American History “Reconstruction”

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ABOUT THE COVER IMAGE

African Americans on the Move, 1940 Migration and mobility are major themes in American history. Immigration to and migration within the United States have been constants of the nation’s past and remain so in the present. One of the most breathtaking relocation stories in this long history is that of African Americans in the twentieth century. Between 1910 and 1970, between 5 and 6 million African Americans left the South for the North and West, transforming the nation in the process. Here a family prepares for the journey from Florida to New Jersey in 1940.

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America A C O N C I S E H I S T O R Y

V O L U M E 2 : S I N C E 1 8 6 5

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James A. Henretta University of Maryland

Eric Hinderaker University of Utah

Rebecca Edwards Vassar College

Robert O. Self Brown University

America A C O N C I S E H I S T O R Y

Bedford / St. Martin’s Boston • New York

S I X T H E D I T I O N

V O L U M E 2 : S I N C E 1 8 6 5

For Bedford/St. Martin’s Publisher for History: Mary V. Dougherty Senior Executive Editor for History and Technology: William J. Lombardo Director of Development for History: Jane Knetzger Senior Developmental Editor: Laura Arcari Production Editor: Annette Pagliaro Sweeney Senior Production Supervisor: Jennifer Peterson Executive Marketing Manager: Sandra McGuire Editorial Assistants: Victoria Royal, Emily DiPietro Production Assistant: Erica Zhang Copy Editor: Susan Zorn Indexer: Leoni McVey, McVey & Associates, Inc. Cartography: Mapping Specialists, Ltd. Photo Researcher: Pembroke Herbert and Sandi Rygiel, Picture Research Consultants, Inc. Senior Art Director: Anna Palchik Text Design: Maureen McCutcheon Cover Design: Marine Miller Cover Photo: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection [LC-USF34-040820-D] Composition: Jouve Printing and Binding: RR Donnelley and Sons

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xi

Preface Why This Book This Way

History classrooms present a unique dilemma. How do we off er our students a basic understanding of key events and facts, while inviting them to see the past not as a rote list of names and dates, but as the fascinating, confl icted prelude to their lives today? How do we teach our students to think like historians? As scholars and teachers who go into the classroom every day, we know these challenges well and have composed the sixth edition of America: A Concise History to help instructors meet them.

Of course the contents of this book are only helpful if students read and assimilate the material before coming to class, so for the sixth edition we are rolling out a suite of digital tools designed to save you time and help students gain confi dence and learn historical thinking skills. So that students will come to class prepared, they now receive access to LearningCurve — an adaptive learning tool that garners over a 90% student satisfaction rate that helps them master content — when they purchase a new copy of America: A Concise History. And because we know that your classroom needs are chang- ing rapidly, we are excited to announce that America is available with LaunchPad, a new, robust interactive e-book and course space with a wealth of additional content and learning aids that makes customizing and assigning the book and its resources easy and effi cient. LaunchPad can be used on its own or in conjunction with this printed text, giving instructors and students the best of both worlds — the narrative text in an inexpensive, easy-to-read printed format as well as our highly acclaimed digital resources and tools, where their use and combination are limited only by the imagination of the instructor. To learn more about the benefi ts of LearningCurve and LaunchPad, see bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise/catalog.

America has long been known for its breadth, balance, and ability to explain to students not just what happened, but why. Th e latest edition both preserves and sub- stantially builds upon those strengths. Th e foundation of our approach lies in our commitment to an integrated history. America: A Concise History combines traditional “top-down” narratives of political and economic aff airs with “bottom-up” narratives of the lived experiences of ordinary people. Our goal is to help students achieve a richer understanding of politics, diplomacy, war, economics, intellectual and cultural life, and gender, class, and race relations, by exploring how developments in all these areas were interconnected. Our analysis is fueled by a passion for exploring big, consequen- tial questions. How did a colonial slave society settled by people from four continents become a pluralist democracy? How have liberty and equality informed the American experience? Questions like these help students understand what’s at stake as we study the past. In America: A Concise History, we provide an integrated historical approach and a dedication to why history matters to bear on the full sweep of America’s past.

xii Preface

One of the most exciting developments in this edition is the arrival of a new author, Eric Hinderaker. An expert in native and early American history, Eric brings a fresh interpretation of native and colonial European societies and the revolutionary Atlantic world of the eighteenth century that enlivens and enriches our narrative. Eric joins James Henretta, long the intellectual anchor of the book, whose scholarly work now focuses on law, citizenship, and the state in early America; Rebecca Edwards, an expert in women’s and gender history and nineteenth-century electoral politics; and Robert Self, whose work explores the relationship between urban and suburban poli- tics, social movements, and the state. Together, we strive to ensure that energy and creativity, as well as our wide experience in the study of history, infuse every page that follows.

Th e core of a textbook is its narrative, and we have endeavored to make ours clear, accessible, and lively. In it, we focus not only on the marvelous diversity of peoples who came to call themselves Americans, but also on the institutions that have forged a common national identity. More than ever, we daily confront the collision of our past with the demands of the future and the shrinking distance between Americans and others around the globe. To help students meet these challenges, we call attention to connections with the histories of Canada, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, drawing links between events in the United States and those elsewhere. In our contem- porary digital world, facts and data are everywhere. What students crave is analysis. As it has since its inception, America: A Concise History provides students with a compre- hensive explanation and interpretation of events, a guide to why history unfolded as it did, and a roadmap for understanding the world in which we live.

A Nine-Part Framework Highlights Key Developments One of the greatest strengths of America: A Concise History is its part structure, which helps students identify the key forces and major developments that shaped each era. A four-page Part Opener introduces each part, using analysis, striking images, and a detailed thematic timeline to orient students to the major developments and themes of the period covered. New “Th ematic Understanding” questions ask students to consider periodization and make connections among chapters. By organizing U.S. his- tory into nine distinct periods, rather than just 31 successive chapters, we encourage students to trace changes and continuities over time and to grasp connections between political, economic, social, and cultural events.

In this edition, we have reengineered the part structure to refl ect the most up-to- date scholarship. Pre-contact native societies and European colonization are now cov- ered in two distinct parts, allowing us to devote comprehensive attention to the whole of North America before the 1760s. We have also added an additional part bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, bringing fresh perspectives on industrializa- tion, the “long progressive era,” and the growth of American global power. Together, the nine parts organize the complex history of North America and the United States into comprehensible sections with distinct themes.

Part 1, “Transformations of North America, 1450–1700,” highlights the diver- sity and complexity of Native Americans prior to European contact, examines the

Preface xiii

transformative impact of European intrusions and the Columbian Exchange, and emphasizes the experimental quality of colonial ventures. Part 2, “British North America and the Atlantic World, 1660–1763,” explains the diversifi cation of British North America and the rise of the British Atlantic World and emphasizes the impor- tance of contact between colonists and Native Americans and imperial rivalries among European powers. Part 3, “Revolution and Republican Culture, 1763–1820,” traces the rise of colonial protest against British imperial reform, outlines the ways that the American Revolution challenged the social order, and explores the processes of con- quest, competition, and consolidation that followed from it.

Part 4, “Overlapping Revolutions, 1800–1860” traces the transformation of the economy, society, and culture of the new nation; the creation of a democratic polity; and growing sectional divisions. Part 5, “Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877,” covers the confl icts generated by America’s empire-building in the West, including sectional political struggles that led to the Civil War, and during and aft er Reconstruction, national consolidation of power. Part 6, “Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917,” examines the transformations brought about by the rise of corporations and a powerhouse industrial economy, including immigration; a diverse, urbanizing society; and movements for progressive reform.

Part 7, “Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945,” explores America’s rise to world power, the cultural transformations and political confl icts of the 1920s, the Great Depression, and the creation of the welfare state. Part 8, “Th e Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980,” addresses the postwar period, including America’s new global leadership role during the Cold War; the expansion of federal responsibility during a new “age of liberalism”; and the growth of mass consumption and the middle class. Finally, Part 9, “Global Capitalism and the End of the Ameri- can Century, 1980 to the Present,” discusses the conservative political ascendancy of the 1980s; the end of the Cold War and rising confl ict in the Middle East; and global- ization and increasing social inequality.

Hundreds of Sources Encourage Students to Think Comparatively and Critically America: A Concise History has long emphasized primary sources. In addition to weav- ing lively quotations throughout the narrative, we off er students substantial excerpts from historical documents — letters, diaries, autobiographies, public testimony, and more — and numerous fi gures that give students practice working with data. Th ese documents allow students to experience the past through the words and perspectives of those who lived it, to understand how historians make sense of the past using data, and to gain skill in interpreting historical evidence.

Each chapter of the book includes two types of primary source features. Ameri- can Voices features in every chapter help students to understand how important events and phenomena were viewed domestically. New America Compared features use primary sources and data to situate U.S. history in global context, while giving

xiv Preface

students practice in comparison and data analysis. Retooled from the Voices from America feature from the last edition to include data in addition to primary sources, these features appear in every chapter on topics as diverse as the fi ght for women’s rights in France and the United States, an examination of labor laws aft er emancipa- tion in Haiti and the United States, the loss of human life in World War I, and an analy- sis of the worldwide economic malaise of the 1970s.

In LaunchPad, students have access to hundreds of additional primary sources, including a brand-new feature to aid you in teaching historical thinking skills. Th ink- ing Like a Historian features in every LaunchPad chapter include 5–8 brief sources organized around a central theme, such as “Beyond the Proclamation Line,” “Making Modern Presidents,” and “Th e Suburban Landscape of Cold War America.” Students are asked to analyze the documents and complete a “Putting It All Together” assign- ment that asks them to synthesize and use the evidence to create an argument. Because we understand how important primary sources are to the study of history, we are also pleased to off er in LaunchPad the all-new companion reader, Sources of America’s History.

As in past editions, an outstanding visual program engages students’ attention and gives them practice in working with visual sources. Th e book’s illustration program is greatly expanded in LaunchPad, which features more than twice as many images as the print book: over 425 paintings, cartoons, illustrations, photographs, and charts. Infor- mative captions set the illustrations in context and provide students with background for making their own analysis of the images in the book. Keenly aware that students lack geographic literacy, we have included dozens of maps that show major develop- ments in the narrative, each with captions to help students interpret what they see.

Taken together, these documents, fi gures, maps, and illustrations provide instruc- tors with a trove of teaching materials, such that America: A Concise History off ers not only a compelling narrative, but also — right in the text — the rich documentary mate- rials that instructors need to bring the past alive and introduce students to historical analysis.

Study Aids Support Student Understanding and Teach Historical Thinking Skills Each chapter in the book provides aids to student comprehension and study. New “Big Idea” questions at the start of every chapter guide student reading and focus their attention on identifying not just what happened, but why. Focus questions at the end of each major section help guide students in their reading. At the end of each chapter, we use a timeline to remind students of important events and reiterate the themes in an analytic summary.

To better support students in their understanding of the material and in their development of historical thinking skills, users of LaunchPad for America: A Concise History will fi nd a wealth of additional learning tools. Author preview videos that speak to the “big idea” of the chapter and guided reading activities for each chapter focus student learning and encourage active engagement with the text. Users of the

Preface xv

interactive e-book will also gain profi ciency in historical thinking skills via marginal review questions that ask students to “Identify Causes,” “Trace Change over Time,” and “Understand Points of View,” among other skills. Where students are likely to stumble over a key concept, we boldface it in the text wherever it is fi rst mentioned and provide a pop-up glossary defi nition for each term. In the Chapter Review section, we include a set of review questions for the chapter as a whole, along with “Making Connections” and “Th ematic Understanding” questions that ask students to con- sider broader historical issues, developments, and continuities and changes over time. Lastly, the chapter timelines in LaunchPad are accompanied by “Key Turning Points” questions that remind students of important events and ask them to consider peri- odization. Th e diff erent types of formative and summative assessment in LaunchPad, including short answer, essay questions, multiple-choice quizzing, and Learning- Curve, are designed to get students reading before class and can be edited, customized with your own material, and assigned in seconds.

New Scholarship Introduces Students to the Latest Research and Interpretations In the new edition, we continue to off er instructors a bold account of U.S. history that refl ects the latest, most exciting scholarship in the fi eld. Th roughout the book, we have given increased attention to political culture and political economy, including the his- tory of capitalism, using this analysis to help students understand how society, culture, politics, and the economy informed one another.

With new author Eric Hinderaker aboard we have taken the opportunity to recon- ceptualize much of the pre-1800 material. Th is edition opens with two dramatically revised chapters marked by closer and more sustained attention to the way Native Americans shaped, and were shaped by, the contact experience and highlighting the tenuous and varied nature of colonial experimentation. Th ese changes carry through the edition in a sharpened continental perspective and expanded coverage of Native Americans, the environment, and the West in every era. We have also brought closer attention to the patterns and varieties of colonial enterprise and new attention to the Atlantic world and the many revolutions — in print, consumption, and politics — that transformed the eighteenth century.

In our coverage of the nineteenth century, the discussion of slavery now includes material on African American childhood and the impact of hired-out slaves on black identity. Th e spiritual life of Joseph Smith also receives greater attention, as do the complex attitudes of Mormons toward slavery. New fi ndings have also deepened the analysis of the War with Mexico and its impact on domestic politics. But the really new feature of these chapters is their heightened international, indeed global, perspective.

In the post–Civil War chapters, enhanced coverage of gender, ethnicity, and race includes greater emphasis on gay and lesbian history and Asian and Latino immigra- tion, alongside the entire chapter devoted to the Civil Rights Movement, a major addi- tion to the last edition. Finally, we have kept up with recent developments with an expanded section on the Obama presidency and the elections of 2008 and 2012.

xvi Preface

Acknowledgments We are grateful to the following scholars and teachers who reported on their experi- ences with the last edition or reviewed features of the new edition. Th eir comments oft en challenged us to rethink or justify our interpretations and always provided a check on accuracy down to the smallest detail.

Jeff rey S. Adler, University of Florida Jennifer L. Bertolet, Th e George Washington University Vicki Black, Blinn College Stefan Bosworth, Hostos Community College Tammy K. Byron, Dalton State College Jessica Cannon, University of Central Missouri Rose Darrough, Palomar College Petra DeWitt, Missouri University of Science & Technology Nancy J. Duke, Daytona State College Richard M. Filipink, Western Illinois University Matthew Garrett, Bakersfi eld College Benjamin H. Hampton, Manchester Community College and Great Bay

Community College Isadora Helfgott, University of Wyoming Stephanie Jannenga, Muskegon Community College Antoine Joseph, Bryant University Lorraine M. Lees, Old Dominion University John S. Leiby, Paradise Valley Community College Karen Ward Mahar, Siena College Timothy R. Mahoney, University of Nebraska — Lincoln Eric Mayer, Victor Valley College Glenn Melancon, Southeastern Oklahoma State University Frances Mitilineos, Oakton Community College James Mills, University of Texas, Brownsville Anne Paulet, Humboldt State University Th omas Ratliff , Central Connecticut State University LeeAnn Reynolds, Samford University Jenny Shaw, University of Alabama Courtney Smith, Cabrini College Timothy Th urber, Virginia Commonwealth University Julio Vasquez, University of Kansas Sarah E. Vandament, North Lake College of the Dallas County Community

College District Louis Williams, St. Louis Community College — Forest Park

As the authors of America: A Concise History, we know better than anyone else how much this book is the work of other hands and minds. We are indebted to Mary Dougherty, William J. Lombardo, and Jane Knetzger, who oversaw this edition, and Laura Arcari, who asked the right questions, suggested a multitude of improvements, and expertly guided the manuscript to completion. As usual, Denise B. Wydra and

Preface xvii

Joan E. Feinberg generously provided the resources we needed to produce an out- standing volume. Annette Pagliaro Sweeney did a masterful job consulting with the authors and seeing the book through the production process. Sandi McGuire in the marketing department understood how to communicate our vision to teachers, and the sales force did wonderful work in helping this edition reach the classroom. We also thank the rest of our editorial and production team for their dedicated eff orts: Associ- ate Editors Robin Soule and Jen Jovin; Editorial Assistant Victoria Royal; Susan Zorn, who copyedited the manuscript; proofreaders Linda McLatchie and Barbara Price; art researchers Pembroke Herbert and Sandi Rygiel at Picture Research Consultants and Archives; text permissions researcher Eve Lehmann; and Kalina Ingham and Hilary Newman, who oversaw permissions. Finally, we want to express our appreciation for the invaluable assistance of Patricia Deveneau, who expertly suggested topics and sources for the Th inking Like A Historian feature in Chapters 8–14; Kendra Kennedy, for crucial research aid; and Eliza Blanchard and Erin Boss, for research assistance at Vassar. Many thanks to all of you for your contributions to this new edition of America: A Concise History.

James A. Henretta Eric Hinderaker Rebecca Edwards Robert O. Self

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xix

Versions and Supplements

Adopters of America: A Concise History and their students have access to abundant extra resources, including documents, presentation and testing materials, the acclaimed Bedford Series in History and Culture volumes, and much more. See below for more information, visit the book’s catalog site at bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise /catalog, or contact your local Bedford/St. Martin’s sales representative.

Get the Right Version for Your Class To accommodate diff erent course lengths and course budgets, America: A Concise His- tory is available in several diff erent formats, including e-books, which are available at a substantial discount.

• Volume 1, To 1877 (Chapters 1–16): available in paperback and e-book formats

• Volume 2, Since 1865 (Chapters 15–31): available in paperback and e-book formats

Any of these volumes can be packaged with additional books for a discount. To get ISBNs for discount packages, see the online catalog at bedfordstmartins.com /henrettaconcise/catalog or contact your Bedford/St. Martin’s representative.

NEW Take the Leap with LaunchPad — a Content-Rich and Assessment-Ready Interactive e-Book and Course Space. Intuitive and easy-to-use for students and instructors alike, LaunchPad is ready to use as is, and can be edited, customized with your own material, and assigned in seconds. LaunchPad for America: A Concise History includes Bedford/St. Martin’s high-quality content all in one place, including the full interactive e-book and the Sources for Amer- ica’s History documents collection plus LearningCurve, short author video chapter previews, guided reading activities designed to help students read actively for key con- cepts, additional primary sources, images, videos, chapter summative quizzes, and more. A wealth of formative and summative assessments, including short answer, essay questions, multiple-choice quizzing, and LearningCurve, an adaptive learning program, help students gain confi dence and get them reading before class. LaunchPad easily integrates with course management systems, and with fast ways to build assign- ments, rearrange chapters, and add new pages, sections, or links, it lets teachers build

xx Versions and Supplements

the course materials they need and hold students accountable. For more information, visit bedfordstmartins.com/launchpad, or to arrange a demo, contact us at history@ bedfordstmartins.com.

Let Students Choose Th eir e-Book Format. In addition to the LaunchPad interac- tive e-book, students can purchase the downloadable Bedford e-Book to Go for Amer- ica: A Concise History from our Web site or fi nd other PDF versions of the e-book at our publishing partners’ sites: Amazon, CourseSmart, Chegg, KNO, VitalSource, GooglePlay, B&N NOOKStudy, Follett CafeScribe, Copia, and eCampus.

NEW Assign LearningCurve So You Know What Your Students Know and They Come to Class Prepared.

As described in the preface and on the inside front cover, students purchasing new books receive access to LearningCurve for America: A Concise History. Assigning LearningCurve in place of reading quizzes is easy for instructors, and the reporting features help instructors track overall class trends and spot topics that are giving stu- dents trouble so they can adjust their lectures and class activities. Th is online learning tool is popular with students because it was designed to help them rehearse content at their own pace in a nonthreatening, game-like environment. Th e feedback for wrong answers provides instructional coaching and sends students back to the book for review. Students answer as many questions as necessary to reach a target score, with repeated chances to revisit material they haven’t mastered. When LearningCurve is assigned, students come to class better prepared.

Take Advantage of Instructor Resources Bedford/St. Martin’s has developed a rich array of teaching resources for this book and for this course. Th ey range from lecture and presentation materials and assess- ment tools to course management options. Most can be downloaded or ordered at bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise/catalog.

Instructor’s Resource Manual. Th e instructor’s manual off ers both experienced and fi rst-time instructors tools for preparing lectures and running discussions. It includes chapter-review material, teaching strategies, and a guide to chapter-specifi c supple- ments available for the text, plus suggestions on how to get the most out of Learning- Curve and a survival guide for fi rst-time teaching assistants.

Guide to Changing Editions. Designed to facilitate an instructor’s transition from the previous edition of America: A Concise History to the current edition, this guide presents an overview of major changes as well as of changes in each chapter.

Computerized Test Bank. Th e test bank includes a mix of fresh, carefully craft ed multiple-choice, short-answer, and essay questions for each chapter. It also contains brand new source-based multiple-choice questions and volume-wide essay questions. All questions appear in Microsoft Word format and in easy-to-use test bank soft ware

Versions and Supplements xxi

that allows instructors to add, edit, re-sequence, and print questions and answers. Instructors can also export questions into a variety of formats, including Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and Moodle.

Th e Bedford Lecture Kit: PowerPoint Maps, Images, Lecture Outlines, and i>clicker Content. Look good and save time with Th e Bedford Lecture Kit. Th ese presenta- tion materials are downloadable individually from the Instructor Resources tab at bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise/catalog and are available on Th e Bedford Lecture Kit Instructor’s Resource CD-ROM. Th ey provide ready-made and fully cus- tomizable PowerPoint multimedia presentations that include lecture outlines with embedded maps, fi gures, and selected images from the textbook and extra background for instructors. Also available are maps and selected images in JPEG and PowerPoint formats; content for i>clicker, a classroom response system, in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint formats; the Instructor’s Resource Manual in Microsoft Word format; and outline maps in PDF format for quizzing or handing out. All fi les are suitable for copy- ing onto transparency acetates.

America in Motion: Video Clips for U.S. History. Set history in motion with Amer- ica in Motion, an instructor DVD containing dozens of short digital movie fi les of events in twentieth-century American history. From the wreckage of the battleship Maine to FDR’s fi reside chats to Oliver North testifying before Congress, America in Motion engages students with dynamic scenes from key events and challenges them to think critically. All fi les are classroom-ready, edited for brevity, and easily integrated with PowerPoint or other presentation soft ware for electronic lectures or assignments. An accompanying guide provides each clip’s historical context, ideas for use, and sug- gested questions.

Videos and Multimedia. A wide assortment of videos and multimedia CD-ROMs on various topics in U.S. history is available to qualifi ed adopters through your Bedford/ St. Martin’s sales representative.

Package and Save Your Students Money For information on free packages and discounts up to 50%, visit bedfordstmartins .com/henretta/catalog, or contact your local Bedford/St. Martin’s sales representative. Th e products that follow all qualify for discount packaging.

NEW Sources for America’s History. Th is primary source collection by Kevin B. Sheets of State University of New York, College at Cortland is designed to complement the textbook. Sources for America’s History provides a broad selection of over 225 primary- source documents as well as editorial apparatus to help students understand the sources. To support the structure of the parent text, unique part document sets at the end of each part present sources that illustrate the major themes of each section. Available free when packaged with the print text and included in the LaunchPad e-book. Also available on its own as a downloadable PDF e-book or with the main text’s e-Book to Go.

xxii Versions and Supplements

NEW Bedford Digital Collections @ bedfordstmartins.com/bdc/catalog. Th is source collection provides a fl exible and aff ordable online repository of discovery-oriented primary-source projects and single primary sources that you can easily customize and link to from your course management system or Web site. Package discounts are available.

Th e Bedford Series in History and Culture. More than 120 titles in this highly praised series combine fi rst-rate scholarship, historical narrative, and important primary doc- uments for undergraduate courses. Each book is brief, inexpensive, and focused on a specifi c topic or period. For a complete list of titles, visit bedfordstmartins.com /history/series. Package discounts are available.

Rand McNally Atlas of American History. Th is collection of over eighty full-color maps illustrates key events and eras from early exploration, settlement, expansion, and immigration to U.S. involvement in wars abroad and on U.S. soil. Introductory pages for each section include a brief overview, timelines, graphs, and photos to quickly establish a historical context. Available for $5.00 when packaged with the print text.

Maps in Context: A Workbook for American History. Written by historical cartog- raphy expert Gerald A. Danzer (University of Illinois at Chicago), this skill-building workbook helps students comprehend essential connections between geographic lit- eracy and historical understanding. Organized to correspond to the typical U.S. his- tory survey course, Maps in Context presents a wealth of map-centered projects and convenient pop quizzes that give students hands-on experience working with maps. Available free when packaged with the print text.

Th e Bedford Glossary for U.S. History. Th is handy supplement for the survey course gives students historically contextualized defi nitions for hundreds of terms — from abolitionism to zoot suit — that they will encounter in lectures, reading, and exams. Available free when packaged with the print text.

U.S. History Matters: A Student Guide to U.S. History Online. Th is resource, writ- ten by Alan Gevinson, Kelly Shrum, and the late Roy Rosenzweig (all of George Mason University), provides an illustrated and annotated guide to 250 of the most useful Web sites for student research in U.S. history as well as advice on evaluating and using Internet sources. Th is essential guide is based on the acclaimed “History Matters” Web site developed by the American Social History Project and the Center for History and New Media. Available free when packaged with the print text.

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A Pocket Guide to Writing in History. Th is portable and aff ordable reference tool by Mary Lynn Rampolla provides reading, writing, and research advice useful to students

Versions and Supplements xxiii

in all history courses. Concise yet comprehensive advice on approaching typical his- tory assignments, developing critical reading skills, writing eff ective history papers, conducting research, using and documenting sources, and avoiding plagiarism — enhanced with practical tips and examples throughout — have made this slim refer- ence a best-seller. Package discounts are available.

A Student’s Guide to History. Th is complete guide to success in any history course provides the practical help students need to be successful. In addition to introducing students to the nature of the discipline, author Jules Benjamin teaches a wide range of skills from preparing for exams to approaching common writing assignments, and explains the research and documentation process with plentiful examples. Package discounts are available.

America Firsthand. With its distinctive focus on ordinary people, this primary doc- uments reader, by Anthony Marcus, John M. Giggie, and David Burner, off ers a remarkable range of perspectives on America’s history from those who lived it. Popu- lar Points of View sections expose students to diff erent perspectives on a specifi c event or topic, and Visual Portfolios invite analysis of the visual record. Package discounts are available.

xxiv

Brief Contents

PA R T 5

Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877 (continued) 15 Reconstruction, 1865–1877 438 16 Conquering a Continent, 1854–1890 467

PA R T 6

Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917 494 17 Industrial America: Corporations and Confl icts, 1877–1911 498 18 Th e Victorians Make the Modern, 1880–1917 524 19 “Civilization’s Inferno”: Th e Rise and Reform of Industrial Cities,

1880–1917 552 20 Whose Government? Politics, Populists, and Progressives, 1880–1917 579

PA R T 7

Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945 608 21 An Emerging World Power, 1890–1918 612 22 Cultural Confl ict, Bubble, and Bust, 1919–1932 639 23 Managing the Great Depression, Forging the New Deal, 1929–1939 665 24 Th e World at War, 1937–1945 694

PA R T 8

The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980 726 25 Cold War America, 1945–1963 730 26 Triumph of the Middle Class, 1945–1963 760 27 Walking into Freedom Land: Th e Civil Rights Movement, 1941–1973 788 28 Uncivil Wars: Liberal Crisis and Conservative Rebirth, 1961–1972 819 29 Th e Search for Order in an Era of Limits, 1973–1980 849

Brief Contents xxv

PA R T 9

Global Capitalism and the End of the American Century, 1980 to the Present 878 30 Conservative America in the Ascent, 1980–1991 882 31 Confronting Global and National Dilemmas, 1989 to the Present 911

xxvi

Contents

About the Cover Art i Preface: Why Th is Book Th is Way? xi Versions and Supplements xix Brief Contents xxiv Maps, Figures, and Tables xxxviii

PA R T 5

Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877 (continued)

CHAPTER 15 Reconstruction, 1865–1877 438

Th e Struggle for National Reconstruction 439 Presidential Approaches: From Lincoln to Johnson 439 Congress Versus the President 440 Radical Reconstruction 442 Woman Suff rage Denied 445

Th e Meaning of Freedom 447 Th e Quest for Land 448 Republican Governments in the South 453 Building Black Communities 455

Th e Undoing of Reconstruction 457 Th e Republicans Unravel 458 Counterrevolution in the South 460 Reconstruction Rolled Back 462 Lasting Legacies 463

Summary 465 For Further Exploration 465 Timeline 466 C h a p t e r R e v i e w LearningCurve

A M E R I C A CO M PA R E D Labor Laws After Emancipation: Haiti and the United States 441

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S Jourdon Anderson: Relishing Freedom 449

Contents xxvii

CHAPTER 16 Conquering a Continent, 1854–1890 467

Th e Republican Vision 468 Th e New Union and the World 468 Integrating the National Economy 471

Incorporating the West 475 Mining Empires 475 Cattlemen on the Plains 477 Homesteaders 478 Th e First National Park 481

A Harvest of Blood: Native Peoples Dispossessed 482 Th e Civil War and Indians on the Plains 483 Grant’s Peace Policy 485 Th e End of Armed Resistance 488 Strategies of Survival 490 Western Myths and Realities 490

Summary 492 For Further Exploration 493 Timeline 493 C h a p t e r R e v i e w LearningCurve

A M E R I C A CO M PA R E D The Santa Fe Railroad in Mexico and the United States 472

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S Zitkala-S̈a (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin): Becoming White 486

PA R T 6

Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917 494

CHAPTER 17 Industrial America: Corporations and Confl icts, 1877–1911 498

Th e Rise of Big Business 499 Innovators in Enterprise 500 Th e Corporate Workplace 503 On the Shop Floor 505

Immigrants, East and West 508 Newcomers from Europe 509 Asian Americans and Exclusion 511

Labor Gets Organized 514 Th e Emergence of a Labor Movement 515 Th e Knights of Labor 516 Farmers and Workers: Th e Cooperative Alliance 518 Another Path: Th e American Federation of Labor 520

xxviii Contents

Summary 522 For Further Exploration 522 Timeline 523 C h a p t e r R e v i e w LearningCurve

A M E R I C A CO M PA R E D Emigrants and Destinations, 1881–1915 510

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S Suey Hin: Sold into Sexual Slavery 512

CHAPTER 18 The Victorians Make the Modern, 1880–1917 524

Commerce and Culture 525 Consumer Spaces 526 Masculinity and the Rise of Sports 528 Th e Great Outdoors 530

Women, Men, and the Solitude of Self 533 Changes in Family Life 534 Education 534 From Domesticity to Women’s Rights 537

Science and Faith 541 Darwinism and Its Critics 542 Realism in the Arts 544 Religion: Diversity and Innovation 546

Summary 550 For Further Exploration 551 Timeline 551 C h a p t e r R e v i e w LearningCurve

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S Theodore Dreiser: Social Darwinism 543

A M E R I C A CO M PA R E D Christianity in the United States and Japan 548

CHAPTER 19 “Civilization’s Inferno”: The Rise and Reform of Industrial Cities, 1880–1917 552

Th e New Metropolis 553 Th e Shape of the Industrial City 553 Newcomers and Neighborhoods 556 City Cultures 561

Governing the Great City 565 Urban Machines 565 Th e Limits of Machine Government 567

Contents xxix

Crucibles of Progressive Reform 569 Fighting Dirt and Vice 569 Th e Movement for Social Settlements 571 Cities and National Politics 573

Summary 577 For Further Exploration 577 Timeline 578 C h a p t e r R e v i e w LearningCurve

A M E R I C A CO M PA R E D The World’s Biggest Cities, 1800–2000 554

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S William G. Shepherd and Rose Schneiderman: “These Dead Bodies Were the Answer”: The Triangle Fire 576

CHAPTER 20 Whose Government? Politics, Populists, and Progressives, 1880–1917 579

Reform Visions, 1880–1892 580 Electoral Politics Aft er Reconstruction 580 Th e Populist Program 583

Th e Political Earthquakes of the 1890s 585 Depression and Reaction 585 Democrats and the “Solid South” 587 New National Realities 590

Reform Reshaped, 1901–1912 593 Th eodore Roosevelt as President 593 Diverse Progressive Goals 596 Th e Election of 1912 601

Wilson and the New Freedom, 1913–1917 603 Economic Reforms 603 Progressive Legacies 605

Summary 606 For Further Exploration 607 Timeline 607 C h a p t e r R e v i e w LearningCurve

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S Ida B. Wells: The Cause of Lynching 589

A M E R I C A CO M PA R E D A Progressive Reports from New Zealand 597

xxx Contents

PA R T 7

Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945 608

CHAPTER 21 An Emerging World Power, 1890–1918 612

From Expansion to Imperialism 613 Foundations of Empire 613 Th e War of 1898 614 Spoils of War 616

A Power Among Powers 620 Th e Open Door in Asia 620 Th e United States and Latin America 621

Th e United States in World War I 624 From Neutrality to War 624 “Over Th ere” 626 War on the Home Front 629

Catastrophe at Versailles 635 Th e Fate of Wilson’s Ideas 635 Congress Rejects the Treaty 636

Summary 637 For Further Exploration 638 Timeline 638 C h a p t e r R e v i e w LearningCurve

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S General Arthur MacArthur: Making the Philippines Safe for Democracy 619

A M E R I C A CO M PA R E D The Human Cost of World War I 629

CHAPTER 22 Cultural Confl ict, Bubble, and Bust, 1919–1932 639

Confl icted Legacies of World War I 640 Racial Strife 640 Erosion of Labor Rights 641 Th e Red Scare 642

Politics in the 1920s 643 Women in Politics 644 Republicans and Business 645 Dollar Diplomacy 646 Culture Wars 647

Intellectual Modernism 653 Harlem in Vogue 653 Critiquing American Life 656

From Boom to Bust 657 Th e Postwar Economy 657

Contents xxxi

Consumer Culture 657 Th e Coming of the Great Depression 660

Summary 663 For Further Exploration 663 Timeline 664 C h a p t e r R e v i e w LearningCurve

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S Hiram Wesley Evans: The Fight for Americanism 651

A M E R I C A CO M PA R E D Hollywood in Europe 661

CHAPTER 23 Managing the Great Depression, Forging the New Deal, 1929–1939 665

Early Responses to the Depression, 1929–1932 666 Enter Herbert Hoover 666 Rising Discontent 668 Th e 1932 Election 670

Th e New Deal Arrives, 1933–1935 670 Roosevelt and the First Hundred Days 672 Th e New Deal Under Attack 676

Th e Second New Deal and the Redefi ning of Liberalism, 1935–1938 678 Th e Welfare State Comes into Being 678 From Reform to Stalemate 680

Th e New Deal’s Impact on Society 682 A People’s Democracy 682 Reshaping the Environment 687 Th e New Deal and the Arts 690 Th e Legacies of the New Deal 691

Summary 692 For Further Exploration 692 Timeline 693 C h a p t e r R e v i e w LearningCurve

A M E R I C A CO M PA R E D The Great Depression in England and the United States 667

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S Ordinary People Respond to the New Deal 673

CHAPTER 24 The World at War, 1937–1945 694

Th e Road to War 695 Th e Rise of Fascism 695 War Approaches 696 Th e Attack on Pearl Harbor 701

xxxii Contents

Organizing for Victory 702 Financing the War 702 Mobilizing the American Fighting Force 704 Workers and the War Eff ort 706 Politics in Wartime 710

Life on the Home Front 710 “For the Duration” 710 Migration and the Wartime City 711 Japanese Removal 713

Fighting and Winning the War 715 Wartime Aims and Tensions 715 Th e War in Europe 715 Th e War in the Pacifi c 718 Th e Atomic Bomb and the End of the War 719 Th e Toll of the War 723

Summary 724 For Further Exploration 724 Timeline 725 C h a p t e r R e v i e w LearningCurve

A M E R I C A CO M PA R E D The Scales of War: Losses and Gains During World War II 703

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S Donna Jean Harvey: Women in the Wartime Workplace 707

PA R T 8

The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980 726

CHAPTER 25 Cold War America, 1945–1963 730

Containment and a Divided Global Order 731 Origins of the Cold War 731 Th e Containment Strategy 734 Containment in Asia 739

Cold War Liberalism 743 Truman and the End of Reform 743 Red Scare: Th e Hunt for Communists 745 Th e Politics of Cold War Liberalism 748

Containment in the Postcolonial World 751 Th e Cold War and Colonial Independence 752 John F. Kennedy and the Cold War 755 Making a Commitment in Vietnam 757

Summary 758 For Further Exploration 758 Timeline 759

Contents xxxiii

C h a p t e r R e v i e w LearningCurve

A M E R I C A CO M PA R E D Arming for the Cold War 739

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S Mark Goodson: Red Hunting on the Quiz Shows 747

CHAPTER 26 Triumph of the Middle Class, 1945–1963 760

Postwar Prosperity and the Affl uent Society 761 Economy: From Recovery to Dominance 762 A Nation of Consumers 765 Youth Culture 769 Religion and the Middle Class 771

Th e American Family in the Era of Containment 771 Th e Baby Boom 772 Women, Work, and Family 773 Challenging Middle-Class Morality 776

A Suburban Nation 778 Th e Postwar Housing Boom 778 Rise of the Sunbelt 782 Two Societies: Urban and Suburban 783

Summary 786 For Further Exploration 787 Timeline 787 C h a p t e r R e v i e w LearningCurve

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S Coming of Age in the Postwar Years 775

A M E R I C A CO M PA R E D Hanoch Bartov: Everyone Has a Car 781

CHAPTER 27 Walking into Freedom Land: The Civil Rights Movement, 1941–1973 788

Th e Emerging Civil Rights Struggle, 1941–1957 789 Life Under Jim Crow 789 Origins of the Civil Rights Movement 791 World War II: Th e Beginnings 792 Cold War Civil Rights 793 Mexican Americans and Japanese Americans 795 Fighting for Equality Before the Law 798

Forging a Protest Movement, 1955–1965 801 Nonviolent Direct Action 801 Legislating Civil Rights, 1963–1965 805

xxxiv Contents

Beyond Civil Rights, 1966–1973 810 Black Nationalism 810 Poverty and Urban Violence 813 Rise of the Chicano Movement 814 Th e American Indian Movement 815

Summary 817 For Further Exploration 817 Timeline 818 C h a p t e r R e v i e w LearningCurve

A M E R I C A CO M PA R E D Freedom in the United States and Africa 796

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S Franklin McCain: Desegregating Lunch Counters 803

CHAPTER 28 Uncivil Wars: Liberal Crisis and Conservative Rebirth, 1961–1972 819

Liberalism at High Tide 820 John F. Kennedy’s Promise 820 Lyndon B. Johnson and the Great Society 821 Rebirth of the Women’s Movement 824

Th e Vietnam War Begins 826 Escalation Under Johnson 827 Public Opinion and the War 829 Rise of the Student Movement 829

Days of Rage, 1968–1972 833 War Abroad, Tragedy at Home 833 Th e Antiwar Movement and the 1968 Election 836 Th e Nationalist Turn 837 Women’s Liberation 838 Stonewall and Gay Liberation 840

Richard Nixon and the Politics of the Silent Majority 840 Nixon in Vietnam 841 Th e Silent Majority Speaks Out 844 Th e 1972 Election 846

Summary 847 For Further Exploration 847 Timeline 848 C h a p t e r R e v i e w LearningCurve

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S Letters to Dr. Spock 830

A M E R I C A CO M PA R E D The Global Protests of 1968 835

Contents xxxv

CHAPTER 29 The Search for Order in an Era of Limits, 1973–1980 849

An Era of Limits 850 Energy Crisis 850 Environmentalism 852 Economic Transformation 853 Urban Crisis and Suburban Revolt 856

Politics in Flux, 1973–1980 859 Watergate and the Fall of a President 859 Jimmy Carter: Th e Outsider as President 861

Reform and Reaction in the 1970s 863 Civil Rights in a New Era 863 Th e Women’s Movement and Gay Rights 864 Aft er the Warren Court 869

Th e American Family on Trial 869 Working Families in the Age of Deindustrialization 870 Navigating the Sexual Revolution 872 Religion in the 1970s: Th e Fourth Great Awakening 874

Summary 876 For Further Exploration 877 Timeline 877 C h a p t e r R e v i e w LearningCurve

A M E R I C A CO M PA R E D Economic Malaise in the Seventies 857

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S Debating the Equal Rights Amendment 867

PA R T 9

Global Capitalism and the End of the American Century, 1980 to the Present 878

CHAPTER 30 Conservative America in the Ascent, 1980–1991 882

Th e Rise of the New Right 883 Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan: Champions of the Right 883 Free-Market Economics and Religious Conservatism 886 Th e Carter Presidency 887

Th e Dawning of the Conservative Age 890 Th e Reagan Coalition 891 Conservatives in Power 892 Morning in America 896

Th e End of the Cold War 901 U.S.-Soviet Relations in a New Era 901 A New Political Order at Home and Abroad 906

xxxvi Contents

Summary 909 For Further Exploration 910 Timeline 910 C h a p t e r R e v i e w LearningCurve

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S Christianity and Public Life 888

A M E R I C A CO M PA R E D Yoichi Funabashi: “Japan and America: Global Partners” 899

CHAPTER 31 Confronting Global and National Dilemmas, 1989 to the Present 911

America in the Global Economy 912 Th e Rise of the European Union and China 913 An Era of Globalization 915 Revolutions in Technology 917

Politics and Partisanship in a New Era 918 An Increasingly Plural Society 918 Clashes over “Family Values” 924 Th e Clinton Presidency, 1993–2001 926 Post–Cold War Foreign Policy 929

Into a New Century 931 Th e Ascendance of George W. Bush 931 Violence Abroad and Economic Collapse at Home 936 Th e Obama Presidency 937

Summary 941 For Further Exploration 941 Timeline 942 C h a p t e r R e v i e w LearningCurve

A M E R I C A CO M PA R E D Global Trade, 1960–2009 914

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S Cheap Labor: Immigration and Globalization 919

D O C U M E N T S

Th e Declaration of Independence D-1 Th e Constitution of the United States of America D-5 Amendments to the Constitution (Including the Six Unratifi ed Amendments) D-14

Appendix A-1 Index I-1

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xxxviii

Maps, Figures, and Tables

CHAPTER 15 Map 15.1 Reconstruction 443 Map 15.2 The Barrow Plantation, 1860 and 1881 452 Table 15.1 Primary Reconstruction Laws and Constitutional Amendments 444

CHAPTER 16 Map 16.1 The Santa Fe Railroad System, 1885 472 Map 16.2 Mining Frontiers, 1848–1890 476 Map 16.3 Indian Country in the West, to 1890 483

CHAPTER 17 Map 17.1 The New South, 1900 508 Map 17.2 Sources of European Immigration to the United States, 1871–1910 509 Figure 17.1 Business Activity and Wholesale Prices, 1869–1900 499 Figure 17.2 Major Destinations for Emigrants, 1881–1915 510

CHAPTER 18 Map 18.1 National Parks and Forests, 1872–1980 532 Map 18.2 Women’s Suff rage, 1890–1919 540

CHAPTER 19 Map 19.1 The Lower East Side, New York City, 1900 558 Map 19.2 The Expansion of Chicago, 1865–1902 560 Table 19.1 The World’s Biggest Cities, 1800–2000 554

CHAPTER 20 Map 20.1 The Presidential Elections of 1880, 1884, and 1888 581 Map 20.2 Disenfranchisement in the New South 588 Map 20.3 The Presidential Elections of 1892 and 1896 592 Map 20.4 The Presidential Election of 1912 602 Table 20.1 Major Federal Progressive Measures, 1883–1921 604

CHAPTER 21 Map 21.1 Policeman of the Caribbean 623 Map 21.2 U.S. Participation on the Western Front, 1918 628 Table 21.1 World War I Casualties 629

CHAPTER 22 Map 22.1 Ku Klux Klan Politics and Violence in the 1920s 652 Map 22.2 The Presidential Election of 1928 653

CHAPTER 23 Map 23.1 Civilian Conservation Corps Camps 675 Map 23.2 The Tennessee Valley Authority, 1933–1952 689

CHAPTER 24 Map 24.1 World War II in Europe, 1941–1943 716 Map 24.2 World War II in Europe, 1944–1945 717

Maps, Figures, and Tables xxxix

Map 24.3 World War II in the Pacifi c, 1941–1942 720 Map 24.4 World War II in the Pacifi c, 1943–1945 721 Figure 24.1 World War II Military and Civilian Deaths, 1939–1945 703 Figure 24.2 Gross Domestic Product Rates Worldwide, 1938–1945 703

CHAPTER 25 Map 25.1 Cold War in Europe, 1955 734 Map 25.2 The Korean War, 1950–1953 742 Map 25.3 American Global Defense Treaties in the Cold War Era 752 Table 25.1 Worldwide Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–1975 739

CHAPTER 26 Map 26.1 Connecting the Nation: The Interstate Highway System, 1930 and 1970 780 Map 26.2 Shifting Population Patterns, 1950–1980 783

CHAPTER 27 Map 27.1 Internal Migrations 794 Map 27.2 Desegregation Court Cases 800 Map 27.3 Black Voter Registration in the South, 1964 and 1975 809 Table 27.1 African American College Enrollment 792

CHAPTER 28 Map 28.1 The Vietnam War, 1968 828

CHAPTER 29 Map 29.1 From Rust Belt to Sunbelt, 1940–2000 855 Map 29.2 States Ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment, 1972–1977 865 Figure 29.1 U.S. Energy Consumption, 1900–2000 851 Figure 29.2 Falling Gross Domestic Product 857 Figure 29.3 Rising Unemployment 857

CHAPTER 30 Map 30.1 U.S. Involvement in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1954–2000 903 Map 30.2 The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Creation of Independent States, 1989–1991 906 Figure 30.1 The Annual Federal Budget Defi cit (or Surplus), 1940–2009 894

CHAPTER 31 Map 31.1 Growth of the European Community, 1951–2005 915 Map 31.2 Hispanic and Asian Populations, 2000 921 Map 31.3 U.S. Involvement in the Middle East, 1979–2010 935 Figure 31.1 Imports, 1960–2009 914 Figure 31.2 Exports, 1960–2009 914 Figure 31.3 American Immigration, 1920–2000 920 Figure 31.4 Gross Federal Debt as a Percentage of Gross Domestic Product 933 Table 31.1 Impact of the Bush Tax Cuts, 2001–2003 932

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America A C O N C I S E H I S T O R Y

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15 Reconstruction1865–1877 On the last day of April 1866, black soldiers in Memphis, Tennessee, turned in their weapons as they mustered out of the Union army. Th e next day, whites who resented the soldiers’ pres- ence provoked a clash. At a street celebra- tion where African Americans shouted “Hurrah for Abe Lincoln,” a white police- man responded, “Your old father, Abe Lincoln, is dead and damned.” Th e scuffl e that followed precipitated three days of

white violence and rape that left forty-eight African Americans dead and dozens more wounded. Mobs burned black homes and churches and destroyed all twelve of the city’s black schools.

Unionists were appalled. Th ey had won the Civil War, but where was the peace? Ex-Confederates murdered freedmen and fl agrantly resisted federal control. Aft er the Memphis attacks, Republicans in Congress proposed a new measure that would pro- tect African Americans by defi ning and enforcing U.S. citizenship rights. Eventually this bill became the most signifi cant law to emerge from Reconstruction, the Four- teenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Andrew Johnson, however — the Unionist Democrat who became president aft er Abraham Lincoln’s assassination — refused to sign the bill. In May 1865, while Con- gress was adjourned, Johnson had implemented his own Reconstruction plan. It extended amnesty to all southerners who took a loyalty oath, except for a few high- ranking Confederates. It also allowed states to reenter the Union as soon as they revoked secession, abolished slavery, and relieved their new state governments of fi nancial burdens by repudiating Confederate debts. A year later, at the time of the Memphis carnage, all ex-Confederate states had met Johnson’s terms. Th e president rejected any further intervention.

Johnson’s vetoes, combined with ongoing violence in the South, angered Unionist voters. In the political struggle that ensued, congressional Republicans seized the ini- tiative from the president and enacted a sweeping program that became known as Radical Reconstruction. One of its key achievements would have been unthinkable a few years earlier: voting rights for African American men.

IDENTIFY THE BIG IDEA What goals did Republican policymakers, ex-Confederates, and freedpeople pursue during Reconstruction? To what degree did each succeed?

C H A P T E R 1 5 Reconstruction, 1865–1877 439

Southern blacks, however, had additional, urgent priorities. “We have toiled nearly all our lives as slaves [and] have made these lands what they are,” a group of South Caro- lina petitioners declared. Th ey pleaded for “some provision by which we as Freedmen can obtain a Homestead.” Th ough northern Republicans and freedpeople agreed that black southerners must have physical safety and the right to vote, former slaves also wanted economic independence. Northerners sought, instead, to revive cash-crop plantations with wage labor. Reconstruction’s eventual failure stemmed from the con- fl icting goals of lawmakers, freedpeople, and relentlessly hostile ex-Confederates.

The Struggle for National Reconstruction Congress clashed with President Johnson, in part, because the framers of the Constitu- tion did not anticipate a civil war or provide for its aft ermath. Had Confederate states legally left the Union when they seceded? If so, then their reentry required action by Congress. If not — if even during secession they had retained U.S. statehood — then restoring them might be an administrative matter, best left to the president. Lack of clarity on this fundamental question made for explosive politics.

Presidential Approaches: From Lincoln to Johnson As wartime president, Lincoln had off ered a plan similar to Johnson’s. It granted amnesty to most ex-Confederates and allowed each rebellious state to return to the Union as soon as 10 percent of its voters had taken a loyalty oath and the state had approved the Th irteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. But even amid defeat, Con- federate states rejected this Ten Percent Plan — an ominous sign for the future. In July 1864, Congress proposed a tougher substitute, the Wade-Davis Bill, that required an oath of allegiance by a majority of each state’s adult white men, new governments formed only by those who had never taken up arms against the Union, and permanent disenfranchisement of Confederate leaders. Lincoln defeated the Wade-Davis Bill with a pocket veto, leaving it unsigned when Congress adjourned. At the same time, he opened talks with key congressmen, aiming for a compromise.

We will never know what would have happened had Lincoln lived. His assassina- tion in April 1865 plunged the nation into political uncertainty. As a special train bore the president’s fl ag-draped coffi n home to Illinois, thousands of Americans lined the railroad tracks in mourning. Furious and grief-stricken, many Unionists blamed all Confederates for the acts of southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth and his accom- plices in the murder. At the same time, Lincoln’s death left the presidency in the hands of Andrew Johnson, a man utterly lacking in Lincoln’s moral sense and political judgment.

Johnson was a self-styled “common man” from the hills of eastern Tennessee. Trained as a tailor, he built his political career on the support of farmers and laborers. Loyal to the Union, Johnson had refused to leave the U.S. Senate when Tennessee seceded. Aft er federal forces captured Nashville in 1862, Lincoln appointed Johnson as Tennessee’s military governor. In the election of 1864, placing Lincoln and this War Democrat on the ticket together had seemed a smart move, designed to promote unity.

440 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

But aft er Lincoln’s death, Johnson’s disagreement with Republicans, combined with his belligerent and contradictory actions, wreaked political havoc.

Th e new president and Congress confronted a set of problems that would have challenged even Lincoln. During the war, Unionists had insisted that rebel leaders were a small minority and most white southerners wanted to rejoin the Union. With even greater optimism, Republicans hoped the defeated South would accept postwar reforms. Ex-Confederates, however, contested that plan through both violence and political action. New southern state legislatures, created under Johnson’s limited Reconstruction plan, moved to restore slavery in all but name. In 1865, they enacted Black Codes, designed to force former slaves back to plantation labor. Like similar laws passed in other places aft er slavery ended, the codes refl ected plantation owners’ eco- nomic interests (America Compared, p. 441). Th ey imposed severe penalties on blacks who did not hold full-year labor contracts and also set up procedures for taking black children from their parents and apprenticing them to former slave masters.

Faced with these developments, Johnson gave all the wrong signals. He had long talked tough against southern planters. But in practice, Johnson allied himself with ex-Confederate leaders, forgiving them when they appealed for pardons. White south- ern leaders were delighted. “By this wise and noble statesmanship,” wrote a Confeder- ate legislator, “you have become the benefactor of the Southern people.” Northerners and freedmen were disgusted. Th e president had left Reconstruction “to the tender mercies of the rebels,” wrote one Republican. An angry Union veteran in Missouri called Johnson “a traitor to the loyal people of the Union.” Emboldened by Johnson’s indulgence, ex-Confederates began to fi lter back into the halls of power. When Geor- gians elected Alexander Stephens, former vice president of the Confederacy, to repre- sent them in Congress, many outraged Republicans saw this as the last straw.

Congress Versus the President Under the Constitution, Congress is “the judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifi - cations of its own Members” (Article 1, Section 5). Using this power, Republican majorities in both houses had refused to admit southern delegations when Congress convened in December 1865, eff ectively blocking Johnson’s program. Hoping to mol- lify Congress, some southern states dropped the most objectionable provisions from their Black Codes. But at the same time, antiblack violence erupted in various parts of the South.

Congressional Republicans concluded that the federal government had to inter- vene. Back in March 1865, Congress had established the Freedmen’s Bureau to aid displaced blacks and other war refugees. In early 1866, Congress voted to extend the bureau, gave it direct funding for the fi rst time, and authorized its agents to investigate southern abuses. Even more extraordinary was the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which declared formerly enslaved people to be citizens and granted them equal protection and rights of contract, with full access to the courts.

Th ese bills provoked bitter confl ict with Johnson, who vetoed them both. Johnson’s racism, hitherto publicly muted, now blazed forth: “Th is is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government for white men.” Galva- nized, Republicans in Congress gathered two-thirds majorities and overrode both

A M E R I C A C O M PA R E D

441

L a b o r L a w s A f t e r E m a n c i p a t i o n : H a i t i a n d t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s Many government offi cials agreed with former masters on the need to control rural workers. Oft en planters themselves or allied with the planter class, they believed that economic strength and public revenue depended on plantation export crops and that workers would not produce those without legal coercion.

Th is was true in the British Caribbean and also Haiti, which eventually, aft er a success- ful slave revolt ending in 1803, became an independent republic led by former slaves and, in particular, by propertied free men of color. In the passage below, a British observer describes a rural labor code adopted by Haiti’s government in 1826. Despite the law, Haiti’s large plantations did not revive; the island’s economy, even more than that of the U.S. South, came to be dominated by small-scale, impoverished farmers.

Th e Code of Laws before us is one that could only have been framed by a legislature composed of proprietors of land, having at their command a considerable military power, of which they themselves were the leaders; for a population whom it was necessary to compel to labour. . . .

Th e choice of a master, altho’ expressly reserved to the labourer, is greatly modifi ed by the clauses which restrain the labourer from quitting the section of country to which he belongs; and from the absence of any clause compelling proprietors to engage him; so that the cultivator must consent to bind himself to whomsoever may be willing to engage him, or remain in prison, to be employed among convicts. . . .

Th e Code begins (Article 1) by declar- ing Agriculture to be the foundation of national prosperity; and then decrees (Article 3), Th at all persons, excepting soldiers, and civil servants of the State, professional persons, artizans, and domestic servants, shall cultivate the soil. Th e next clause (Article 4), forbids the inhabitants of the country quitting it to dwell in towns or villages; and every kind of wholesale or retail trade is forbidden (Article 7) to be

exercised by persons dwelling in the country.

Further articles stipulate that any person dwelling in the country, not being the owner or occupier of land, and not having bound himself in the manner directed, . . . shall be considered a vaga- bond, be arrested, and taken before a Justice, who, aft er reading the Law to him, shall commit him to jail, until he consent to bind himself according to law.

. . . Th ose who are hired from a job-master [labor agent], . . . are entitled to receive half the produce, aft er deducting the expences of cultivation; [those who are bound to the proprietor directly], one-fourth of the gross produce of their labour. . . . Out of their miserable pittance, these Haitian labourers are to provide themselves and their children with almost every thing, and to lay by a provision for old age. . . .

Th ese, with the regulations already detailed, clearly shew what is intended to be the condition of the labouring population of Haiti. I must not call it slavery; the word is objectionable; but few of the ingredients of slavery seem to be wanting.

442 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

vetoes, passing the Civil Rights Act in April 1866 and the Freedmen’s Bureau law four months later. Th eir resolve was reinforced by continued upheaval in the South. In addition to the violence in Memphis, twenty-four black political leaders and their allies in Arkansas were murdered and their homes burned.

Anxious to protect freedpeople and reassert Republican power in the South, Con- gress took further measures to sustain civil rights. In what became the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), it declared that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” were citizens. No state could abridge “the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States”; deprive “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due pro- cess of law”; or deny anyone “equal protection.” In a stunning increase of federal power, the Fourteenth Amendment declared that when people’s essential rights were at stake, national citizenship henceforth took priority over citizenship in a state.

Johnson opposed ratifi cation, but public opinion had swung against him. In the 1866 congressional elections, voters gave Republicans a 3-to-1 majority in Congress. Power shift ed to the so-called Radical Republicans, who sought sweeping transforma- tions in the defeated South. Th e Radicals’ leader in the Senate was Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the fi ery abolitionist who in 1856 had been nearly beaten to death by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks. Radicals in the House followed Th addeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, a passionate advocate of freedmen’s political and economic rights. With such men at the fore, and with congressional Republicans now numerous and united enough to override Johnson’s vetoes on many questions, Congress pro- ceeded to remake Reconstruction.

Radical Reconstruction Th e Reconstruction Act of 1867, enacted in March, divided the conquered South into fi ve military districts, each under the command of a U.S. general (Map 15.1). To reen- ter the Union, former Confederate states had to grant the vote to freedmen and deny it to leading ex-Confederates. Each military commander was required to register all eligible adult males, black as well as white; supervise state constitutional conventions; and ensure that new constitutions guaranteed black suff rage. Congress would readmit a state to the Union once these conditions were met and the new state legislature rati- fi ed the Fourteenth Amendment. Johnson vetoed the Reconstruction Act, but Con- gress overrode his veto (Table 15.1).

The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson

In August 1867, Johnson fought back by “suspending” Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, a Radical, and replacing him with Union general Ulysses S. Grant, believing Grant would be a good soldier

and follow orders. Johnson, however, had misjudged Grant, who publicly objected to the president’s machinations. When the Senate overruled Stanton’s suspension, Grant — now an open enemy of Johnson — resigned so Stanton could resume his place as secre- tary of war. On February 21, 1868, Johnson formally dismissed Stanton. Th e feisty secretary of war responded by barricading himself in his offi ce, precipitating a crisis.

Th ree days later, for the fi rst time in U.S. history, legislators in the House of Rep- resentatives introduced articles of impeachment against the president, employing their constitutional power to charge high federal offi cials with “Treason, Bribery, or

C H A P T E R 1 5 Reconstruction, 1865–1877 443

other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Th e House serves, in eff ect, as the prosecutor in such cases, and the Senate serves as the court. Th e Republican majority brought eleven counts of misconduct against Johnson, most relating to infringement of the powers of Congress. Aft er an eleven-week trial in the Senate, thirty-fi ve senators voted for conviction — one vote short of the two-thirds majority required. Twelve Democrats and seven Republicans voted for acquittal. Th e dissenting Republicans felt that remov- ing a president for defying Congress was too damaging to the constitutional system of checks and balances. But despite the president’s acquittal, Congress had shown its power. For the brief months remaining in his term, Johnson was largely irrelevant.

The Election of 1868 and the Fifteenth

Amendment

Th e impeachment controversy made Grant, already the Union’s greatest war hero, a Republican idol as well. He easily won the party’s presidential nomination in 1868. Although he supported Radical Reconstruction, Grant also urged sectional reconcilia-

tion. His Democratic opponent, former New York governor Horatio Seymour, almost declined the nomination because he understood that Democrats could not yet overcome

MAP 15.1 Reconstruction The federal government organized the Confederate states into fi ve military districts during Radical Reconstruction. For the states shown in this map, the fi rst date indicates when that state was readmitted to the Union; the second date shows when Radical Republicans lost control of the state government. All the ex-Confederate states rejoined the Union between 1868 and 1870, but the periods of Radical government varied widely. Republicans lasted only a few months in Virginia; they held on until the end of Reconstruction in Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina.

Confederate states

Military district boundary

Date of defeat of radical Reconstruction government

Date of readmission to the Union

1871

1870

0 100 200 kilometers

0 100 200 miles

N

S

EW

ATLANTIC OCEAN

Gulf of Mexico

NEW MEXICO TERRITORY

INDIAN TERRITORY

COLO. KANS.

TEXAS 1870 1873

LA. 1868 1877

ARK. 1868 1874

MISS. 1870 1875

TENN. 1866 1869

KY.

W. VA.

PENN. MD. DEL.

ALA. 1868 1874

GA. 1870 1871

FLA. 1868 1877

S.C. 1868 1877

MO.

IOWA

ILL.

IND. OHIO

N.C. 1868 1870

VA. 1870 1870

M E X I C O

MILITARY DISTRICT NO. 5

MILITARY DISTRICT NO. 4

MILITARY DISTRICT NO. 3

MILITARY DISTRICT NO. 2

MILITARY DISTRICT NO. 1

444 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

the stain of disloyalty. Grant won by an overwhelming margin, receiving 214 out of 294 electoral votes. Republicans retained two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress.

In February 1869, following this smashing victory, Republicans produced the era’s last constitutional amendment, the Fift eenth. It protected male citizens’ right to vote irrespective of race, color, or “previous condition of servitude.” Despite Radical Repub- licans’ protests, the amendment left room for a poll tax (paid for the privilege of vot- ing) and literacy requirements. Both were concessions to northern and western states that sought such provisions to keep immigrants and the “unworthy” poor from the polls. Congress required the four states remaining under federal control to ratify the measure as a condition for readmission to the Union. A year later, the Fift eenth Amendment became law.

Passage of the Fift eenth Amendment, despite its limitations, was an astonishing feat. Elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, lawmakers had left emancipated slaves in

TABLE 15.1 Primary Reconstruction Laws and Constitutional Amendments

Law (Date of Congressional Passage) Key Provisions

Thirteenth Amendment (December 1865*) Prohibited slavery Civil Rights Act of 1866 (April 1866) Defi ned citizenship rights of freedmen Authorized federal authorities to bring suit against

those who violated those rights Fourteenth Amendment (June 1866†) Established national citizenship for persons born or

naturalized in the United States Prohibited the states from depriving citizens of their

civil rights or equal protection under the law Reduced state representation in House of Representa-

tives by the percentage of adult male citizens denied the vote

Reconstruction Act of 1867 (March 1867) Divided the South into fi ve military districts, each under the command of a Union general

Established requirements for readmission of ex- Confederate states to the Union

Tenure of Offi ce Act (March 1867) Required Senate consent for removal of any federal offi cial whose appointment had required Senate confi rmation

Fifteenth Amendment (February 1869‡) Forbade states to deny citizens the right to vote on the grounds of race, color, or “previous condition of servitude”

Ku Klux Klan Act (April 1871) Authorized the president to use federal prosecutions and military force to suppress conspiracies to deprive citizens of the right to vote and enjoy the equal protection of the law

*Ratifi ed by three-fourths of all states in December 1865. †Ratifi ed by three-fourths of all states in July 1868. ‡Ratifi ed by three-fourths of all states in March 1870.

C H A P T E R 1 5 Reconstruction, 1865–1877 445

a condition of semi-citizenship, with no voting rights. But, like almost all Americans, congressional Republicans had extraordinary faith in the power of the vote. Many African Americans agreed. “Th e colored people of these Southern states have cast their lot with the Government,” declared a delegate to Arkansas’s constitutional convention, “and with the great Republican Party. . . . Th e ballot is our only means of protection.” In the election of 1870, hun- dreds of thousands of African Americans voted across the South, in an atmosphere of collective pride and celebration.

Woman Suff rage Denied Passage of the Fift eenth Amendment was a bittersweet victory for one group of Union loyalists: women. Some formerly enslaved women believed they would win voting rights along with their men, until northern allies corrected that impression. National women’s rights leaders, who had campaigned for the ballot since the Seneca Falls con- vention of 1848, hoped to secure voting rights for women and African American men at the same time. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton put it, women could “avail ourselves of

To see a longer excerpt of the Arkansas delegate’s document, along with other primary sources from this period, see Sources for America’s History.

“We Accept the Situation” This 1867 Harper’s Weekly cartoon refers to the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867, which instructed ex-Confederate states to hold constitutional conventions and stipulated that the resulting constitutions must provide voting rights for black men. The two images here suggest white northerners’ views of both ex-Confederates and emancipated slaves. How is each depicted? What does this suggest about the troubles that lay ahead for Reconstruction policy? The cartoonist was Thomas Nast (1840–1902), one of the most infl uential artists of his era. Nast fi rst drew “Santa Claus” in his modern form, and it was he who began depicting the Democratic Party as a kicking donkey and Republicans as an elephant — suggesting (since elephants are supposed to have good memories) their long remembrance of the Civil War and emancipation. Library of Congress.

446 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

the strong arm and the blue uniform of the black soldier to walk in by his side.” Th e protected categories for voting in the Fift eenth Amendment could have read “race, color, sex, or previous condition of servitude.” But that word proved impossible to obtain.

Enfranchising black men had clear benefi ts for the authors of Reconstruction. It punished ex-Confederates and ensured Republican support in the South. But women’s partisan loyalties were not so clear, and a substantial majority of northern voters — all men, of course — opposed women’s enfranchisement. Even Radicals feared that this “side issue” would overburden their program. Infl uential abolitionists such as Wendell Philips refused to campaign for women’s suff rage, fearing it would detract from the focus on black men. Philips criticized women’s leaders for being “selfi sh.” “Do you believe,” Stanton hotly replied, “the African race is entirely composed of males?”

By May 1869, the former allies were at an impasse. At a convention of the Equal Rights Association, black abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Frederick Douglass pleaded for white women to consider the situation in the South and allow black male suff rage to take priority. “When women, because they are women, are hunted down, . . . dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp posts,” Douglass said, “then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.” Some women’s suff rage leaders joined Douglass in backing the Fift eenth Amendment without the word sex. But many, especially white women, rejected Douglass’s plea. One African American woman remarked that they “all go for sex, letting race occupy a minor position.” Embittered, Elizabeth Cady Stanton lashed out against “Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Ung Tung,” maligning uneducated freedmen and immigrants who could vote while edu-

“Out in the Cold” Though many women, including African American activists in the South, went to the polls in the early 1870s to test whether the new Fourteenth Amendment had given them the vote, federal courts subsequently rejected women’s voting rights. Only the Wyoming and Utah territories fully enfran chised women. At the same time, revised naturalization laws allowed immigrant men of African descent — though not of Asian descent — to become citizens. With its crude Irish, African, and Chinese racial caricatures, this 1884 cartoon from the humor magazine The Judge echoes the arguments of some white suff ragists that though men of races stereotyped as inferior had been enfranchised, white women were not. The woman knocking on the door is also a caricature, with her harsh appearance and masculine hat. Library of Congress.

C H A P T E R 1 5 Reconstruction, 1865–1877 447

cated white women could not. Douglass’s resolution in support of the Fift eenth Amendment failed, and the convention broke up.

At this searing moment, a rift opened in the women’s movement. Th e majority, led by Lucy Stone, reconciled themselves to disappointment. Organized into the Ameri- can Woman Suff rage Association, they remained loyal to the Republican Party in hopes that once Reconstruction had been settled, it would be women’s turn. A group led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony struck out in a new direction. Th ey saw that, once the Reconstruction Amendments had passed, women’s suff rage was unlikely in the near future. Stanton declared that woman “must not put her trust in man.” Th e new organization she headed, the National Woman Suff rage Association (NWSA), focused exclusively on women’s rights and took up the battle for a federal suff rage amendment.

In 1873, NWSA members decided to test the new constitutional amendments. Suff ragists all over the United States, including some black women in the South, tried to register and vote. Most were turned away. In an ensuing lawsuit, suff rage advocate Virginia Minor of Missouri argued that the registrar who denied her a ballot had vio- lated her rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. In Minor v. Happersett (1875), the Supreme Court dashed such hopes. It ruled that suff rage rights were not inherent in citizenship; women were citizens, but state legislatures could deny women the vote if they wished.

Despite these defeats, Radical Reconstruction had created the conditions for a nationwide women’s rights movement. Some argued for suff rage as part of a broader expansion of democracy. Others, on the contrary, saw white women’s votes as a pos- sible counterweight to the votes of African American or Chinese men (while oppo- nents pointed out that black and immigrant women would likely be enfranchised, too). When Wyoming Territory gave women full voting rights in 1869, its governor received telegrams of congratulation from around the world. Aft erward, contrary to dire predictions, female voters in Wyoming did not appear to neglect their homes, abandon their children, or otherwise “unsex” themselves. Women’s suf- frage could no longer be dismissed as the absurd notion of a tiny minority. It had become a serious issue for national debate.

The Meaning of Freedom While political leaders wrangled in Washington, emancipated slaves acted on their own ideas about freedom (American Voices, p. 449). Emancipation meant many things: the end of punishment by the lash; the ability to move around; reunion of fami- lies; and opportunities to build schools and churches and to publish and read news- papers. Foremost among freedpeople’s demands were voting rights and economic autonomy. Former Confederates opposed these goals. Most southern whites believed the proper place for blacks was as “servants and inferiors,” as a Virginia planter testifi ed

How and why did federal Recon- struction policies evolve between 1865 and 1870?

Abolitionists and women’s suf- frage advocates were generally close allies before 1865. What divisions emerged during Recon- struction and why?

448 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

to Congress. Mississippi’s governor, elected under President Johnson’s plan, vowed that “ours is and it shall ever be, a government of white men.” Meanwhile, as Recon- struction unfolded, it became clear that on economic questions, southern blacks and northern Republican policymakers did not see eye to eye.

The Quest for Land During the Civil War, wherever Union forces had conquered portions of the South, rural black workers had formed associations that agreed on common goals and even practiced military drills. Aft er the war, when resettlement became the responsibility of the Freedmen’s Bureau, thousands of rural blacks hoped for land distributions. But Johnson’s amnesty plan, which allowed pardoned Confederates to recover property seized during the war, blasted such hopes. In October 1865, for example, Johnson ordered General Oliver O. Howard, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, to restore planta- tions on South Carolina’s Sea Islands to white property holders. Dispossessed blacks protested: “Why do you take away our lands? You take them from us who have always been true, always true to the Government! You give them to our all-time enemies! Th at is not right!” Former slaves resisted eff orts to evict them. Led by black Union veterans, they fought pitched battles with former slaveholders and bands of ex-Confederate sol- diers. But white landowners, sometimes aided by federal troops, generally prevailed.

Freed Slaves and Northerners:

Confl icting Goals

On questions of land and labor, freedmen in the South and Repub- licans in Washington seriously diff ered. Th e economic revolution of the antebellum period had transformed New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. Believing similar development could revolu-

tionize the South, most congressional leaders sought to restore cotton as the country’s leading export, and they envisioned former slaves as wageworkers on cash-crop plan- tations, not independent farmers. Only a handful of radicals, like Th addeus Stevens, argued that freed slaves had earned a right to land grants, through what Lincoln had referred to as “four hundred years of unrequited toil.” Stevens proposed that southern plantations be treated as “forfeited estates of the enemy” and broken up into small farms for former slaves. “Nothing will make men so industrious and moral,” Stevens declared, “as to let them feel that they are above want and are the owners of the soil which they till.”

Today, most historians of Reconstruction agree with Stevens: policymakers did not do enough to ensure freedpeople’s economic security. Without land, former slaves were left poor and vulnerable. At the time, though, Stevens had few allies. A deep ven- eration for private property lay at the heart of his vision, but others interpreted the same principle diff erently: they defi ned ownership by legal title, not by labor invested. Th ough oft en accused of harshness toward the defeated Confederacy, most Republicans — even Radicals — could not imagine “giving” land to former slaves. Th e same con- gressmen, of course, had no diffi culty giving away homesteads on the frontier that had been taken from Indians. But they were deeply reluctant to confi scate white-owned plantations.

Some southern Republican state governments did try, without much success, to use tax policy to break up large landholdings and get them into the hands of poorer

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S

449

R e l i s h i n g F r e e d o m J O U R D O N A N D E R S O N Folklorists have recorded the sly ways that slaves found, even in bondage, for “puttin’ down” their masters. But only in freedom — and beyond reach in a northern state at that — could Anderson’s sarcasm be expressed so openly, with the jest that his family might consider returning if they fi rst received the wages due them, calculated to the dollar, for all those years in slavery. Anderson’s letter, although probably written or edited by a white friend in Dayton, surely is faithful to what the ex-slave wanted to say.

Dayton, Ohio August 7, 1865. To My Old Master, Colonel P. H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee. Sir:

I got your letter, and was glad to fi nd that you had not forgotten Jourdon. . . . I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s house to kill the union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. . . .

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-fi ve dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy, — the folks call her Mrs. Anderson, — and the children — Milly, Jane, and Grundy — go to school and are learning well. . . . We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Th em colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. Th e children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys

would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. . . .

Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. . . . I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-fi ve dollars a month for me and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. . . .

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. . . . I would rather stay here and starve — and die, if it come to that — than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. . . .

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant, Jourdon Anderson

SOURCE: Stanley I. Kutler, ed., Looking for America: Th e People’s History, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 2: 4–6, 24–27.

450 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

whites and blacks. In 1869, South Carolina established a land commission to buy property and resell it on easy terms to the landless; about 14,000 black families acquired farms through the program. But such initiatives were the exception, not the rule. Over time, some rural blacks did succeed in becoming small-scale landowners, especially in Upper South states such as Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. But it was an uphill fi ght, and policymakers provided little aid.

Wage Labor and Sharecropping

Without land, most freedpeople had few options but to work for former slave owners. Landowners wanted to retain the old gang- labor system, with wages replacing the food, clothing, and shelter

that slaves had once received. Southern planters — who had recently scorned the North for the cruelties of wage labor — now embraced wage work with apparent satis- faction. Maliciously comparing black workers to free-roaming pigs, landowners told them to “root, hog, or die.” Former slaves found themselves with rock-bottom wages; it was a shock to fi nd that emancipation and “free labor” did not prevent a hardwork- ing family from nearly starving.

African American workers used a variety of tactics to fi ght back. As early as 1865, alarmed whites across the South reported that former slaves were holding mass meetings

Sharecroppers in Georgia This photograph shows a Georgia sharecropping family in front of their cabin at cotton-harvesting time. The man in the buggy behind them is probably the landowner. What does this photograph reveal about the condition of sharecroppers? Is there evidence that they might have considered themselves to be doing fairly well — as well as evidence of limits on their success and independence? Note that cotton is growing all the way up to the house, suggesting that the family left little room for a garden or livestock. Through the relentless pressure of loans and debt, sharecropping forced southern farmers into a cash-crop monoculture. Brown Brothers.

C H A P T E R 1 5 Reconstruction, 1865–1877 451

to agree on “plans and terms for labor.” Such meetings continued through the Recon- struction years. Facing limited prospects at home, some workers left the fi elds and trav- eled long distances to seek better-paying jobs on the railroads or in turpentine and lumber camps. Others — from rice cultivators to laundry workers — organized strikes.

At the same time, struggles raged between employers and freedpeople over wom- en’s work. In slavery, African American women’s bodies had been the sexual property of white men. Protecting black women from such abuse, as much as possible, was a crucial priority for freedpeople. When planters demanded that black women go back into the fi elds, African Americans resisted resolutely. “I seen on some plantations,” one freedman recounted, “where the white men would . . . tell colored men that their wives and children could not live on their places unless they work in the fi elds. Th e colored men [answered that] whenever they wanted their wives to work they would tell them themselves.”

Th ere was a profound irony in this man’s defi nition of freedom: it designated a wife’s labor as her husband’s property. Some black women asserted their independence and headed their own households, though this was oft en a matter of necessity rather than choice. For many freedpeople, the opportunity for a stable family life was one of the greatest achievements of emancipation. Many enthusiastically accepted the north- ern ideal of domesticity. Missionaries, teachers, and editors of black newspapers urged men to work diligently and support their families, and they told women (though many worked for wages) to devote themselves to motherhood and the home.

Even in rural areas, former slaves refused to work under conditions that recalled slavery. Th ere would be no gang work, they vowed: no overseers, no whippings, no regulation of their private lives. Across the South, planters who needed labor were forced to yield to what one planter termed the “prejudices of the freedmen, who desire to be masters of their own time.” In a few areas, wage work became the norm — for example, on the giant sugar plantations of Louisiana fi nanced by northern capital. But cotton planters lacked money to pay wages, and sometimes, in lieu of a wage, they off ered a share of the crop. Freedmen, in turn, paid their rent in shares of the harvest.

Th us the Reconstruction years gave rise to a distinctive system of cotton agricul- ture known as sharecropping, in which freedmen worked as renters, exchanging their labor for the use of land, house, implements, and sometimes seed and fertilizer. Share- croppers typically turned over half of their crops to the landlord (Map 15.2). In a credit- starved agricultural region that grew crops for a world economy, sharecropping was an eff ective strategy, enabling laborers and landowners to share risks and returns. But it was a very unequal relationship. Starting out penniless, sharecroppers had no way to make it through the fi rst growing season without borrowing for food and supplies.

Country storekeepers stepped in. Bankrolled by northern suppliers, they fur- nished sharecroppers with provisions and took as collateral a lien on the crop, eff ec- tively assuming ownership of croppers’ shares and leaving them only what remained aft er debts had been paid. Crop-lien laws enforced lenders’ ownership rights to the crop share. Once indebted at a store, sharecroppers became easy targets for exorbitant prices, unfair interest rates, and crooked bookkeeping. As cotton prices declined in the 1870s, more and more sharecroppers fell into permanent debt. If the merchant was also the landowner or conspired with the landowner, debt became a pretext for forced labor, or peonage.

452 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

Sharecropping arose in part because it was a good fi t for cotton agriculture. Cotton, unlike sugarcane, could be raised effi ciently by small farmers (provided they had the lash of indebtedness always on their backs). We can see this in the experience of other regions that became major producers in response to the global cotton shortage set off by the Civil War. In India, Egypt, Brazil, and West Africa, variants of the sharecropping system emerged. Everywhere international merchants and bankers, who put up capital, insisted on passage of crop-lien laws. Indian and Egyptian villagers ended up, like their American counterparts, permanently under the thumb of furnishing merchants.

By 1890, three out of every four black farmers in the South were tenants or share- croppers; among white farmers, the ratio was one in three. For freedmen, sharecropping was not the worst choice, in a world where former masters threatened to impose labor conditions that were close to slavery. But the costs were devastating. With farms leased on a year-to-year basis, neither tenant nor owner had much incentive to improve the property. Th e crop-lien system rested on expensive interest payments — money that might otherwise have gone into agricultural improvements or to meet human needs.

MAP 15.2 The Barrow Plantation, 1860 and 1881 This map is a modern redrawing of one that fi rst appeared in the popular magazine Scribner’s Monthly in April 1881, accompanying an article about the Barrow plantation. Comparing the 1860 map of this central Georgia plantation with the 1881 map reveals the impact of sharecropping on patterns of black residence. In 1860, the slave quarters were clustered near the planter’s house. In contrast, by 1881 the sharecroppers were scattered across the plantation’s 2,000 acres, having built cabins on the ridges between the low-lying streams. The surname Barrow was common among the sharecropping families, which means almost certainly that they had been slaves who, years after emancipation, still had not moved on. For sharecroppers, freedom meant not only their individual lots and cabins but also the school and church shown on the map.

The boundary also indicates that the land was surveyed according to the old “metes-and-bounds” system, not the rectangular pattern created by the Land Ordinance of 1785 for the division of federal lands.

1881 Landlord’s house

Service and farm buildings

Houses of former slaves

Road

Valley floor

Gentle slopes

Higher ground

1. Syrup 4% 2. Wheat 5% 3. Fodder 6% 4. Corn 28% 5. Cotton 57%

Crop share of income for Handy Barrow (ex-slave, 1881)

12 3

45

Sy ll’

s Fo

rk

North Fork

Little R

iver

Wright’s Branch

Branch Creek

� �

Black Church (Baptist)

School

Gin house

Handy Barrow

Plantation bo und

ary

The boundary line of the plantation is the same on both maps because the Barrow Plantation remained in the same family.

Sy ll’

s Fo

rk

North Fork

Little R

iver

Wright’s Branch

Branch Creek

Gin house

Plantation bo un

dar y

1860 Master’s house

Service and farm buildings

Slave quarters

Road

Valley floor

Gentle slopes

Higher ground

C H A P T E R 1 5 Reconstruction, 1865–1877 453

And sharecropping committed the South infl exibly to cotton, a crop that generated the cash required by landlords and furnishing merchants. Th e result was a stagnant farm economy that blighted the South’s future. As Republican governments tried to remake the region, they confronted not only wartime destruction but also the failure of their hopes that free labor would create a modern, prosperous South, built in the image of the industrializing North. Instead, the South’s rural economy remained mired in widespread poverty and based on an uneasy compromise between landowners and laborers.

Republican Governments in the South Between 1868 and 1871, all the former Confederate states met congressional stipula- tions and rejoined the Union. Protected by federal troops, Republican administrations in these states retained power for periods ranging from a few months in Virginia to nine years in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida. Th ese governments remain some of the most misunderstood institutions in all U.S. history. Ex-Confederates never accepted their legitimacy. Many other whites agreed, focusing particularly on the role of African Americans who began to serve in public offi ce. “It is strange, abnormal, and unfi t,” declared one British visitor to Louisiana, “that a negro Legislature should deal . . . with the gravest commercial and fi nancial interests.” During much of the twentieth century, historians echoed such critics, condemning Reconstruction leaders as ignorant and corrupt. Th ese historians shared the racial prejudices of the British observer: Blacks were simply unfi t to govern.

In fact, Reconstruction governments were ambitious. Th ey were hated, in part, because they undertook impressive reforms in public education, family law, social ser- vices, commerce, and transportation. Like their northern allies, southern Republicans admired the economic and social transformations that had occurred in the North before the Civil War and worked energetically to import them.

Th e southern Republican Party included former Whigs, a few former Democrats, black and white newcomers from the North, and southern African Americans. From the start, its leaders faced the dilemma of racial prejudice. In the upcountry, white Unionists were eager to join the party but sometimes reluctant to work with black allies. In most areas, the Republicans also desperately needed African Americans, who constituted a majority of registered voters in Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, and Mississippi.

For a brief moment in the late 1860s, black and white Republicans joined forces through the Union League, a secret fraternal order. Formed in border states and north- ern cities during the Civil War, the league became a powerful political association that spread through the former Confederacy. Functioning as a grassroots wing of Radical Republicanism, it pressured Congress to uphold justice for freedmen. Aft er blacks won voting rights, the league organized meetings at churches and schoolhouses to instruct freedmen on political issues and voting procedures. League clubs held parades and military drills, giving a public face to the new political order.

Th e Freedmen’s Bureau also supported grassroots Reconstruction eff orts. Th ough some bureau offi cials sympathized with planters, most were dedicated, idealistic men who tried valiantly to reconcile opposing interests. Bureau men kept a sharp eye out for unfair labor contracts and oft en forced landowners to bargain with workers and tenants. Th ey advised freedmen on economic matters; provided direct payments to desperate families, especially women and children; and helped establish schools. In

454 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

cooperation with northern aid societies, the bureau played a key role in founding Afri- can American colleges and universities such as Fisk, Tougaloo, and the Hampton Insti- tute. Th ese institutions, in turn, focused on training teachers. By 1869, there were more than three thousand teachers instructing freedpeople in the South. More than half were themselves African Americans.

Ex-Confederates viewed the Union League, Freedmen’s Bureau, and Republican Party as illegitimate forces in southern aff airs, and they resented the political educa- tion of freedpeople. Th ey referred to southern whites who supported Reconstruction as scalawags — an ancient Scots-Irish term for worthless animals — and denounced northern whites as carpetbaggers, self-seeking interlopers who carried all their prop- erty in cheap suitcases called carpetbags. Such labels glossed over the actual diversity of white Republicans. Many arrivals from the North, while motivated by personal profi t, also brought capital and skills. Interspersed with ambitious schemers were reformers hoping to advance freedmen’s rights. So-called scalawags were even more varied. Some southern Republicans were former slave owners; others were ex-Whigs or even ex-Democrats who hoped to attract northern capital. But most hailed from the backcountry and wanted to rid the South of its slaveholding aristocracy, believing slav- ery had victimized whites as well as blacks.

Southern Democrats’ contempt for black politicians, whom they regarded as igno- rant fi eld hands, was just as misguided as their stereotypes about white Republicans. Many African American leaders in the South came from the ranks of antebellum free blacks. Others were skilled men like Robert Smalls of South Carolina, who as a slave had worked for wages that he turned over to his master. Smalls, a steamer pilot in Charleston harbor, had become a war hero when he escaped with his family and other slaves and brought his ship to the Union navy. Buying property in Beaufort aft er the war, Smalls became a state legislator and later a congressman. Blanche K. Bruce, another former slave, had been tutored on a Virginia plantation by his white father; during the war, he escaped and established a school for freedmen in Missouri. In 1869, he moved to Mississippi and became, fi ve years later, Mississippi’s second black U.S. senator. Polit- ical leaders such as Smalls and Bruce were joined by northern blacks — including min- isters, teachers, and Union veterans — who moved south to support Reconstruction.

During Radical Reconstruction, such men fanned out into plantation districts and recruited former slaves to participate in politics. Literacy helped freedman Th omas Allen, a Baptist minister and shoemaker, win election to the Georgia legislature. “Th e colored people came to me,” Allen recalled, “and I gave them the best instructions I could. I took the New York Tribune and other papers, and in that way I found out a great deal, and I told them whatever I thought was right.” Th ough never proportionate to their numbers in the population, blacks became offi ceholders across the South. In South Car- olina, African Americans constituted a majority in the lower house of the legislature in 1868. Over the course of Reconstruction, twenty African Americans served in state administrations as governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, or lesser offi ces. More than six hundred became state legislators, and sixteen were congressmen.

Both white and black Republicans had big plans. Th eir southern Reconstruction governments eliminated property qualifi cations for the vote and abolished Black Codes. Th eir new state constitutions expanded the rights of married women, enabling them to own their own property and wages — “a wonderful reform,” one white woman

C H A P T E R 1 5 Reconstruction, 1865–1877 455

in Georgia wrote, for “the cause of Women’s Rights.” Like their counterparts in the North, southern Republicans also believed in using government to foster economic growth. Seeking to diversify the economy beyond cotton agriculture, they poured money into railroads and other projects.

In myriad ways, Republicans brought southern state and city governments up to date. Th ey outlawed corporal punishments such as whipping and branding. Th ey established hospitals and asylums for orphans and the disabled. South Carolina off ered free public health services, while Alabama provided free legal representation for defendants who could not pay. Some municipal governments paved streets and installed streetlights. Petersburg, Virginia, established a board of health that off ered free medical care during the smallpox epidemic of 1873. Nashville, Tennessee, created soup kitchens for the poor.

Most impressive of all were achievements in public education, where the South had lagged woefully. Republicans viewed education as the foundation of a true demo- cratic order. By 1875, over half of black children were attending school in Mississippi, Florida, and South Carolina. African Americans of all ages rushed to the newly estab- lished schools, even when they had to pay tuition. Th ey understood why slaveholders had criminalized slave literacy: the practice of freedom rested on the ability to read newspapers, labor contracts, history books, and the Bible. A school offi cial in Virginia reported that freedpeople were “crazy to learn.” One Louisiana man explained why he was sending his children to school, even though he needed their help in the fi eld. It was “better than leaving them a fortune; because if you left them even fi ve hundred dollars, some man having more education than they had would come along and cheat them out of it all.” Th ousands of white children, particularly girls and the sons of poor farmers and laborers, also benefi tted from new public education systems. Young white women’s graduation from high school, an unheard-of occurrence before the Civil War, became a celebrated event in southern cities and towns.

Southern Reconstruction governments also had their fl aws — fl aws that would become more apparent as the 1870s unfolded. In the race for economic development, for example, state offi cials allowed private companies to hire out prisoners to labor in mines and other industries, in a notorious system known as convict leasing. Corrup- tion was rife and conditions horrifi c. In 1866, Alabama’s governor leased 200 state convicts to a railroad construction company for the grand total of $5. While they labored to build state-subsidized lines such as the Alabama and Chattanooga, prison- ers were housed at night in open, rolling cages. Physical abuse was common and medi- cal care nonexistent. At the start of 1869, Alabama counted 263 prisoners available for leasing; by the end of the year, a staggering 92 of them had died. While convict leasing expanded in later decades, it began during Reconstruction, supported by both Repub- licans and Democrats.

Building Black Communities In slavery days, African Americans had built networks of religious worship and mutual aid, but these operated largely in secret. Aft er emancipation, southern blacks could engage in open community building. In doing so, they cooperated with northern mis- sionaries and teachers, both black and white, who came to help in the great work of

456 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

freedom. “Ignorant though they may be, on account of long years of oppression, they exhibit a desire to hear and to learn, that I never imagined,” reported African Ameri- can minister Reverend James Lynch, who traveled from Maryland to the Deep South. “Every word you say while preaching, they drink down and respond to, with an ear- nestness that sets your heart all on fi re.”

Independent churches quickly became central community institutions, as blacks across the South left white-dominated congregations, where they had sat in segregated balconies, and built churches of their own. Th ese churches joined their counterparts in the North to become national denominations, including, most prominently, the National Baptist Convention and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Black churches served not only as sites of worship but also as schools, social centers, and meeting halls. Ministers were oft en political spokesmen as well. As Charles H. Pearce, a black Methodist pastor in Florida, declared, “A man in this State cannot do his whole duty as a minister except he looks out for the political interests of his people.” Reli- gious leaders articulated the special destiny of freedpeople as the new “Children of Israel.”

Fisk Jubilee Singers, 1873 Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, was established in 1865 to provide higher education for African Americans from all across the South. When university funds ran short in 1871, the Jubilee Singers choral group was formed and began touring to raise money for the school. They performed African American spirituals and folksongs, such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” arranged in ways that appealed to white audiences, making this music nationally popular for the fi rst time. In 1872, the group performed for President Grant at the White House. Money raised by this acclaimed chorale saved Fisk from bankruptcy. Edmund Havel’s portrait of the group was painted during their fi rst European tour. Fisk University Art Galleries.

C H A P T E R 1 5 Reconstruction, 1865–1877 457

Th e fl owering of black churches, schools, newspapers, and civic groups was one of the most enduring initiatives of the Reconstruction era. Dedicated teachers and char- ity leaders embarked on a project of “race uplift ” that never ceased thereaft er, while black entrepreneurs were proud to build businesses that served their communities. Th e issue of desegregation — sharing public facilities with whites — was a trickier one. Th ough some black leaders pressed for desegregation, they were keenly aware of the backlash this was likely to provoke. Others made it clear that they preferred their chil- dren to attend all-black schools, especially if they encountered hostile or condescend- ing white teachers and classmates. Many had pragmatic concerns. Asked whether she wanted her boys to attend an integrated school, one woman in New Orleans said no: “I don’t want my children to be pounded by . . . white boys. I don’t send them to school to fi ght, I send them to learn.”

At the national level, congressmen wrestled with similar issues as they debated an ambitious civil rights bill championed by Radical Republican senator Charles Sumner. Sumner fi rst introduced his bill in 1870, seeking to enforce, among other things, equal access to schools, public transportation, hotels, and churches. Despite a series of defeats and delays, the bill remained on Capitol Hill for fi ve years. Opponents charged that shared public spaces would lead to race mixing and intermarriage. Some sympa- thetic Republicans feared a backlash, while others questioned whether, because of the First Amendment, the federal government had the right to regulate churches. On his deathbed in 1874, Sumner exhorted a visitor to remember the civil rights bill: “Don’t let it fail.” In the end, the Senate removed Sumner’s provision for integrated churches, and the House removed the clause requiring integrated schools. But to honor the great Mas- sachusetts abolitionist, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Th e law required “full and equal” access to jury service and to trans- portation and public accommodations, irre- spective of race. It was the last such act for almost a hundred years — until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The Undoing of Reconstruction Sumner’s death marked the waning of Radical Reconstruction. Th at movement had accomplished more than anyone dreamed a few years earlier. But a chasm had opened between the goals of freedmen, who wanted autonomy, and policymakers, whose fi rst priorities were to reincorporate ex-Confederates into the nation and build a powerful national economy. Meanwhile, the North was fl ooded with one-sided, racist reports such as James M. Pike’s infl uential book Th e Prostrate State (1873), which claimed South Carolina was in the grip of “black barbarism.” Events of the 1870s deepened the northern public’s disillusionment. Scandals rocked the Grant administration, and an economic depression curbed both private investment and public spending. At the same time, northern resolve was worn down by continued ex-Confederate resistance and violence. Only full-scale military intervention could reverse the situation in the

Why did sharecropping emerge, and how did it aff ect freedpeople and the southern economy?

What policies did southern Recon- struction legislators pursue, and what needs of the postwar South did they seek to serve?

458 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

South, and by the mid-1870s the North had no political willpower to renew the occupation.

The Republicans Unravel Republicans had banked on economic growth to underpin their ambitious program, but their hopes were dashed in 1873 by the sudden onset of a severe worldwide depres- sion. In the United States, the initial panic was triggered by the bankruptcy of the Northern Pacifi c Railroad, backed by leading fi nancier Jay Cooke. Cooke’s supervi- sion of Union fi nances during the Civil War had made him a national hero; his down- fall was a shock, and since Cooke was so well connected in Washington, it raised suspicions that Republican fi nancial manipulation had caused the depression. Offi - cials in the Grant administration deepened public resentment toward their party when they rejected pleas to increase the money supply and provide relief from debt and unemployment.

Th e impact of the depression varied in diff erent parts of the United States. Farm- ers suff ered a terrible plight as crop prices plunged, while industrial workers faced layoff s and sharp wage reductions. Within a year, 50 percent of American iron manu- facturing had stopped. By 1877, half the nation’s railroad companies had fi led for bankruptcy. Rail construction halted. With hundreds of thousands thrown out of work, people took to the road. Wandering “tramps,” who camped by railroad tracks and knocked on doors to beg for work and food, terrifi ed prosperous Americans.

In addition to discrediting Republicans, the depression directly undercut their policies, most dramatically in the South. Th e ex-Confederacy was still recovering from the ravages of war, and its new economic and social order remained fragile. Th e bold policies of southern Republicans — for education, public health, and grants to railroad builders — cost a great deal of money. Federal support, through programs like the Freedmen’s Bureau, had begun to fade even before 1873. Republicans had banked on major infusions of northern and foreign investment capital; for the most part, these failed to materialize. Investors who had sunk money into Confederate bonds, only to have those repudiated, were especially wary. Th e South’s economy grew more slowly than Republicans had hoped, and aft er 1873, growth screeched to a halt. State debts mounted rapidly, and as crushing interest on bonds fell due, public credit collapsed.

Not only had Republican offi cials failed to anticipate a severe depression; during the era of generous spending, considerable funds had also been wasted or had ended up in the pockets of corrupt offi cials. Two swindlers in North Carolina, one of them a former Union general, were found to have distributed more than $200,000 in bribes and loans to legislators to gain millions in state funds for rail construction. Instead of building railroads, they used the money to travel to Europe and speculate in stocks and bonds. Not only Republicans were on the take. “You are mistaken,” wrote one southern Democrat to a northern friend, “if you suppose that all the evils . . . result from the carpetbaggers and negroes. Th e Democrats are leagued with them when any- thing is proposed that promises to pay.” In South Carolina, when African American congressman Robert Smalls was convicted of taking a bribe, the Democratic governor pardoned him — in exchange for an agreement that federal offi cials would drop an investigation of Democratic election frauds.

C H A P T E R 1 5 Reconstruction, 1865–1877 459

One of the depression’s most tragic results was the failure of the Freedman’s Sav- ings and Trust Company. Th is private bank, founded in 1865, had worked closely with the Freedmen’s Bureau and Union army across the South. Former slaves associated it with the party of Lincoln, and thousands responded to northerners’ call for thrift and savings by bringing their small deposits to the nearest branch. African American farmers, entrepreneurs, churches, and charitable groups opened accounts at the bank. But in the early 1870s, the bank’s directors sank their money into risky loans and spec- ulative investments. In June 1874, the bank failed.

Some Republicans believed that, because the bank had been so closely associated with the U.S. Army and federal agencies, Congress had a duty to step in. Even one southern Democrat argued that the government was “morally bound to see to it that not a dollar is lost.” But in the end, Congress refused to compensate the 61,000 deposi- tors. About half recovered small amounts — averaging $18.51 — but the others received nothing. Th e party of Reconstruction was losing its moral gloss.

The Disillusioned Liberals

As a result of the depression and rising criticism of postwar activ- ist government, a revolt emerged in the Republican Party. It was led by infl uential intellectuals, journalists, and businessmen who

believed in classical liberalism: free trade, small government, low property taxes, and limitation of voting rights to men of education and property. Liberals responded to the massive increase in federal power, during the Civil War and Reconstruction, by urging a policy of laissez faire, in which government “let alone” business and the economy. In the postwar decades, laissez faire advocates never succeeded in ending federal policies such as the protective tariff and national banking system (Chapter 16), but their argu- ments helped roll back Reconstruction. Unable to block Grant’s renomination for the presidency in 1872, the dissidents broke away and formed a new party under the name Liberal Republican. Th eir candidate was Horace Greeley, longtime publisher of the New York Tribune and veteran reformer and abolitionist. Th e Democrats, still in disar- ray, also nominated Greeley, notwithstanding his editorial diatribes against them. A poor campaigner, Greeley was assailed so severely that, as he said, “I hardly knew whether I was running for the Presidency or the penitentiary.”

Grant won reelection overwhelmingly, capturing 56 percent of the popular vote and every electoral vote. Yet Liberal Republicans had shift ed the terms of debate. Th e agenda they advanced — smaller government, restricted voting rights, and reconcilia- tion with ex-Confederates — resonated with Democrats, who had long advocated lim- ited government and were working to reclaim their status as a legitimate national party. Liberalism thus crossed party lines, uniting disillusioned conservative Republi- cans with Democrats who denounced government activism. E. L. Godkin of Th e Nation and other classical liberal editors played key roles in turning northern public opinion against Reconstruction. With unabashed elitism, Godkin and others claimed that freedmen were unfi t to vote. Th ey denounced universal suff rage, which “can only mean in plain English the government of ignorance and vice.”

Th e second Grant administration gave liberals plenty of ammunition. Th e most notorious scandal involved Crédit Mobilier, a sham corporation set up by share- holders in the Union Pacifi c Railroad to secure government grants at an enormous profi t. Organizers of the scheme protected it from investigation by providing gift s of

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Crédit Mobilier stock to powerful members of Congress. Another scandal involved the Whiskey Ring, a network of liquor distillers and treasury agents who defrauded the government of millions of dollars of excise taxes on whiskey. Th e ringleader was Grant’s private secretary, Orville Babcock. Others went to prison, but Grant stood by Babcock, possibly perjuring himself to save his secretary from jail. Th e stench of scan- dal permeated the White House.

Counterrevolution in the South While northerners became preoccupied with scandals and the shock of economic depression, ex-Confederates seized power in the South. Most believed (as northern liberals had also begun to argue) that southern Reconstruction governments were ille- gitimate “regimes.” Led by the planters, ex-Confederates staged a massive insurgency to take back the South.

When they could win at the ballot box, southern Democrats took that route. Th ey got ex-Confederate voting rights restored and campaigned against “negro rule.” But when force was necessary, southern Democrats used it. Present-day Americans, wit- nessing political violence in other countries, seldom remember that our own history includes the overthrow of elected governments by paramilitary groups. But this is exactly how Reconstruction ended in many parts of the South. Ex-Confederates terror- ized Republicans, especially in districts with large proportions of black voters. Black political leaders were shot, hanged, beaten to death, and in one case even beheaded. Many Republicans, both black and white, went into hiding or fl ed for their lives. South- ern Democrats called this violent process “Redemption” — a heroic name that still sticks today, even though this seizure of power was murderous and undemocratic.

No one looms larger in this bloody story than Nathan Bedford Forrest, a deco- rated Confederate general. Born in poverty in 1821, Forrest had risen to become a big-time slave trader and Mississippi planter. A fi ery secessionist, Forrest had formed a Tennessee Confederate cavalry regiment, fought bravely at the battle of Shiloh, and won fame as a daring raider. On April 12, 1864, his troops perpetrated one of the war’s worst atrocities, the massacre at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, of black Union soldiers who were trying to surrender.

Aft er the Civil War, Forrest’s determination to uphold white supremacy altered the course of Reconstruction. William G. Brownlow, elected as Tennessee’s Republican governor in 1865, was a tough man, a former prisoner of the Confederates who was not shy about calling his enemies to account. Ex-Confederates struck back with a cam- paign of terror, targeting especially Brownlow’s black supporters. Amid the mayhem, ex-Confederates formed the fi rst Ku Klux Klan group in late 1865 or early 1866. As it proliferated across the state, the Klan turned to Forrest, who had been trying, unsuc- cessfully, to rebuild his prewar fortune. Late in 1866, at a secret meeting in Nashville, Forrest donned the robes of Grand Wizard. His activities are mostly cloaked in mys- tery, but there is no mistake about his goals: the Klan would strike blows against the despised Republican government of Tennessee.

In many towns, the Klan became virtually identical to the Democratic Party. Klan members — including Forrest — dominated Tennessee’s delegation to the Democratic national convention of 1868. At home, the Klan unleashed a murderous campaign of

C H A P T E R 1 5 Reconstruction, 1865–1877 461

terror, and though Governor Brownlow responded resolutely, in the end Republicans cracked. Th e Klan and similar groups — organized under such names as the White League and Knights of the White Camelia — arose in other states. Vigilantes burned freedmen’s schools, beat teachers, attacked Republican gatherings, and murdered polit- ical opponents. By 1870, Democrats had seized power in Georgia and North Carolina and were making headway across the South. Once they took power, they slashed prop- erty taxes and passed other laws favorable to landowners. Th ey terminated Reconstruc- tion programs and cut funding for schools, especially those teaching black students.

In responding to the Klan between 1869 and 1871, the federal government showed it could still exert power eff ectively in the South. Determined to end Klan violence, Congress held extensive hearings and in 1870 passed laws designed to protect freed- men’s rights under the Fourteenth and Fift eenth Amendments. Th ese so-called Enforcement Laws authorized federal prosecutions, military intervention, and martial law to suppress terrorist activity. Grant’s administration made full use of these new powers. In South Carolina, where the Klan was deeply entrenched, U.S. troops occu- pied nine counties, made hundreds of arrests, and drove as many as 2,000 Klansmen from the state.

Th is assault on the Klan, while raising the spirits of southern Republicans, revealed how dependent they were on Washington. “No such law could be enforced by state authority,” one Mississippi Republican observed, “the local power being too weak.” But northern Republicans were growing disillusioned with Reconstruction, while in the South, prosecuting Klansmen was an uphill battle against all-white juries and unsym- pathetic federal judges. Aft er 1872, prosecutions dropped off . In the meantime, the Texas government fell to the Democrats in 1873 and Alabama and Arkansas in 1874.

Ku Klux Klan Mask White supremacists of the 1870s organized under many names and wore many costumes, not simply (or often) the white cone-shaped hats that were made famous later, in the 1920s, when the Klan underwent a nationwide resurgence. Few masks from the 1870s have survived. The horns and fangs on this one, from North Carolina, suggest how Klan members sought to strike terror in their victims, while also hiding their own identities. North Carolina Museum of History.

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Reconstruction Rolled Back As divided Republicans debated how to respond, voters in the congressional election of 1874 handed them one of the most stunning defeats of the nineteenth century. Responding especially to the severe depression that gripped the nation, they removed almost half of the party’s 199 representatives in the House. Democrats, who had held 88 seats, now commanded an overwhelming majority of 182. “Th e election is not merely a victory but a revolution,” exulted a Democratic newspaper in New York.

Aft er 1874, with Democrats in control of the House, Republicans who tried to shore up their southern wing had limited options. Bowing to election results, the Grant administration began to reject southern Republicans’ appeals for aid. Events in Mississippi showed the outcome. As state elections neared there in 1875, paramilitary groups such as the Red Shirts operated openly. Mississippi’s Republican governor, Adelbert Ames, a Union veteran from Maine, appealed for U.S. troops, but Grant refused. “Th e whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South,” complained a Grant offi cial, who told southern Republicans that they were responsible for their own fate. Facing a rising tide of brutal murders, Governor Ames — realizing that only further bloodshed could result — urged his allies to give up the fi ght. Brandishing guns and stuffi ng ballot boxes, Democratic “Redeemers” swept the 1875 elections and took control of Mississippi. By 1876, Reconstruction was largely over. Republican governments, backed by token U.S. military units, remained in only three southern states: Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida. Elsewhere, former Con- federates and their allies took power.

The Supreme Court Rejects Equal Rights

Th ough ex-Confederates seized power in southern states, new land- mark constitutional amendments and federal laws remained in force. If the Supreme Court had left these intact, subsequent generations of civil rights advocates could have used the federal courts to combat

racial discrimination and violence. Instead, the Court closed off this avenue for the pursuit of justice, just as it dashed the hopes of women’s rights advocates.

As early as 1873, in a group of decisions known collectively as the Slaughter-House Cases, the Court began to undercut the power of the Fourteenth Amendment. In this case and a related ruling, U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), the justices argued that the Four- teenth Amendment off ered only a few, rather trivial federal protections to citizens (such as access to navigable waterways). In Cruikshank — a case that emerged from a grue- some killing of African American farmers by ex-Confederates in Colfax, Louisiana, followed by a Democratic political coup — the Court ruled that voting rights remained a state matter unless the state itself violated those rights. If former slaves’ rights were violated by individuals or private groups (including the Klan), that lay beyond federal jurisdiction. Th e Fourteenth Amendment did not protect citizens from armed vigilan- tes, even when those vigilantes seized political power. Th e Court thus gutted the Four- teenth Amendment. In the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the justices also struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, paving the way for later decisions that sanctioned segregation. Th e impact of these decisions endured well into the twentieth century.

C H A P T E R 1 5 Reconstruction, 1865–1877 463

The Political Crisis of 1877

Aft er the grim election results of 1874, Republicans faced a major bat- tle in the presidential election of 1876. Abandoning Grant, they nomi- nated Rutherford B. Hayes, a former Union general who was untainted

by corruption and — even more important — hailed from the key swing state of Ohio. Hayes’s Democratic opponent was New York governor Samuel J. Tilden, a Wall Street lawyer with a reform reputation. Tilden favored home rule for the South, but so, more discreetly, did Hayes. With enforcement on the wane, Reconstruction did not fi gure prominently in the campaign, and little was said about the states still led by Recon- struction governments: Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana.

Once returns started coming in on election night, however, those states loomed large. Tilden led in the popular vote and seemed headed for victory until sleepless politicians at Republican headquarters realized that the electoral vote stood at 184 to 165, with the 20 votes from Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana still uncertain. If Hayes took those votes, he would win by a margin of 1. Citing ample evidence of Democratic fraud and intimidation, Republican offi cials certifi ed all three states for Hayes. “Redeemer” Democrats who had taken over the states’ governments submitted their own electoral votes for Tilden. When Congress met in early 1877, it confronted two sets of electoral votes from those states.

Th e Constitution does not provide for such a contingency. All it says is that the president of the Senate (in 1877, a Republican) opens the electoral certifi cates before the House (Democratic) and the Senate (Republican) and “the Votes shall then be counted” (Article 2, Section 1). Suspense gripped the country. Th ere was talk of inside deals or a new election — even a violent coup. Finally, Congress appointed an electoral commission to settle the question. Th e commission included seven Republicans, seven Democrats, and, as the deciding member, David Davis, a Supreme Court justice not known to have fi xed party loyalties. Davis, however, disqualifi ed himself by accepting an Illinois Senate seat. He was replaced by Republican justice Joseph P. Bradley, and by a vote of 8 to 7, on party lines, the commission awarded the election to Hayes.

In the House of Representatives, outraged Democrats vowed to stall the fi nal count of electoral votes so as to prevent Hayes’s inauguration on March 4. But in the end, they went along — partly because Tilden himself urged that they do so. Hayes had publicly indicated his desire to off er substantial patronage to the South, including fed- eral funds for education and internal improvements. He promised “a complete change of men and policy” — naively hoping, at the same time, that he could count on support from old-line southern Whigs and protect black voting rights. Hayes was inaugurated on schedule. He expressed hope in his inaugural address that the federal government could serve “the interests of both races carefully and equally.” But, setting aside the U.S. troops who were serving on border duty in Texas, only 3,000 Union soldiers remained in the South. As soon as the new president ordered them back to their barracks, the last Republican administrations in the South collapsed. Reconstruction had ended.

Lasting Legacies In the short run, the political events of 1877 had little impact on most southerners. Much of the work of “Redemption” had already been done. What mattered was the long, slow decline of Radical Republican power and the corresponding rise of Democrats

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in the South and nationally. It was obvious that so-called Redeemers in the South had assumed power through violence. But many Americans — including prominent classi- cal liberals who shaped public opinion — believed the Democrats had overthrown cor- rupt, illegitimate governments; thus the end justifi ed the means. Aft er 1874, those who deplored the results had little political traction. Th e only remaining question was how far Reconstruction would be rolled back.

Th e South never went back to the antebellum status quo. Sharecropping, for all its fl aws and injustices, was not slavery. Freedmen and freedwomen managed to resist gang labor and work on their own terms. Th ey also established their right to marry, read and write, worship as they pleased, and travel in search of a better life — rights that were not easily revoked. Across the South, black farmers overcame great odds to buy and work their own land. African American businessmen built thriving enter- prises. Black churches and community groups sustained networks of mutual aid. Par- ents sacrifi ced to send their children to school, and a few proudly watched their sons and daughters graduate from college.

Reconstruction had also shaken, if not fully overturned, the legal and political framework that had made the United States a white man’s country. Th is was a stunning achievement, and though hostile courts and political opponents undercut it, no one ever repealed the Th irteenth, Fourteenth, and Fift eenth Amendments. Th ey remained in the Constitution, and the civil rights movement of the twentieth century would return and build on this framework (Chapter 26).

Still, in the fi nal reckoning, Reconstruction failed. Th e majority of freedpeople remained in poverty, and by the late 1870s their political rights were also eroding. Vocal advocates of smaller government argued that Reconstruction had been a mis- take; pressured by economic hardship, northern voters abandoned their southern Unionist allies. One of the enduring legacies of this process was the way later Ameri- cans remembered Reconstruction itself. Aft er “Redemption,” generations of school- children were taught that ignorant, lazy blacks and corrupt whites had imposed illegitimate Reconstruction “regimes” on the South. White southerners won national support for their celebration of a heroic Confederacy.

One of the fi rst historians to challenge these views was the great African Ameri- can intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois. In Black Reconstruction in America (1935), Du Bois meticulously documented the history of African American struggle, white vigilante violence, and national policy failure. If Reconstruction, he wrote, “had been conceived as a major national program . . . whose accomplishment at any price was well worth the eff ort, we should be living today in a diff erent world.” His words still ring true, but in 1935 historians ignored him. Not a single scholarly journal reviewed Du Bois’s important book. Ex-Confederates had lost the war, but they won control over the nation’s memory of Reconstruction.

Meanwhile, though their programs failed in the South, Republicans carried their nation-building project into the West, where their policies helped consolidate a continental empire. Th ere, the federal power that had secured emancipation created the conditions for the United States to become an industrial power and a major leader on the world stage.

How did ex-Confederates, freed- people, Republicans, and classical liberals view the end of Recon- struction?

C H A P T E R 1 5 Reconstruction, 1865–1877 465

S U M M A RY Postwar Republicans faced two tasks: restoring rebellious states to the Union and defi n- ing the role of emancipated slaves. Aft er Lincoln’s assassination, his successor, Andrew Johnson, hostile to Congress, unilaterally off ered the South easy terms for reentering the Union. Exploiting this opportunity, southerners adopted oppressive Black Codes and put ex-Confederates back in power. Congress impeached Johnson and, though failing to convict him, seized the initiative and placed the South under military rule. In this second, or radical, phase of Reconstruction, Republican state governments tried to transform the South’s economic and social institutions. Congress passed inno- vative civil rights acts and funded new agencies like the Freedmen’s Bureau. Th e Four- teenth Amendment defi ned U.S. citizenship and asserted that states could no longer supersede it, and the Fift eenth Amendment gave voting rights to formerly enslaved men. Debate over this amendment precipitated a split among women’s rights advo- cates, since women did not win inclusion.

Freedmen found that their goals confl icted with those of Republican leaders, who counted on cotton to fuel economic growth. Like southern landowners, lawmakers envisioned former slaves as wageworkers, while freedmen wanted their own land. Sharecropping, which satisfi ed no one completely, emerged as a compromise suited to the needs of the cotton market and an impoverished, credit-starved region.

Nothing could reconcile ex-Confederates to Republican government, and they staged a violent counterrevolution in the name of white supremacy and “Redemption.” Meanwhile, struck by a massive economic depression, northern voters handed Repub- licans a crushing defeat in the election of 1874. By 1876, Reconstruction was dead. Rutherford B. Hayes’s narrow victory in the presidential election of that year resulted in withdrawal of the last Union troops from the South. A series of Supreme Court decisions also undermined the Fourteenth Amendment and civil rights laws, setting up legal parameters through which, over the long term, disenfranchisement and seg- regation would fl ourish.

Fo r Fu r t h e r E x p l o rat i o n American Social History Project, Freedom’s Unfi nished Revolution (1996). A wonderful col-

lection of images and eyewitness accounts. Philip Dray, Capitol Men (2008). A readable history of Reconstruction from the perspective

of the fi rst African American congressmen. Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: Th e Struggle over Woman Suff rage and Black Suff rage in

Reconstruction America (2011). A thoughtful exploration of the split among radical reformers.

Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction (1990). Th e best short overview of events in this decade, combining grassroots and political perspectives.

Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet (2003). Hahn’s groundbreaking study of the rural South shows how African Americans’ strategies during Reconstruction were built on ear- lier experiences during slavery and the Civil War.

Brooks D. Simpson, Th e Reconstruction Presidents (1998). A lively assessment of presidential politics from Lincoln through Hayes, full of entertaining quotations.

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T I M E L I N E

1864 Wade-Davis Bill passed by Congress but killed by Lincoln’s pocket veto

1865 Freedmen’s Bureau established Lincoln assassinated; Andrew

Johnson succeeds him as president

Johnson implements restora- tion plan

Ex-Confederate states pass Black Codes to limit freed- people’s rights

1866 Civil Rights Act passes over Johnson’s veto

Major Republican gains in congressional elections

1867 Reconstruction Act 1868 Impeachment of Andrew

Johnson Fourteenth Amendment

ratifi ed Ulysses S. Grant elected

president

1870 Ku Klux Klan at peak of power Congress passes Enforcement

Laws to suppress Klan Fifteenth Amendment ratifi ed 1872 Grant reelected Crédit Mobilier scandal emerges 1873 Panic of 1873 ushers in severe

economic depression 1874 Sweeping Democratic gains in

congressional elections 1875 Whiskey Ring and other

scandals undermine Grant administration

Minor v. Happersett: Supreme Court rules that Fourteenth Amendment does not extend voting rights to women

1876 Supreme Court severely curtails Reconstruction in U.S. v. Cruikshank

1877 Rutherford B. Hayes becomes president

Reconstruction offi cially ends

M AK E IT S T I C K

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16 Conquering a Continent 1854–1890 On May 10, 1869, Americans poured into the streets for a giant party. In big cities, the racket was incredible. Cannons boomed and train whistles shrilled. New York fi red a hundred-gun salute at City Hall. Congregations sang anthems, while the less religious gathered in saloons to celebrate with whiskey. Phila- delphia’s joyful throngs reminded an observer of the day, four years earlier, when news had arrived of Lee’s surrender.

Th e festivities were prompted by a long-awaited telegraph message: executives of the Union Pacifi c and Central Pacifi c railroads had driven a golden spike at Promontory Point, Utah, linking up their lines. Unbroken track now stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacifi c. A journey across North America could be made in less than a week.

Th e fi rst transcontinental railroad meant jobs and money. San Francisco residents got right to business: aft er fi ring a salute, they loaded Japanese tea on a train bound for St. Louis, marking California’s fi rst overland delivery to the East. In coming decades, trade and tourism fueled tremendous growth west of the Mississippi. San Francisco, which in 1860 had handled $7.4 million in imports, increased that fi gure to $49 mil- lion over thirty years. Th e new railroad would, as one speaker predicted in 1869, “pop- ulate our vast territory” and make America “the highway of nations.”

Th e railroad was also a political triumph. Victorious in the Civil War, Republicans saw themselves as heirs to the American System envisioned by antebellum Whigs. Th ey believed government intervention in the economy was the key to nation building. But unlike Whigs, whose plans had met stiff Democratic opposition, Republicans enjoyed a decade of unparalleled federal power. Th ey used it vigorously: U.S. govern- ment spending per person, aft er skyrocketing in the Civil War, remained well above earlier levels. Republicans believed that national economic integration was the best guarantor of lasting peace. As a New York minister declared, the federally supported transcontinental railroad would “preserve the Union.”

Th e minister was wrong on one point. He claimed the railroad was a peaceful achievement, in contrast to military battles that had brought “devastation, misery, and woe.” In fact, creating a continental empire caused plenty of woe. Regions west of the

IDENTIFY THE BIG IDEA How did U.S. policymakers seek to stimulate the economy and integrate the trans-Mississippi west into the nation, and how did this aff ect people living there?

468 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

Mississippi could only be incorporated if the United States subdued native peoples and established favorable conditions for international investors — oft en at great domestic cost. And while conquering the West helped make the United States into an industrial power, it also deepened America’s rivalry with European empires and created new pat- terns of exploitation.

The Republican Vision Reshaping the former Confederacy was only part of Republicans’ plan for a reconstructed nation. Th ey remembered the era aft er Andrew Jackson’s destruction of the Second National Bank as one of economic chaos, when the United States had become vulnerable to international creditors and market fl uctuations. Land speculation on the frontier had provoked extreme cycles of boom and bust. Failure to fund a transcontinental railroad had left diff erent regions of the country disconnected. Th is, Republicans believed, had helped trigger the Civil War, and they were determined to set a new direction.

Even while the war raged, Congress made vigorous use of federal power, launch- ing the transcontinental rail project and a new national banking system. Congress also raised the protective tariff on a range of manufactured goods, from textiles to steel, and on some agricultural products, like wool and sugar. At federal customhouses in each port, foreign manufacturers who brought merchandise into the United States had to pay import fees. Th ese tariff revenues gave U.S. manufacturers, who did not pay the fees, a competitive advantage in America’s vast domestic market.

Th e economic depression that began in 1873 set limits on Republicans’ economic ambitions, just as it hindered their Reconstruction plans in the South. But their poli- cies continued to shape the economy. Th ough some historians argue that the late nine- teenth century was an era of laissez faire or unrestrained capitalism, in which government sat passively by, the industrial United States was actually the product of a massive public-private partnership in which government played critical roles.

The New Union and the World Th e United States emerged from the Civil War with new leverage in its negotiation with European countries, especially Great Britain, whose navy dominated the seas. Britain, which had allowed Confederate raiding ships such as CSS Alabama to be built in its shipyards, submitted aft erward to arbitration and paid the United States $15.5 million in damages. Flush with victory, many Americans expected more British and Spanish territories to drop into the Union’s lap. Senator Charles Sumner proposed, in fact, that Britain settle the Alabama claims by handing over Canada.

Such dreams were a logical extension of pre–Civil War conquests, especially in the Mexican War. With the coasts now linked by rail, merchants and manufacturers looked across the Pacifi c, hungry for trade with Asia. Americans had already established a dominant presence in Hawaii, where U.S. whalers and merchant ships stopped for food and repairs. With the advent of steam-powered vessels, both the U.S. Navy and private shippers wanted more refueling points in the Caribbean and Pacifi c.

Even before the Civil War, these commercial aims had prompted the U.S. govern-

C H A P T E R 1 6 Conquering a Continent, 1854–1890 469

ment to force Japan to open trade. For centuries, since unpleasant encounters with Portuguese traders in the 1600s, Japanese leaders had adhered to a policy of strict iso- lation. Americans, who wanted coal stations in Japan, argued that trade would extend what one missionary called “commerce, knowledge, and Christianity, with their mul- tiplied blessings.” Whether or not Japan wanted these blessings was irrelevant. In 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry succeeded in getting Japanese offi cials to sign the Treaty of Kanagawa, allowing U.S. ships to refuel at two ports. By 1858, America and Japan had commenced trade, and a U.S. consul took up residence in Japan’s capital, Edo (now known as Tokyo).

Union victory also increased U.S. economic infl uence in Latin America. While the United States was preoccupied with its internal war, France had deposed Mexico’s gov- ernment and installed an emperor. On May 5, 1867, Mexico overthrew the French invaders and executed Emperor Maximilian. But while Mexico regained independence, it lay open to the economic designs of its increasingly powerful northern neighbor.

A new model emerged for asserting U.S. power in Latin America and Asia: not by direct conquest, but through trade. Th e architect of this vision was William Seward, secretary of state from 1861 to 1869 under presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. A New Yorker of grand ambition and ego, Seward believed, like many con- temporaries, that Asia would become “the chief theatre of [world] events” and that commerce there was key to America’s prosperity. He urged the Senate to purchase sites in both the Pacifi c and the Caribbean for naval bases and refueling stations. When

The Great West In the wake of the Civil War, Americans looked westward. Republicans implemented an array of policies to foster economic development in the “Great West.” Ranchers, farmers, and lumbermen cast hungry eyes on the remaining lands held by Native Americans. Steam- boats and railroads, both visible in the background of this image, became celebrated as symbols of the expanding reach of U.S. economic might. This 1881 promotional poster illustrates the bountiful natural resources to be found out west, as well as the land available for ranching, farming, and commerce. The men in the lower left corner are surveying land for sale. Library of Congress.

470 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

An American Merchant Ship in Yokohama Harbor, 1861 After the United States forcibly “opened” Japan to foreign trade in 1854, American and European ships and visitors became a familiar sight in the port of Yokohama. In these 1861 prints — two panels of a fi ve-panel series — artist Hashimoto Sadahide meticulously details activity in Yokohama Harbor. On the left, goods are carried onto an American merchant ship; on the right, two women dressed in Western style watch the arrival of another boat. In the background, a steamship fl ies the Dutch fl ag; a rowboat heading to or from another (unseen) ship carries the fl ag of France. Library of Congress.

Japan changed policy and tried to close its ports to foreigners, Seward dispatched U.S. naval vessels to join those of Britain, France, and the Netherlands in reopening trade by force. At the same time, Seward urged annexation of Hawaii. He also predicted that the United States would one day claim the Philippines and build a Panama canal.

Seward’s short-term achievements were modest. Exhausted by civil war, Americans had little enthusiasm for further military exploits. Seward achieved only two signifi cant victories. In 1868, he secured congressional approval for the Burlingame Treaty with China, which guaranteed the rights of U.S. missionaries in China and set offi cial terms for the emigration of Chinese laborers, some of whom were already clearing farmland and building railroads in the West. Th at same year, Seward negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia. Aft er the Senate approved the deal, Seward waxed poetic:

Our nation with united interests blest Not now content to poise, shall sway the rest; Abroad our empire shall no limits know, But like the sea in endless circles fl ow.

C H A P T E R 1 6 Conquering a Continent, 1854–1890 471

Many Americans scoff ed at the purchase of Alaska, a frigid arctic tract that skeptics nicknamed “Seward’s Icebox.” But the secretary of state mapped out a path his Repub- lican successors would follow thirty years later in an aggressive bid for global power.

Integrating the National Economy Closer to home, Republicans focused on transportation infrastructure. Railroad devel- opment in the United States began well before the Civil War, with the fi rst locomotives arriving from Britain in the early 1830s. Unlike canals or roads, railroads off ered the promise of year-round, all-weather service. Locomotives could run in the dark and never needed to rest, except to take on coal and water. Steam engines crossed high mountains and rocky gorges where pack animals could fi nd no fodder and canals could never reach. West of the Mississippi, railroads opened vast regions for farming, trade, and tourism. A transcontinental railroad executive was only half-joking when he said, “Th e West is purely a railroad enterprise.”

Governments could choose to build and operate railroads themselves or promote construction by private companies. Unlike most European countries, the United States chose the private approach. Th e federal government, however, provided essential loans, subsidies, and grants of public land. States and localities also lured railroads with off ers of fi nancial aid, mainly by buying railroad bonds. Without this aid, rail networks would have grown much more slowly and would probably have concen- trated in urban regions. With it, railroads enjoyed an enormous — and reckless — boom. By 1900, virtually no corner of the country lacked rail service. At the same time, U.S. railroads built across the border into Mexico (America Compared, p. 472).

Railroad companies transformed American capitalism. Th ey adopted a legal form of organization, the corporation, that enabled them to raise private capital in prodi- gious amounts. In earlier decades, state legislatures had chartered corporations for specifi c public purposes, binding these creations to government goals and oversight. But over the course of the nineteenth century, legislatures gradually began to allow any business to become a corporation by simply applying for a state charter. Among the fi rst corporations to become large interstate enterprises, private railroads were much freer than earlier companies to do as they pleased. Aft er the Civil War, they received lavish public aid with few strings attached. Th eir position was like that of American banks in late 2008 aft er the big federal bailout: even critics acknowledged that public aid to these giant companies was good for the economy, but they observed that it also lent government support to fabulous accumulations of private wealth.

Tariff s and Economic Growth

Along with the transformative power of railroads, Republicans’ protective tariff s helped build other U.S. industries, including tex- tiles and steel in the Northeast and Midwest and, through tariff s on

imported sugar and wool, sugar beet farming and sheep ranching in the West. Tariff s also funded government itself. In an era when the United States did not levy income taxes, tariff s provided the bulk of treasury revenue. Th e Civil War had left the Union with a staggering debt of $2.8 billion. Tariff income erased that debt and by the 1880s generated huge budget surpluses — a circumstance hard to imagine today.

As Reconstruction faltered, tariff s came under political fi re. Democrats argued that tariff s taxed American consumers by denying them access to low-cost imported goods

A M E R I C A C O M PA R E D

472

T h e S a n t a F e R a i l r o a d i n M e x i c o a n d t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s Th is map, based on an 1885 traveler’s guide published by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, includes the company’s U.S. lines and also those of its Mexican Central Railroad, an ATSF subsidiary that crossed the border and terminated at Guaymas and Mexico City, Mexico. Th e dots represent the many stops that the trains made along the routes between major cities. Most Mexican railroads in this era were built and operated by U.S. companies. As you analyze this map, consider how residents of the two countries may have experienced the railroad’s arrival in diff erent ways.

Gulf of Mexico

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MAP 16.1 The Santa Fe Railroad System, 1885

C H A P T E R 1 6 Conquering a Continent, 1854–1890 473

and forcing them to pay subsidies to U.S. manufacturers. Republicans claimed, con- versely, that tariff s benefi tted workers because they created jobs, blocked low-wage for- eign competition, and safeguarded America from the kind of industrial poverty that had arisen in Europe. According to this argument, tariff s helped American men earn enough to support their families; wives could devote themselves to homemaking, and children could go to school, not the factory. For protectionist Republicans, high tariff s were akin to the abolition of slavery: they protected and uplift ed the most vulnerable workers.

In these fi erce debates, both sides were partly right. Protective tariff s did play a powerful role in economic growth. Th ey helped transform the United States into a global industrial power. Eventually, though, even protectionist Republicans had to admit that Democrats had a point: tariff s had not prevented industrial poverty in the United States. Corporations accumulated massive benefi ts from tariff s but failed to pass them along to workers, who oft en toiled long hours for low wages. Furthermore, tariff s helped foster trusts, corporations that dominated whole sectors of the economy and wielded near-monopoly power. Th e rise of large private corporations and trusts generated enduring political problems.

The Role of Courts While fostering growth, most historians agree, Republicans did not give government enough regulatory power over the new cor-

porations. State legislatures did pass hundreds of regulatory laws aft er the Civil War, but interstate companies challenged them in federal courts. In Munn v. Illinois (1877), the Supreme Court affi rmed that states could regulate key businesses, such as railroads and grain elevators, that were “clothed in the public interest.” However, the justices feared that too many state and local regulations would impede business and fragment the national marketplace. Starting in the 1870s, they interpreted the “due process” clause of the new Fourteenth Amendment — which dictated that no state could “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” — as shielding corporations from excessive regulation. Ironically, the Court refused to use the same amendment to protect the rights of African Americans.

In the Southwest as well, federal courts promoted economic development at the expense of racial justice. Th ough the United States had taken control of New Mexico and Arizona aft er the Mexican War, much land remained aft erward in the hands of Mexican farmers and ranchers. Many lived as peónes, under longstanding agreements with landowners who held large tracts originally granted by the Spanish crown. Th e post–Civil War years brought railroads and an infl ux of land-hungry Anglos. New Mexico’s governor reported indignantly that Mexican shepherds were oft en “asked” to leave their ranges “by a cowboy or cattle herder with a brace of pistols at his belt and a Winchester in his hands.”

Existing land claims were so complex that Congress eventually set up a special court to rule on land titles. Between 1891 and 1904, the court invalidated most tradi- tional claims, including those of many New Mexico ejidos, or villages owned collec- tively by their communities. Mexican Americans lost about 64 percent of the contested lands. In addition, much land was sold or appropriated through legal machinations like those of a notorious cabal of politicians and lawyers known as the Santa Fe Ring. Th e result was displacement of thousands of Mexican American villagers and farmers. Some found work as railroad builders or mine workers; others, moving into the sparse

474 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

high country of the Sierras and Rockies where cattle could not survive, developed sheep raising into a major enterprise.

Silver and Gold In an era of nation building, U.S. and European policymakers sought new ways to rationalize markets. Industrializing nations, for example,

tried to develop an international system of standard measurements and even a unifi ed currency. Th ough these proposals failed as each nation succumbed to self-interest, gov- ernments did increasingly agree that, for “scientifi c” reasons, money should be based on gold, which was thought to have an intrinsic worth above other metals. Great Britain had long held to the gold standard, meaning that paper notes from the Bank of England could be backed by gold held in the bank’s vaults. During the 1870s and 1880s, the United States, Germany, France, and other countries also converted to gold.

Beforehand, these nations had been on a bimetallic standard: they issued both gold and silver coins, with respective weights fi xed at a relative value. Th e United States switched to the gold standard in part because treasury offi cials and fi nanciers were watching developments out west. Geologists accurately predicted the discovery of immense silver deposits, such as Nevada’s Comstock Lode, without comparable new gold strikes. A massive infl ux of silver would clearly upset the long-standing ratio. Th us, with a law that became infamous to later critics as the “Crime of 1873,” Congress chose gold. It directed the U.S. Treasury to cease minting silver dollars and, over a six- year period, retire Civil War–era greenbacks (paper dollars) and replace them with notes from an expanded system of national banks. Aft er this process was complete in 1879, the treasury exchanged these notes for gold on request. (Advocates of bimetal- lism did achieve one small victory: the Bland-Allison Act of 1878 required the U.S. Mint to coin a modest amount of silver.)

By adopting the gold standard, Republican policymakers sharply limited the nation’s money supply, to the level of available gold. Th e amount of money circulating in the United States had been $30.35 per person in 1865; by 1880, it fell to only $19.36 per per- son. Today, few economists would sanction such a plan, especially for an economy grow- ing at breakneck speed. Th ey would recommend, instead, increasing money supplies to keep pace with development. But at the time, policymakers remembered rampant ante- bellum speculation and the hardships of infl ation during the Civil War. Th e United States, as a developing country, also needed to attract investment capital from Britain, Belgium, and other European nations that were on the gold standard. Making it easy to exchange U.S. bonds and currency for gold encouraged European investors to send their

money to the United States. Republican policies fostered exuberant

growth and a breathtakingly rapid integration of the economy. Railroads and telegraphs tied the nation together. U.S. manufacturers amassed staggering amounts of capital and built corpo- rations of national and even global scope. With its immense, integrated marketplace of work- ers, consumers, raw materials, and fi nished products, the United States was poised to become a mighty industrial power.

In what ways did Republicans use federal power on the world stage, and in what ways did they continue policies from the pre– Civil War era?

What federal policies contributed to the rise of America’s industrial economy, and what were their results?

C H A P T E R 1 6 Conquering a Continent, 1854–1890 475

Incorporating the West Republicans wanted farms as well as factories. As early as 1860, popular lyrics hailed the advent of “Uncle Sam’s Farm”:

A welcome, warm and hearty, do we give the sons of toil, To come west and settle and labor on Free Soil; We’ve room enough and land enough, they needn’t feel alarmed — Oh! Come to the land of Freedom and vote yourself a farm.

Th e Homestead Act (1862) gave 160 acres of federal land to any applicant who occu- pied and improved the property. Republicans hoped the bill would help build up the interior West, which was inhabited by Indian peoples but remained “empty” on U.S. government survey maps.

Implementing this plan required innovative policies. Th e same year it passed the Homestead Act, Congress also created the federal Department of Agriculture and, through the Morrill Act, set aside 140 million federal acres that states could sell to raise money for public universities. Th e goal of these land-grant colleges was to broaden edu- cational opportunities and foster technical and scientifi c expertise. Aft er the Civil War, Congress also funded a series of geological surveys, dispatching U.S. Army offi cers, sci- entists, and photographers to chart unknown western terrain and catalog resources.

To a large extent, these policies succeeded in incorporating lands west of the Mis- sissippi. Th e United States began to exploit its western empire for minerals, lumber, and other raw materials. But for ordinary Americans who went west, dreams oft en outran reality. Well-fi nanced corporations, not individual prospectors, reaped most of the profi ts from western mines, while the Great Plains environment proved resistant to ranching and farming.

Mining Empires In the late 1850s, as easy pickings in the California gold rush diminished, prospectors scattered in hopes of fi nding riches elsewhere. Th ey found gold at many sites, includ- ing Nevada, the Colorado Rockies, and South Dakota’s Black Hills (Map 16.2). As news of each strike spread, remote areas turned overnight into mob scenes of prospec- tors, traders, prostitutes, and saloon keepers. At community meetings, white prospec- tors made their own laws, oft en using them as an instrument for excluding Mexicans, Chinese, and blacks.

Th e silver from Nevada’s Comstock Lode, discovered in 1859, built the boomtown of Virginia City, which soon acquired fancy hotels, a Shakespearean theater, and even its own stock exchange. In 1870, a hundred saloons operated in Virginia City, brothels lined D Street, and men outnumbered women 2 to 1. In the 1880s, however, as the Comstock Lode played out, Virginia City suff ered the fate of many mining camps: it became a ghost town. What remained was a ravaged landscape with mountains of debris, poisoned water sources, and surrounding lands stripped of timber.

In hopes of encouraging development of western resources, Congress passed the General Mining Act of 1872, which allowed those who discovered minerals on feder- ally owned land to work the claim and keep all the proceeds. (Th e law — including the

476 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

$5-per-acre fee for fi ling a claim — remains in force today.) Americans idealized the notion of the lone, hardy mining prospector with his pan and his mule, but digging into deep veins of underground ore required big money. Consortiums of powerful investors, bringing engineers and advanced equipment, generally extracted the most wealth. Th is was the case for the New York trading fi rm Phelps Dodge, which invested in massive copper mines and smelting operations on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Th e mines created jobs in new towns like Bisbee and Morenci, Arizona — but with dangerous conditions and low pay, especially for those who received the segre- gated “Mexican wage.” Anglos, testifi ed one Mexican mine worker, “occupied deco- rous residences . . . and had large amounts of money,” while “the Mexican population and its economic condition off ered a pathetic contrast.” He protested this aff ront to “the most elemental principles of justice.”

Th e rise of western mining created an insatiable market for timber and produce from the Pacifi c Northwest. Seattle and Portland grew rapidly as supply centers, especially dur- ing the great gold rushes of California (aft er 1849) and the Klondike in Canada’s Yukon Territory (aft er 1897). Residents of Tacoma, Washington, claimed theirs was the “City of Destiny” when it became the Pacifi c terminus for the Northern Pacifi c, the nation’s third

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Cripple Creek 1890

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Boise City

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Silver City

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Helena Butte

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Austin Eureka

Mariposa

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(after Francaviglia) MAP 16.2 Mining Frontiers, 1848–1890 The Far West was America’s gold country because of its geological history. Veins of gold and silver form when molten material from the earth’s core is forced up into fi ssures caused by the tectonic movements that create mountain ranges, such as the ones that dominate the far western landscape. It was these veins, the product of mountain-forming activity many thousands of years earlier, that prospectors began to discover after 1848 and furiously exploit. Although widely dispersed across the Far West, the lodes that they found followed the mountain ranges bisecting the region and bypassing the great plateaus not shaped by the ancient tectonic activity.

C H A P T E R 1 6 Conquering a Continent, 1854–1890 477

transcontinental railroad, in 1887. But rival businessmen in Seattle succeeded in promot- ing their city as the gateway to Alaska and the Klondike. Seattle, a town with 1,000 resi- dents in 1870, grew over the next forty years to a population of a quarter million.

Cattlemen on the Plains While boomtowns arose across the West, hunters began transforming the plains. As late as the Civil War years, great herds of bison still roamed this region. But overhunt- ing and the introduction of European animal affl ictions, like the bacterial disease bru- cellosis, were already decimating the herds. In the 1870s, hide hunters fi nished them off so thoroughly that at one point fewer than two hundred bison remained in U.S. territory. Hunters hidden downwind, under the right conditions, could kill four dozen at a time without moving from the spot. Th ey took hides but left the meat to rot, an act of vast wastefulness that shocked native peoples.

Removal of the bison opened opportunities for cattle ranchers. South Texas pro- vided an early model for their ambitious plans. By the end of the Civil War, about fi ve

Cowboys, Real and Mythic As early as the 1860s, popular dime novels such as this one (right) celebrated the alleged ruggedness, individual freedoms, and gun-slinging capabilities of western cowboys. (Note that this 1888 story, like most dime novels, was published in New York.) Generations of young Americans grew up on stories of frontier valor and “Cowboys versus Indians.” In fact, cowboys like the ones depicted in the photograph were really wageworkers on horseback. An ethnically diverse group, including many blacks and Hispanics, they earned perhaps $25 a month, plus meals and a bed in the bunkhouse, in return for long hours of grueling, lonesome work. Library of Congress; Denver Public Library/Bridgeman Art Library.

478 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

million head of longhorn cattle grazed on Anglo ranches there. In 1865, the Missouri Pacifi c Railroad reached Sedalia, Missouri, far enough west to be accessible as Texas reentered the Union. A longhorn worth $3 in Texas might command $40 at Sedalia. With this incentive, ranchers inaugurated the Long Drive, hiring cowboys to herd cattle hundreds of miles north to the new rail lines, which soon extended into Kansas. At Abilene and Dodge City, Kansas, ranchers sold their longhorns and trail-weary cowboys crowded into saloons. Th ese cow towns captured the nation’s imagination as symbols of the Wild West, but the reality was much less exciting. Cowboys, many of them African Americans and Latinos, were really farmhands on horseback who worked long, harsh hours for low pay.

North of Texas, public grazing lands drew investors and adventurers eager for a taste of the West. By the early 1880s, as many as 7.5 million cattle were overgrazing the plains’ native grasses. A cycle of good weather postponed disaster, which arrived in 1886: record blizzards and bitter cold. An awful scene of rotting carcasses greeted cow- boys as they rode onto the range that spring. Further hit by a severe drought the fol- lowing summer, the cattle boom collapsed.

Th anks to new strategies, however, cattle ranching survived and became part of the integrated national economy. As railroads reached Texas and ranchers there aban- doned the Long Drive, the invention of barbed wire — which enabled ranchers and farmers to fence large areas cheaply and easily on the plains, where wood was scarce and expensive — made it easier for northern cattlemen to fence small areas and feed animals on hay. Stockyards appeared beside the rapidly extending railroad tracks, and trains took these gathered cattle to giant slaughterhouses in cities like Chicago, which turned them into cheap beef for customers back east.

Homesteaders Republicans envisioned the Great Plains dotted with small farms, but farmers had to be persuaded that crops would grow there. Powerful interests worked hard to overcome the popular idea that the grassland was the Great American Desert. Railroads, eager to sell land the government had granted them, advertised aggressively. Land speculators, transatlantic steamship lines, and western states and territories joined the campaign.

Newcomers found the soil beneath the native prairie grasses deep and fertile. Steel plows enabled them to break through the tough roots, while barbed wire provided cheap, eff ective fencing against roaming cattle. European immigrants brought strains of hard- kernel wheat that tolerated the extreme temperatures of the plains. As if to confi rm pro- moters’ optimism, a wet cycle occurred between 1878 and 1886, increasing rainfall in the arid regions east of the Rockies. Americans decided that “rain follows the plow”: settle- ment was increasing rainfall. Some attributed the rain to soil cultivation and tree plant- ing, while others credited God. One Harvard professor proposed that steel railroad tracks attracted moisture. Such optimists would soon learn their mistake.

Th e motivation for most settlers, American or immigrant, was to better them- selves economically. Union veterans, who received favorable terms in staking home- stead claims, played a major role in settling Kansas and other plains states. When severe depression hit northern Europe in the 1870s, Norwegians and Swedes joined German emigrants in large numbers. At the peak of “American fever” in 1882, more

C H A P T E R 1 6 Conquering a Continent, 1854–1890 479

than 105,000 Scandinavians left for the United States. Swedish and Norwegian became the primary languages in parts of Minnesota and the Dakotas.

For some African Americans, the plains represented a promised land of freedom. In 1879, a group of black communities left Mississippi and Louisiana in a quest to escape poverty and white violence. Some 6,000 blacks departed together, most carry- ing little but the clothes on their backs and faith in God. Th ey called themselves Exo- dusters, participants in a great exodus to Kansas. Th e 1880 census reported 40,000 blacks there, by far the largest African American concentration in the West aside from Texas, where the expanding cotton frontier attracted hundreds of thousands of black migrants.

For newcomers, taming the plains diff ered from pioneering in antebellum Iowa or Oregon. Dealers sold big new machines to help with plowing and harvesting. Western wheat traveled by rail to giant grain elevators and traded immediately on world mar- kets. Hoping frontier land values would appreciate rapidly, many farmers planned to profi t from selling acres as much as (or more than) from their crops. In boom times, many rushed into debt to acquire more land and better equipment. All these enthusi- asms — for cash crops, land speculation, borrowed money, and new technology — bore witness to the conviction that farming was, as one agricultural journal remarked, a business “like all other business.”

Women in the West Early miners, lumbermen, and cowboys were overwhelmingly male, but homesteading was a family aff air. Th e success of a farm

depended on the work of wives and children who tended the garden and animals, preserved food, and helped out at harvest time. Some women struck out on their own: a study of North Dakota found between 5 and 20 percent of homestead claims fi led by single women, oft en working land adjacent to that of sisters, brothers, and parents. Family members thus supported one another in the diffi cult work of farming, while easing the loneliness many newcomers felt. Looking back with pride on her home- steading days, one Dakota woman said simply, “It was a place to stay and it was mine.”

While promoting farms in the West, Republicans clashed with the distinctive reli- gious group that had already settled Utah: Mormons, or members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). Aft er suff ering persecution in Missouri and Illinois, Mormons had moved west to Utah in the 1840s, attracting many working-class converts from England as well. Most Americans at the time were deeply hostile to Mor- monism, especially the LDS practice of plural marriage — sanctioned by church founder Joseph Smith — through which some Mormon men married more than one wife.

Mormons had their own complex view of women’s role, illustrated by the career of Mormon leader Emmeline Wells. Born in New Hampshire, Emmeline converted to Mormonism at age thirteen along with her mother and joined the exodus to Utah in 1848. Aft er her fi rst husband abandoned her when he left the church, Emmeline became the seventh wife of church elder Daniel Wells. In 1870, due in part to orga- nized pressure from Wells and other Mormon women, the Utah legislature granted full voting rights to women, becoming the second U.S. territory to do so (aft er Wyo- ming, in 1869). Th e measure increased LDS control, since most Utah women were Mormons, while non-Mormons in mining camps were predominantly male. It also recognized the central role of women in Mormon life.

480 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

Amid the constitutional debates of Reconstruction, polygamy and women’s voting rights became intertwined issues. Encouraged by other plural wives, Emmeline Wells began in 1877 to write for a Salt Lake City newspaper, the Woman’s Exponent. She served as editor for forty years and led local women’s rights groups. At fi rst, Utah’s legislature blocked Wells’s candidacy in a local election, based on her sex. But when Utah won statehood in 1896, Wells had the pleasure of watching several women win seats in the new legislature, including Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon, a physician and Mormon plural wife who became the fi rst American woman to serve in a state senate. Like their counterparts in other western states, Utah’s women experienced a combina- tion of severe frontier hardships and striking new opportunities.

Environmental Challenges

Homesteaders faced a host of challenges, particularly the natural envi- ronment of the Great Plains. Clouds of grasshoppers could descend and destroy a crop in a day; a prairie fi re or hailstorm could do the job

in an hour. In spring, homesteaders faced sudden, terrifying tornados, while their winter experiences in the 1870s added the word blizzard to America’s vocabulary. On the plains, also, water and lumber were hard to fi nd. Newly arrived families oft en cut dugouts into hillsides and then, aft er a season or two, erected houses made of turf cut from the ground.

Over the long term, homesteaders discovered that the western grasslands did not receive enough rain to grow wheat and other grains. As the cycle of rainfall shift ed from wet to dry, farmers as well as ranchers suff ered. “A wind hot as an oven’s fury . . . raged like a pestilence,” reported one Nebraskan, leaving “farmers helpless, with no weapon against this terrible and inscru table wrath of nature.” By the late 1880s, some recently settled lands emptied as homesteaders fl ed in defeat — 50,000 from the Dako- tas alone. It became obvious that farming in the arid West required methods other than those used east of the Mississippi.

Clearly, 160-acre homesteads were the wrong size for the West: farmers needed either small irrigated plots or immense tracts for dry farming, which involved deep planting to bring subsoil moisture to the roots and quick harrowing aft er rainfalls to slow evaporation. Dry farming developed most fully on huge corporate farms in the Red River Valley of North Dakota. But even family farms, the norm elsewhere, could not survive on less than 300 acres of grain. Crop prices were too low, and the climate too unpredictable, to allow farmers to get by on less.

In this struggle, settlers regarded themselves as nature’s conquerors, striving, as one pioneer remarked, “to get the land subdued and the wilde nature out of it.” Much about its “wilde nature” was hidden to the newcomers. Th ey did not know that destroy- ing biodiversity, which was what farming the plains really meant, opened pathways for exotic, destructive pests and weeds, and that removing native grasses left the soil vul- nerable to erosion. By the turn of the twentieth century, about half the nation’s cattle and sheep, one-third of its cereal crops, and nearly three-fi ft hs of its wheat came from the Great Plains. But in the drier parts of the region, it was not a sustainable achieve- ment. Th is renowned breadbasket was later revealed to be, in the words of one histo- rian, “the largest, longest-run agricultural and environmental miscalculation in American history.”

John Wesley Powell, a one-armed Union veteran, predicted the catastrophe from an early date. Powell, employed by the new U.S. Geological Survey, led a famous expedi- tion in the West in which his team navigated the rapids of the Colorado River through

C H A P T E R 1 6 Conquering a Continent, 1854–1890 481

the Grand Canyon in wooden boats. In his Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States (1879), Powell told Congress bluntly that 160-acre homesteads would not work in dry regions. Impressed with the success of Mormon irrigation projects in Utah, Powell urged the United States to follow their model. He proposed that the government develop the West’s water resources, building dams and canals and organizing landown- ers into local districts to operate them. Doubting that rugged individualism would suc- ceed in the West, Powell proposed massive cooperation under government control.

Aft er heated debate, Congress rejected Powell’s plan. Critics accused him of play- ing into the hands of large ranching corporations; boosters were not yet willing to give up the dream of small homesteads. But Powell turned out to be right. Th ough environ- mental historians do not always agree with Powell’s proposed solutions, they point to his Report on Arid Lands as a cogent critique of what went wrong on the Great Plains. Later, federal funding paid for dams and canals that supported intensive agriculture in many parts of the West.

The First National Park Powell was not the only one rethinking land use. Th e West’s incorporation into the national marketplace occurred with such speed that some Americans began to fear rampant overdevelopment. Perhaps the federal government should not sell off all its public land, but instead hold and manage some of it. Amid the heady initiatives of Reconstruction, Congress began to preserve sites of unusual natural splendor. As early as 1864, Congress gave 10 square miles of the Yosemite Valley to California for “public use, resort, and recreation.” (In 1890, Yosemite reverted to federal control.) In 1872, it set aside 2 million acres of Wyoming’s Yellowstone Valley as the world’s fi rst national park: preserved as a public holding, it would serve as “a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefi t and enjoyment of the people.”

Railroad tourism, which developed side by side with other western industries, was an important motive for the creation of Yellowstone National Park. Th e Northern Pacifi c Railroad lobbied Congress vigorously to get the park established. Soon, luxury Pull- man cars ushered visitors to Yellowstone’s hotel, operated by the railroad itself. But creation of the park was fraught with complications. Since no one knew exactly what a “national park” was or how to operate it, the U.S. Army was dispatched to take charge; only in the early 1900s, when Congress established many more parks in the West, did consistent management policies emerge. In the meantime, soldiers spent much of their time arresting native peoples who sought to hunt on Yellowstone lands.

Th e creation of Yellowstone was an important step toward an ethic of respect for land and wildlife. So was the 1871 creation of a U.S. Fisheries Commission, which made recommendations to stem the decline in wild fi sh; by the 1930s, it merged with other federal wildlife bureaus to become the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. At the same time, eviction of Indians showed that defi ning small preserves of “uninhabited wilderness” was part of conquest itself. In 1877, for example, the federal government forcibly removed the Nez Perce tribe from their ancestral land in what is now Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Under the leadership of young Chief Joseph, the Nez Perces tried to fl ee to Canada. Aft er a journey of 1,100 miles, they were forced to surrender just short of the border. During their trek, fi ve bands crossed Yellowstone; as a Nez Perce named Yellow Wolf recalled, they “knew that country well.” For thirteen days,

482 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

Nez Perce men raided the valley for supplies, waylaying several groups of tourists. Th e con- fl ict made national headlines. Easterners, proud of their new “pleasuring ground,” were startled to fi nd that it remained a site of native resis- tance. Americans were not settling an empty West. Th ey were unsettling it by taking it from native peoples who already lived there.

A Harvest of Blood: Native Peoples Dispossessed Before the Civil War, when most Americans believed the prairie could not be farmed, Congress reserved the Great Plains for Indian peoples. But in the era of steel plows and railroads, policymakers suddenly had the power and desire to incorporate the whole region. Th e U.S. Army fought against the loosely federated Sioux — the major power on the northern grasslands — as well as other peoples who had agreed to live on reser- vations but found conditions so desperate that they fl ed (Map 16.3). Th ese “reserva-

The Yo-Hamite Falls, 1855 This is one of the earliest artistic renderings of the Yosemite Valley, drawn, in fact, before the place came to be called Yosemite. The scale of the waterfall, which drops 2,300 feet to the valley below, is dramatized by artist Thomas A. Ayres’s companions in the foreground. In this romantic lithograph, one can already see the grandeur of the West that Yosemite came to represent for Americans. University of California at Berkeley, Bancroft Library.

Compare the development of mining, ranching, and farming in the West. How did their environ- mental consequences diff er?

What factors led to the creation of the fi rst national parks?

C H A P T E R 1 6 Conquering a Continent, 1854–1890 483

tion wars,” caused largely by local violence and confused federal policies, were messy and bitter. Pointing to failed military campaigns, army atrocities, and egregious cor- ruption in the Indian Bureau, reformers called for new policies that would destroy native people’s traditional lifeways and “civilize” them — or, as one reformer put it, “kill the Indian and save the man.”

The Civil War and Indians on the Plains In August 1862, the attention of most Unionists and Confederates was riveted on Gen- eral George McClellan’s failing campaign in Virginia. But in Minnesota, the Dakota Sioux were increasingly frustrated. In 1858, the year Minnesota secured statehood, they had agreed to settle on a strip of land reserved by the government, in exchange for receiving regular payments and supplies. But Indian agents, contractors, and even Minnesota’s territorial governor pocketed most of the funds. When the Dakotas pro- tested that their children were starving, state offi cials dismissed their appeals. Corrup- tion was so egregious that one leading Minnesotan, Episcopal bishop Henry Whipple,

MAP 16.3 Indian Country in the West, to 1890 As settlement pushed onto the Great Plains after the Civil War, native peoples put up bitter resistance but ultimately to no avail. Over a period of decades, they ceded most of their lands to the federal govern- ment, and by 1890 they were confi ned to scattered reservations.

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issouri R . Minnesota R.

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Platte R .

M is

si ss

ip pi

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PAWNEE

BLACKFEET

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HUIA

YUROK

MAIDU

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CHUMASH

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COOS UMPQUA

WALLA WALLA NEZ

PERCÉ

QUINAULT

CHINOOK YAKIMA

SALISHCOLVILLE

SIOUX

CHIPPEWA

SIOUX

WINNEBAGO

MENOMINEE

CHIPPEWA

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SAUK AND FOX

SIOUX

CROW

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SEMINOLE CHOCTAW

OSAGE CHEROKEE

TONKAWA

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COMANCHE

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MANDAN ARIKARA

C A N A D A

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N. DAK.

S. DAK.

MINN.

WIS.

IOWA

MO.

ARK.

LA. TEXAS

N. MEX. TERR.

ARIZ. TERR.

CALIF.

NEV.

UTAH

WYO.

COLO.

KANS.

NEB.

INDIAN TERR.

BLACK HILLS

Wounded Knee Massacre, 1890

Bear Paw Mtn. (Chief Joseph surrenders), 1877

Little Big Horn, 1876

Red River War 1874-75

Skeleton Canyon (Geronimo surrenders), 1886

Chief Joseph’s Route

Bozeman Trail

ILL.

MISS.

Sand Creek Massacre, 1864

Dakota Sioux Uprising, 1862

Fetterman Massacre, 1866

Selected battles

Tribal locations reflect situation in the 1840s

Before 1850

1850–1870

1870–1890

Indian-Ceded Lands

Reservations, 1890

0 100 200 kilometers

0 100 200 miles

N

S

E W

484 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

wrote an urgent appeal to President James Buchanan. “A nation which sows robbery,” he warned, “will reap a harvest of blood.”

Whipple’s prediction proved correct. During the summer of 1862, a decade of anger boiled over. In a surprise attack, Dakota fi ghters fanned out through the Minnesota countryside, killing immigrants and burning farms. Th ey planned to sweep eastward to St. Paul but were stopped at Fort Ridgely. In the end, more than four hundred whites lay dead, including women and children from farms and small towns. Th ousands fl ed; pan- icked offi cials telegraphed for aid, spreading hysteria from Wisconsin to Colorado.

Minnesotans’ ferocious response to the uprising set the stage for further confl ict. A hastily appointed military court, bent on revenge, sentenced 307 Dakotas to death, making it clear that rebellious Indians would be treated as criminals rather than war- riors. President Abraham Lincoln reviewed the trial records and commuted most of the sentences but authorized the deaths of 38 Dakota men. Th ey were hanged just aft er Christmas 1862 in the largest mass execution in U.S. history. Two months later, Con- gress canceled all treaties with the Dakotas, revoked their annuities, and expelled them from Minnesota. Th e scattered bands fl ed west to join nonreservation allies.

As the uprising showed, the Civil War created two dangerous conditions in the West, compounding the problems already caused by corruption. With the Union army fi ghting the Confederacy, western whites felt vulnerable to Indian attacks. Th ey also discovered they could fi ght Indians with minimal federal oversight. In the wake of the Dakota uprising, worried Coloradans favored a military campaign against the Chey- ennes — allies of the Sioux — even though the Cheyennes had shown little evidence of hostility. Colorado militia leader John M. Chivington, an aspiring politician, deter- mined to quell public anxiety and make his career.

In May 1864, Cheyenne chief Black Kettle, fearing his band would be attacked, consulted with U.S. agents, who instructed him to settle along Sand Creek in eastern Colorado until a treaty could be signed. On November 29, 1864, Chivington’s Colo- rado militia attacked the camp while most of the men were out hunting, slaughtering more than a hundred women and children. “I killed all I could,” one offi cer testifi ed later. “I think and earnestly believe the Indian to be an obstacle to civilization and should be exterminated.” Captain Silas Soule, who served under Chivington but refused to give his men the order to fi re, dissented. “It was hard to see little children on their knees,” he wrote later, “having their brains beat out by men professing to be civi- lized.” Chivington’s men rode back for a celebration in Denver, where they hung Chey- enne scalps (and women’s genitals) from the raft ers of the Apollo Th eater.

Th e northern plains exploded in confl ict. Infuriated by the Sand Creek massacre, Cheyennes carried war pipes to the Arapahos and Sioux, who attacked and burned white settlements along the South Platte River. Ordered to subdue these peoples, the U.S. Army failed miserably: offi cers could not even locate the enemy, who traveled rapidly in small bands and knew the country well. A further shock occurred in December 1866 when 1,500 Sioux warriors executed a perfect ambush, luring Captain William Fetterman and 80 soldiers from a Wyoming fort and wiping them out. With the Fet- terman massacre, the Sioux succeeded in closing the Bozeman Trail, a private road under army protection that had served as the main route into Montana.

General William Tecumseh Sherman, now commanding the army in the West, swore to defeat defi ant Indians. But the Union hero met his match on the plains.

C H A P T E R 1 6 Conquering a Continent, 1854–1890 485

Another year of fi ghting proved expensive and inconclusive. In 1868, the Sioux, led by the Oglala band under Chief Red Cloud, told a peace commission they would not sign any treaty unless the United States pledged to abandon all its forts along the Bozeman Trail. Th e commission agreed. Red Cloud had won.

In the wake of these events, eastern public opinion turned against the Indian wars, which seemed at best ineff ective, at worst brutal. Congress held hearings on the slaugh- ter at Sand Creek. Th ough Chivington, now a civilian, was never prosecuted, the mas- sacre became an infamous example of western vigilantism. By the time Ulysses Grant entered the White House in 1869, the authors of Reconstruction in the South also began to seek solutions to what they called the “Indian problem.”

Grant’s Peace Policy Grant inherited an Indian policy in disarray. Federal incompetence was highlighted by yet another mass killing of friendly Indians in January 1870, this time on the Marias River in Montana, by an army detachment that shot and burned to death 173 Piegans (Blackfeet). Having run out of other options, Grant introduced a peace policy, based on recommendations from Christian advisors. He off ered selected appointments to the reformers — including many former abolitionists — who had created such groups as the Indian Rights Association and the Women’s National Indian Association.

Rejecting the virulent anti-Indian stance of many westerners, reformers argued that native peoples had the innate capacity to become equal with whites. Th ey believed, however, that Indians could achieve this only if they embraced Christianity and white ways (American Voices, p. 486). Reformers thus aimed to destroy native languages, cultures, and religions. Despite humane intentions, their condescension was obvious. Th ey ignored dissenters like Dr. Th omas Bland of the National Indian Defense Associa- tion, who suggested that instead of an “Indian problem” there might be a “white prob- lem” — refusal to permit Indians to follow their own lifeways. To most nineteenth-century Americans, such a notion was shocking and uncivilized. Increasingly dismissive of blacks’ capacity for citizenship and hostile toward “heathen” Chinese immigrants, white Americans were even less willing to understand and respect Indian cultures. Th ey believed that in the modern world, native peoples were fated for extinction.

Indian Boarding Schools

Reformers focused their greatest energy on educating the next gen- eration. Realizing that acculturation — adoption of white ways — was diffi cult when children lived at home, agents and missionaries

created off -reservation schools. Native families were exhorted, bullied, and bribed into sending their children to these schools, where, in addition to school lessons, boys learned farming skills and girls practiced housekeeping. “English only” was the rule; students were punished if they spoke their own lan- guages. Mourning Dove, a Salish girl from what is now Washington State, remembered that her school “ran strictly. We never talked during meals without permission, given only on Sunday or special holi- days. Otherwise there was silence — a terrible silent silence. I was used to the freedom of the forest, and it was hard to learn this strict

To see a longer excerpt of Mourning Dove’s autobiography, along with other primary sources from this period, see Sources for America’s History.

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S

486

B e c o m i n g W h i t e Z I T K A L A - S̈A ( G E R T R U D E S I M M O N S B O N N I N ) Zitkala-S̈a, known later as the author Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, recalled in 1900 her painful transformation from Sioux child to pupil at a Quaker mission school in Indiana.

Th e fi rst day . . . a paleface woman, with white hair, came up aft er us. We were placed in a line of girls who were marching into the dining room. Th ese were Indian girls, in stiff shoes and closely clinging dresses. Th e small girls wore sleeved aprons and shingled hair. As I walked noiselessly in my soft moccasins, I felt like sinking into the fl oor, for my blanket had been stripped from my shoulders. . . . Late in the morning, my friend Judewin gave me a terrible warning. Judewin knew a few words of English; and she had overheard the paleface woman talk about cutting our long, heavy hair. Our mothers had taught us that only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy. Among our people, short hair was worn by mourners, and shingled hair by cowards! . . . In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair. I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick black braids. Th en I lost my spirit. . . .

Now, as I look back upon the recent past, I see it from a distance, as a whole. I remember how, from morning till evening,

many specimens of civilized peoples visited the Indian school. Th e city folks with canes and eyeglass, the countrymen with sunburned cheeks and clumsy feet. . . . Both sorts of these Christian palefaces were alike astounded at seeing the children of savage warriors so docile and industrious.

As answers to their shallow inquiries they received the students’ sample work to look upon. Examining the neatly fi gured pages, and gazing upon the Indian girls and boys bending over their books, the white visitors walked out of the schoolhouse well-satisfi ed: they were educating the children of the red man! . . .

In this fashion many have passed idly through the Indian schools during the last decade, aft erward to boast of their charity to the North American Indian. But few there are who have paused to question whether real life or long lasting death lies beneath this semblance of civilization.

SOURCE: Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron De Hart-Mathews, eds., Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 254–257.

discipline. I was punished many times before I learned.” Th e Lakota boy Plenty Kill, who at boarding school received the new name Luther, remembered his loneliness and fear upon arrival: “Th e big boys would sing brave songs, and that would start the girls to crying. . . . Th e girls’ quarters were about a hundred and fi fty yards from ours, so we could hear them.” Aft er having his hair cut short, Plenty Kill felt a profound change in his identity. “None of us slept well that night,” he recalled. “I felt that I was no more Indian, but would be an imitation of a white man.”

Even in the fi rst fl ush of reform zeal, Grant’s policies faced major hurdles. Most Indians had been pushed off traditional lands and assigned to barren ground that

C H A P T E R 1 6 Conquering a Continent, 1854–1890 487

would have defeated the most enterprising farmer. Poverty and dislocation left Indians especially vulnerable to the ravages of infectious diseases like measles and scarlet fever. At the same time, Quaker, Presbyterian, and Methodist reformers fought turf battles among themselves and with Catholic missionaries. Many traders and agents also con- tinued to steal money and supplies from people they were supposed to protect. In the late 1870s, Rutherford B. Hayes’s administration undertook more housecleaning at the Bureau of Indian Aff airs, but corruption lingered.

From the Indians’ point of view, reformers oft en became just another interest group in a crowded fi eld of whites sending hopelessly mixed messages. Th e attitudes of individual army representatives, agents, and missionaries ranged from courageous and sympathetic to utterly ruthless. Many times, aft er chiefs thought they had reached a face-to-face agreement, they found it drastically altered by Congress or Washington bureaucrats. Nez Perce leader Joseph observed that “white people have too many chiefs. Th ey do not understand each other. . . . I cannot understand why so many chiefs are allowed to talk so many diff erent ways, and promise so many diff erent things.” A Kiowa chief agreed: “We make but few contracts, and them we remember well. Th e whites make so many they are liable to forget them. Th e white chief seems not to be able to govern his braves.”

Native peoples were nonetheless forced to accommodate, as independent tribal gov- ernance and treaty making came to an end. Back in the 1830s, the U.S. Supreme Court had declared Indians no longer sovereign but rather “domestic dependent nations.” On a practical basis, however, both the U.S. Senate and agents in the fi eld continued to negoti- ate treaties as late as 1869. Two years later, the House of Representatives, jealous of Senate privileges, passed a bill to abolish all treaty making with Indians. Th e Senate agreed, provided that existing treaties remained in force. It was one more step in a long, tortur- ous erosion of native rights. Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903) that Congress could make whatever Indian policies it chose, ignoring all existing treaties. Th at same year, in Ex Parte Crow Dog, the Court ruled that no Indian was a citizen unless Congress designated him so. Indians were henceforth wards of the government. Th ese rulings remained in force until the New Deal of the 1930s.

Breaking Up Tribal Lands

Reformers’ most sweeping eff ort to assimilate Indians was the Dawes Severalty Act (1887), the dream of Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massa- chusetts, a leader in the Indian Rights Association. Dawes saw the res-

ervation system as an ugly relic of the past. Th rough severalty — division of tribal lands — he hoped to force Indians onto individual landholdings, partitioning reserva- tions into homesteads, just like those of white farmers. Supporters of the plan believed that landownership would encourage Indians to assimilate. It would lead, as Dawes wrote, to “a personal sense of independence.” Individual property, echoed another reformer, would make the Indian man “intelligently selfi sh, . . . with a pocket that aches to be fi lled with dollars!”

Th e Dawes Act was a disaster. It played into the hands of whites who coveted Indian land and who persuaded the government to sell them land that was not needed for individual allotments. In this and other ways, the Bureau of Indian Aff airs (BIA) imple- mented the law carelessly, to the outrage of Dawes. In Indian Territory, a commission seized more than 15 million “surplus” acres from native tribes by 1894, opening the way

488 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

for whites to convert the last federal territory set aside for native peoples into the state of Oklahoma. In addition to catastrophic losses of collectively held property, native peoples lost 66 percent of their individually allotted lands between the 1880s and the 1930s, through fraud, BIA mismanagement, and pressure to sell to whites.

The End of Armed Resistance As the nation consolidated control of the West in the 1870s, Americans hoped that Grant’s peace policy was solving the “Indian problem.” In the Southwest, such formida- ble peoples as the Kiowas and Comanches had been forced onto reservations. Th e Diné or Navajo nation, exiled under horrifi c conditions during the Civil War but permitted to reoccupy their traditional land, gave up further military resistance. An outbreak among California’s Modoc people in 1873 — again, humiliating to the army — was at last sub- dued. Only Sitting Bull, a leader of the powerful Lakota Sioux on the northern plains, openly refused to go to a reservation. When pressured by U.S. troops, he repeatedly crossed into Canada, where he told reporters that “the life of white men is slavery. . . . I have seen nothing that a white man has, houses or railways or clothing or food, that is as good as the right to move in open country and live in our own fashion.”

In 1874, the Lakotas faced direct provocation. Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, a brash self-promoter who had graduated last in his class at West Point, led an expedition into South Dakota’s Black Hills and loudly proclaimed the discovery of gold. Amid the severe depression of the 1870s, prospectors rushed in. Th e United States, wavering on its 1868 treaty, pressured Sioux leaders to sell the Black Hills. Th e chiefs said no. Ignoring this answer, the government demanded in 1876 that all Sioux gather at the federal agencies. Th e policy backfi red: not only did Sitting Bull refuse to report, but other Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahos slipped away from reservations to join him. Knowing they might face military attack, they agreed to live together for the summer in one great village numbering over seven thousand people. By June, they were camped on the Little Big Horn River in what is now southeastern Montana. Some of the young men wanted to organize raiding parties, but elders counseled against it. “We [are] within our treaty rights as hunters,” they argued. “We must keep ourselves so.”

Th e U.S. Army dispatched a thousand cavalry and infantrymen to drive the Indi- ans back to the reservation. Despite warnings from experienced scouts — including Crow Indian allies — most offi cers thought the job would be easy. Th eir greatest fear was that the Indians would manage to slip away. But amid the nation’s centennial cel- ebration on the Fourth of July 1876, Americans received dreadful news. On June 26 and 27, Lieutenant Colonel Custer, leading the 7th Cavalry as part of a three-pronged eff ort to surround the Indians, had led 210 men in an ill-considered assault on Sitting Bull’s camp. Th e Sioux and their allies had killed the attackers to the last man. “Th e Indians,” one Oglala woman remembered, “acted just like they were driving buff alo to a good place where they could be easily slaughtered.”

As retold by the press in sensational (and oft en fi ctionalized) accounts, the story of Custer’s “last stand” quickly served to justify American conquest of Indian “savages.” Long aft er Americans forgot the massacres of Cheyenne women and children at Sand Creek and of Piegan people on the Marias River, prints of the Battle of Little Big Horn hung in barrooms across the country. William F. “Buff alo Bill” Cody, in his traveling Wild West

C H A P T E R 1 6 Conquering a Continent, 1854–1890 489

performances, enacted a revenge killing of a Cheyenne man named Yellow Hand in a tableau Cody called “fi rst scalp for Custer.” Notwithstanding that the tableau featured a white man scalping a Cheyenne, Cody depicted it as a triumph for civilization.

Little Big Horn proved to be the last military victory of Plains Indians against the U.S. Army. Pursued relentlessly aft er Custer’s death and fi nding fewer and fewer bison to sustain them, Sioux parents watched their children starve through a bitter winter. Slowly, families trickled into the agencies and accommodated themselves to reserva- tion life. Th e next year, the Nez Perces, fl eeing for the Canadian border, also surren- dered. Th e fi nal holdouts fought in the Southwest with Chiricahua Apache leader Geronimo. Like many others, Geronimo had accepted reservation life but found con- ditions unendurable. Describing the desolate land the tribe had been allotted, one Apache said it had “nothing but cactus, rattlesnakes, heat, rocks, and insects. . . . Many, many of our people died of starvation.” When Geronimo took up arms in protest, the

Little Plume and Yellow Kidney Photographer Edward S. Curtis took this photograph of the Piegan (Blackfeet) leader Little Plume and his son Yellow Kidney. Curtis’s extensive collection of photographs of Native Americans remains a valuable resource for historians. However, Curtis altered his images to make his native subjects seem more “authentic”: though Indians made widespread use of nonnative furniture, clothes, and other consumer goods (such as Singer sewing machines), Curtis removed those from the frame. He also retouched photographs to remove items such as belts and watches. Note the circular “shadow” here, against the lodge wall, near Little Plume’s right arm: the original photograph included a clock. Library of Congress.

490 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

army recruited other Apaches to track him and his band into the hills; in September 1886, he surrendered for the last time. Th e Chiricahua Apaches never returned to their homeland. Th e United States had completed its military conquest of the West.

Strategies of Survival Th ough the warpath closed, many native peoples continued secretly to practice tradi- tional customs. Away from the disapproving eyes of agents and teachers, they passed on their languages, histories, and traditional arts and medicine to younger genera- tions. Frustrated missionaries oft en concluded that little could be accomplished because bonds of kinship and custom were so strong. Parents also hated to relinquish their children to off -reservation boarding schools. Th us more and more Indian schools ended up on or near reservations; white teachers had to accept their pupils’ continued participation in the rhythms of Indian community life.

Selectively, most native peoples adopted some white ways. Many parents urged their sons and daughters to study hard, learn English, and develop skills to help them succeed in the new world they confronted. Even Sitting Bull announced in 1885 that he wanted his children “to be educated like the white children are.” Some Indian students grew up to be lawyers, doctors, and advocates for their people, including writers and artists who interpreted native experiences for national audiences. One of the most famous was a Santee Sioux boy named Ohiyesa, who became Dr. Charles Eastman. Posted to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, Eastman practiced medicine side by side with tradi- tional healers, whom he respected, and wrote popular books under his Sioux name. He remembered that when he left for boarding school, his father had said, “We have now entered upon this life, and there is no going back. . . . Remember, my boy, it is the same as if I sent you on your fi rst war-path. I shall expect you to conquer.”

Nothing exemplifi ed this syncretism, or cultural blending, better than the Ghost Dance movement of the late 1880s and early 1890s, which fostered native peoples’ hope that they could, through sacred dances, resurrect the bison and call a great storm to drive whites back across the Atlantic. Th e Ghost Dance drew on Christian elements as well as native ones. As the movement spread from reservation to reservation — Paiutes, Arapahos, Sioux — native peoples developed new forms of pan-Indian iden- tity and cooperation.

White responses to the Ghost Dance showed continued misunderstanding and lethal exertion of authority. In 1890, when a group of Lakota Sioux Ghost Dancers left their South Dakota reservation, they were pursued by the U.S. Army, who feared that further spread of the religion would provoke war. On December 29, at Wounded Knee, the 7th Cavalry caught up with fl eeing Lakotas and killed at least 150 — perhaps as many as 300. Like other massacres, this one could have been avoided. Th e deaths at Wounded Knee stand as a fi nal indictment of decades of relentless U.S. expansion, white ignorance and greed, chaotic and confl icting policies, and bloody mistakes.

Western Myths and Realities Th e post–Civil War frontier produced mythic fi gures who have played starring roles in America’s national folklore ever since: “savage” Indians, brave pioneers, rugged cow- boys, and gun-slinging sheriff s. Far from being invented by Hollywood in the twenti-

C H A P T E R 1 6 Conquering a Continent, 1854–1890 491

eth century, these oversimplifi ed characters emerged in the era when the nation incorporated the West. Pioneers helped develop the mythic ideal. As one Montana woman claimed, they had come west “at peril of their lives” and faced down “scalp dances” and other terrors; in the end, they “conquered the wilderness and transformed it into a land of peace and plenty.” Some former cowboys, capitalizing on the popular- ity of dime novel Westerns, spiced up their memoirs for sale. Eastern readers were eager for stories like Th e Life and Adventures of Nat Love (1907), written by a Texas cowhand who had been born in slavery in Tennessee and who, as a rodeo star in the 1870s, had won the nickname “Deadwood Dick.”

No myth-maker proved more infl uential than Buff alo Bill Cody. Unlike those who saw the West as free or empty, Bill understood that the United States had taken it by con- quest. Ironically, his famous Wild West, which he insisted was not a “show” but an authen- tic representation of frontier experience, provided one of the few employment options for Plains Indians. To escape harsh reservation conditions, Sioux and Cheyenne men signed on with Bill and demonstrated their riding skills for cheering audiences across the United States and Europe, chasing buff alo and attacking U.S. soldiers and pioneer wagons in the arena. Buff alo Bill proved to be a good employer. Black Elk, a Sioux man who joined Cody’s operation, recalled that Bill was generous and “had a strong heart.” But Black Elk had a mixed reaction to the Wild West. “I liked the part of the show we made,” he told an interviewer, “but not the part the Wasichus [white people] made.” As he observed, the Wild West of the 1880s was at its heart a celebration of U.S. military conquest.

At this same moment of transition, a young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner reviewed recent census data and proclaimed the end of the frontier. Up to 1890, he wrote, a clear, westward-moving line had existed between “civilization and savagery.” Th e frontier experience, Turner argued, shaped Americans’ national charac- ter. It left them a heritage of “coarseness and strength, combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness,” as well as “restless, nervous energy.”

Today, historians reject Turner’s depiction of Indian “savagery” — and his contra- dictory idea that white pioneers in the West claimed empty “free land.” Many scholars have noted that frontier conquest was both violent and incomplete. Th e Dust Bowl of the 1930s, as well as more recent cycles of drought, have repeated late-nineteenth- century patterns of hardship and depopulation on the plains. During the 1950s and 1960s, also, uranium mining rushes in the West mimicked earlier patterns of boom and bust, leaving ghost towns in their wake. Turner himself acknowledged that the frontier had both good and evil elements. He noted that in the West, “frontier liberty was sometimes confused with absence of all eff ective government.” But in 1893, when Turner fi rst published “Th e Signifi cance of the Frontier in American History,” eager listeners heard only the positives. Th ey saw pioneering in the West as evidence of American exceptionalism: of the nation’s unique history and destiny. Th ey claimed that “peaceful” American expansion was the opposite of European empires — ignoring the many military and economic similarities. Although politically the American West became a set of states rather than a colony, historians today emphasize the legacy of conquest that is central to its (and America’s) history.

Less than two months aft er the massacre at Wounded Knee, General William T. Sherman died in New York. As the nation marked his passing with pomp and oratory, commentators noted that his career refl ected a great era of conquest and consolida- tion of national power. Known primarily for his role in defeating the Confederacy,

492 PA R T F I V E Creating and Preserving a Continental Nation, 1844–1877

Sherman’s fi rst military exploits had been against Seminoles in Florida. Later, during the Mexican War (1846–1848), he had gone west with the U.S. Army to help claim California. Aft er the Civil War, the general went west again, supervising the forced removal of Sioux and Cheyennes to reservations.

When Sherman graduated from West Point in 1840, the United States had counted twenty-six states, none of them west of Missouri. At his death in 1891, the nation boasted forty-four states, stretching to the Pacifi c coast. Th e United States now rivaled Britain and Germany as an industrial giant, and its dynamic economy was drawing immigrants from around the world. Over the span of Sherman’s career, the United States had become a major player on the world stage. It had done so through the kind

of fi erce military conquest that Sherman made famous, as well as through bold expansions of federal authority to foster economic expansion. From the wars and policies of Sherman’s life- time, the children and grandchildren of Civil War heroes inherited a vast empire. In the com- ing decades, it would be up to them to decide how they would use the nation’s new power.

S U M M A RY Between 1861 and 1877, the United States completed its conquest of the continent. Aft er the Civil War, expansion of railroads fostered integration of the national econ- omy. Republican policymakers promoted this integration through protective tariff s, while federal court rulings facilitated economic growth and strengthened corporations. To attract foreign investment, Congress placed the nation on the gold standard. Federal offi cials also pursued a vigorous foreign policy, acquiring Alaska and asserting U.S. power indirectly through control of international trade in Latin America and Asia.

An important result of economic integration was incorporation of the Great Plains. Cattlemen built an industry linked to the integrated economy, in the process nearly driving the native bison to extinction. Homesteaders confronted harsh environ- mental conditions as they converted the grasslands for agriculture. Republicans cham- pioned homesteader families as representatives of domesticity, an ideal opposed to Mormon plural marriage in Utah. Homesteading accelerated the rapid, oft en violent, transformation of the western environment. Perceiving this transformation, federal offi cials began setting aside natural preserves such as Yellowstone, oft en clashing with Native Americans who wished to hunt there.

Confl icts led to the dispossession of Native American lands. During the Civil War, whites clashed with the Sioux and their allies. Grant’s peace policy sought to end this confl ict by forcing Native Americans to acculturate to European-style practices. Indian armed resistance continued through the 1880s, ending with Geronimo’s surrender in 1886. Th ereaft er, Native Americans survived by secretly continuing their traditions and selectively adopting white ways. Due in part to the determined military conquest of this period, the United States claimed a major role on the world stage. Frontier myths shaped Americans’ view of themselves as rugged individualists with a unique national destiny.

What factors led to warfare between whites and native peoples on the plains?

In what ways did the outlook of native peoples change in the era after armed resistance had ended?

C H A P T E R 1 6 Conquering a Continent, 1854–1890 493

Fo r Fu r t h e r E x p l o rat i o n David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction (1995). A powerful history of American In-

dian boarding schools. American Experience (PBS), “Last Stand at Little Big Horn.” A nuanced one-hour documen-

tary about the famous battle. Sarah Barringer Gordon, Th e Mormon Question (2002). An exploration of plural marriage

debates in national politics. Joy S. Kasson, Buff alo Bill’s Wild West (2001). A wonderful study of Buff alo Bill’s perfor-

mances and their role in shaping mythologies of the West. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Th e Legacy of Conquest (1987) and Something in the Soil (2000).

Limerick’s lively, accessible books are an excellent introduction to historians’ recent re- thinking of western history.

María Montoya, Translating Property (2002). Tells the story of the displacement of Mexican Americans (and their neighbors) in struggles over the Maxwell Land Grant in New Mexico and Colorado.

T I M E L I N E

1854 United States “opens” Japan to trade

1859 Comstock silver lode discov- ered in Nevada

1862 Homestead Act Dakota Sioux uprising in

Minnesota Morrill Act 1864 Sand Creek massacre of

Cheyennes in Colorado Yosemite Valley reserved as

public park 1865 Long Drive of Texas longhorns

begins 1866 Fetterman massacre 1868 Burlingame Treaty with China 1869 Transcontinental railroad

completed Wyoming women’s suff rage 1870 Utah women’s suff rage 1872 General Mining Act Yellowstone National Park

created

1873 United States begins move to gold standard

1876 Battle of Little Big Horn 1877 Nez Perces forcibly removed

from ancestral homelands in Northwest

Munn v. Illinois Supreme Court decision

1879 Exoduster migration to Kansas John Wesley Powell presents

Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States

1880s Rise of the Ghost Dance movement

1885 Sitting Bull tours with Buff alo Bill’s Wild West

1886 Dry cycle begins on the plains Chiricahua Apache leader

Geronimo surrenders 1887 Dawes Severalty Act 1890 Massacre of Sioux Ghost

Dancers at Wounded Knee, South Dakota

M AK E IT S T I C K

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PART 6 Touring the United States around 1900, a Hungarian Catholic abbot named Count Péter Vay visited the steel mills of Pittsburgh. “Fourteen-thousand tall chimneys . . . discharge their burning sparks and smoke incessantly,” he reported. He was moved by the plight of fellow Hun- garians, laboring “wherever the heat is most insupportable, the fl ames most scorching.” One worker had just been killed in a foundry accident. Vay, attending the funeral, worried that immigration was “of no use except to help fi ll the moneybags of the insatiable millionaires.”

Vay witnessed America’s emergence as an industrial power — and the consequences of that transformation. In 1877, the United States was overwhelmingly rural and depen- dent on foreign capital. By 1917, its land- scapes, population, and ways of life were forever altered. Industrialization brought millions of immigrants from around the globe and built immense cities whose gover- nance and social relations off ered unaccus- tomed rewards and challenges. It sharpened class divisions and led to the rise of national labor movements, while prompting Ameri- cans to redefi ne men’s and women’s roles. Industrialization also created pressure for political innovation. As ex-president Th eo- dore Roosevelt declared in 1910, American citizens needed to “control the mighty com- mercial forces which they have called into being.” Workers, farmers, and urban reform- ers sought to regulate corporations, fi ght poverty, and clean up politics and the envi- ronment. In their creative responses to the problems of the industrial age, such reform- ers gave their name to the Progressive Era.

Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments 1877–1917 Corporations and Confl icts

In the post–Civil War decades, giant corporations developed national and even global networks of production, marketing, and fi nance. In many fi elds, vertical integration enabled corporate managers to control production from the harvesting of raw materials through the sale of fi nished products. Nationwide marketing networks developed through innovative use of railroads — and through ruthless competitive tactics such as predatory pricing.

Corporations’ complex structures opened career opportunities for middle managers and salesmen. Women, fi lling new niches as telephone operators and department store clerks, also played an important role in the expanding service sector. At the same time, traditional craftsmen found themselves displaced as deskilled wage work steadily expanded. Factory workers and miners endured dangerous conditions, health hazards, low pay, and frequent bouts of unemployment.

The most dangerous, low-wage work was often allotted to African Americans and immigrants from Europe, Mexico, and Asia. Workers organized to protest these conditions. In addition to creating labor unions, they forged political alliances with farmers, who also found their livelihoods at risk in the changing global economy. Native-born workers and European immigrants successfully agitated for the legal exclusion of Chinese workers. These events are covered in Chapter 17.

495

A Diverse, Urban Society

While the old values of thrift, piety, and domesticity never entirely faded, they faced challenges in the era of industrial- ization. Women asserted more indepen- dent roles in public life. The new model for men was an aggressive masculinity, embodied in the rise of sports. Wide- spread acceptance of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution prompted infl uential thinkers to justify economic inequality as a law of nature. In culture, the rise of literary realism and abstract art marked decisive innovations. Responding to these upheavals, people of religious faith reshaped their institutions. Some accepted modernity, while others called for a return to Christian “fundamentals.” See Chapter 18 for these developments.

Great cities arose, becoming play- grounds for the new superrich while also housing millions of poor immigrants in tenements. At the same time, people of all classes in the vibrant cities enjoyed new pleasures, from amusement parks to vaudeville and movies. The fast-growing cities proved challenging to govern. To the frustration of middle-class reformers, many immigrant voters supported political machines like New York’s Tammany Hall. By 1900, though, even some machine leaders admitted the need for reform, and big cities began to serve as seedbeds for progressive experiments. On these developments, see Chapters 18 and 19.

Reform Initiatives

Political debates in this era centered on the scope of government power, as reformers called for regulation of corpora- tions and other measures to blunt the impact of industrialization. After the 1880s, Republicans increasingly defended big business. Though Republican Theodore Roosevelt championed landmark legisla- tion during his presidency (1901–1909), much reform energy passed to other parties. Democrats, who had long called for limited government, began to advo- cate stronger federal intervention to fi ght poverty and restrain big business. By the 1910s, during the presidency of Democrat Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921), the party enacted an impressive slate of laws. Meanwhile, the Populist, Socialist, and Progressive parties proposed more radical responses to industrialization and concentrated wealth. While none of these parties won national power, their ideas helped shape the course of reform.

Progressive Era reformers — a diverse group who were not at all united — sought to enhance democracy, rein in the power of corporations, uphold labor rights, protect the environment, and promote public health and safety. They faced formidable obstacles, especially from Supreme Court rulings. Nonethe- less, by 1917, national, state, and local governments enacted a range of new laws, representing the early emergence of the modern state. Chapter 20 traces these events.

496

Thematic Understanding:

This timeline arranges some of the important events of this period into themes. What was the relationship of the two severe economic depressions listed under “Work, Exchange, and Technology” to political reform? Did reform tend to come during or after periods of economic crisis? Why do you think this was the case? In what ways did Ameri- cans respond politically to the depression of the 1870s? What continuities and changes do you see in their responses to the next severe depression, in the 1890s?

WORK, EXCHANGE, & TECHNOLOGY

PEOPLING 18

70 • Economic depression (1873–1879)

• First department store opens in Philadelphia (1874)

• Great Railroad Strike (1877) • Deskilling of labor under mass

production

• Hostility toward Chinese immigrants grows

18 80 • First vertically integrated

corporations • Rockefeller establishes Standard

Oil Trust • Emergence of white-collar

managerial work • Women enter paid labor as offi ce

workers • Knights of Labor grows rapidly

(mid-1880s) • American Federation of Labor

founded (1886)

• Rapid industrialization draws immigrants from around the world; American cities grow rapidly

• Chinese Exclusion Act (1882–1943)

18 90 • Severe economic depression

(1893–1897) • Accelerated corporate mergers

in key industries • Birth of modern advertising

• Gorras Blancas confront wealthy Anglo interests in New Mexico

• Ellis Island opens (1892) • Supreme Court upholds

segregation of schools and public facilities in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

• Unemployed whites attack and drive Chinese farmworkers out of California

19 00 • U.S. Steel becomes nation’s fi rst

billion-dollar corporation (1901) • Women’s Trade Union League

founded (1903) • International Workers of the

World founded (1905) • Marianna mine disaster (1907) • Muller v. Oregon (1908) permits

state regulation of women’s working hours

• Triangle Shirtwaist fi re (1911)

• Rising immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe

• Height of eugenics (1900s–1920s)

• Increasing numbers of blacks move to cities; responses include “race riots” by whites

• Japanese immigrants barred from becoming U.S. citizens (1906)

497

ENVIRONMENT & GEOGRAPHY

POLITICS & POWER IDEAS, BELIEFS, & CULTURE

18 70 • Successful containment of New

York cholera outbreak spurs movement for public health (1866)

• First national park established at Yellowstone (1872)

• Appalachian Mountain Club founded (1876)

• Democrats make sweeping congressional gains (1874)

• Era of close party competition in national elections (1874–1894)

• Reconstruction ends (1877)

• Comstock Act bans circulation of most information about sex and birth control (1873)

• National League launches professional baseball (1876)

• Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879)

18 80 • Drought on the plains prompts

calls for federal irrigation • Hatch Act (1887) provides

federal support for agricultural research and experiment stations

• Industrialization and urban growth cause rising pollution

• Pendleton Civil Service Act (1883) • Peak infl uence of Woman’s

Christian Temperance Union (1880s)

• Interstate Commerce Act (1887) • Hull House settlement founded

(1889)

• Increasing numbers of students attend college

• Booker T. Washington founds Tuskegee Institute (1881)

• William Dean Howells calls for realism in literature (1881)

• Birth of American football • Popularity of vaudeville

(1880s–1890s)

18 90 • Sierra Club founded (1892)

• “Bicycle craze” and rise of hiking and camping get more Americans outdoors

• Rise of People’s Party (1890–1896) • Sweeping Republican gains

(1894) • “Solid South” emerges; African

American disenfranchisement in South (1890–1905)

• William McKinley defeats William Jennings Bryan (1896)

• National Consumers’ League founded (1899)

• Chicago World’s Fair (1893) • Literary realism and naturalism

gain recognition • Popularity of ragtime music

(1890s–1900s) • Armory Show introduces

modern art (1913) • Rise of Social Gospel • Joseph Pulitzer pioneers “yellow

journalism”

19 00 • Lacey Act (1900)

• Antiquities Act (1906) gives president authority to create and protect national monuments

• National Audubon Society forms (1901)

• Newlands Reclamation Act (1902)

• First national wildlife refuge created (1903)

• U.S. Forest Service created (1905) • National Park Service created

(1916)

• William McKinley assassinated; Theodore Roosevelt becomes president (1901)

• Niagara Movement calls for full voting rights and equal opportunities for blacks

• Women’s suff rage movement grows

• Nickelodeons introduce commercial motion pictures

• Custom of unchaperoned “dating” arises

• Rise of the Negro Leagues • Peak in overseas missionary

activity • Advent of literary and artistic

modernism

498

C H

A P

T E

R

17 Industrial America: Corporations and Confl icts 1877–1911 For millions of his contemporaries, Andrew Carnegie exemplifi ed Amer-ican success. Arriving from Scotland as a poor twelve-year-old in 1848, Carnegie found work as an errand boy for the Pennsylvania Railroad and rapidly scaled the managerial ladder. In 1865, he struck out on his own as an iron manufacturer, selling to friends in the railroad business. Encouraged by Republican tariff s to enter the steel industry, he soon built a massive

steel mill outside Pittsburgh where a state-of-the-art Bessemer converter made steel refi ning dramatically more effi cient. With Carnegie leading the way, steel became a major U.S. industry, reaching annual production of 10 million metric tons by 1900 — almost as much as the combined output of the world’s other top producers, Germany (6.6 million tons) and Britain (4.8 million).

At fi rst, skilled workers at Carnegie’s mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania, earned good wages. Th ey had a strong union, and Carnegie affi rmed workers’ right to orga- nize. But Carnegie — confi dent that new machinery enabled him to replace many skilled laborers — eventually decided that collective bargaining was too expensive. In the summer of 1892, he withdrew to his estate in Scotland, leaving his partner Henry Clay Frick in command. A former coal magnate and veteran foe of labor, Frick was well qualifi ed to do the dirty work. He announced that aft er July 1, members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers would be locked out of the Homestead mill. If they wanted to return to work, they would have to abandon the union and sign new individual contracts. Frick fortifi ed the mill and prepared to hire replacement workers. Th e battle was on.

At dawn on July 6, barges chugging up the Monongahela River brought dozens of private armed guards from the Pinkerton Detective Agency, hired by Carnegie to defend the plant. Locked-out workers opened fi re, starting a gunfi ght that left seven workers and three Pinkertons dead. Frick appealed to Pennsylvania’s governor, who sent the state militia to arrest labor leaders on charges of riot and murder. Most of the locked-out workers lost their jobs. Th e union was dead.

IDENTIFY THE BIG IDEA What new opportunities and risks did industrialization bring, and how did it reshape American society?

C H A P T E R 1 7 Industrial America: Corporations and Confl icts, 1877–1911 499

As the Homestead lockout showed, industrialization was a controversial and oft en bloody process. During the half century aft er the Civil War, more and more Americans worked not as independent farmers or artisans but as employees of large corporations. Conditions of work changed for people of all economic classes. Drawn by the dynamic economy, immigrants arrived from around the globe. Th ese transformations provoked working people, including farmers as well as industrial workers, to organize and defend their interests.

The Rise of Big Business In the late 1800s, industrialization in Europe and the United States revolutionized the world economy. It brought large-scale commercial agriculture to many parts of the globe and prompted millions of migrants — both skilled workers and displaced peas- ants — to cross continents and oceans in search of jobs. Industrialization also created a production glut. Th e immense scale of agriculture and manufacturing caused a long era of defl ation, when prices dropped worldwide (Figure 17.1).

Falling prices normally signal low demand for goods and services, and thus stag- nation. In England, a mature industrial power, the late nineteenth century did bring economic decline. But in the United States, production expanded. Between 1877 and 1900, Americans’ average real income increased from $388 to $573 per capita. In this sense, Andrew Carnegie was right when he argued that, even though industrialization increased the gap between rich and poor, everyone’s standard of living rose. In his famous 1889 essay “Wealth” — later called “Th e Gospel of Wealth” — he observed that “the poor enjoy what the rich could not before aff ord. What were the luxuries have become the necessaries of life.”

1869 0

20

40

60

80

100

1875 1880 1885 1890 1895 1900

19 26

–1 92

9 =

1 00 Wholesale prices

GDP*

*Gross domestic product

FIGURE 17.1 Business Activity and Wholesale Prices, 1869–1900 This graph shows the key feature of the performance of the late- nineteenth-century economy: while output was booming, wholesale prices were, on the whole, falling. Thus, while workers often struggled with falling wages — especially during decades of severe economic crisis — consumer products also became cheaper to buy.

To see a longer excerpt of “The Gospel of Wealth,” along with other primary sources from this period, see Sources for America’s History.

500 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

Technological and business effi ciencies allowed American fi rms to grow, invest in new equipment, and earn profi ts even as prices for their products fell. Growth depended, in turn, on America’s large and growing population, expansion into the West, and an integrated national marketplace. In many fi elds, large corporations became the dominant form of business.

Innovators in Enterprise As rail lines stretched westward between the 1850s and 1880s, operators faced a crisis. As one Erie Railroad executive noted, a superintendent on a 50-mile line could personally attend to every detail. But supervising a 500-mile line was impossible; trains ran late, communications failed, and trains crashed. Managers gradually invented systems to solve these problems. Th ey distinguished top executives from those responsible for day-to-day operations. Th ey departmentalized operations by function — purchasing, machinery, freight traffi c, passenger traffi c — and established clear lines of communica- tion. Th ey perfected cost accounting, which allowed an industrialist like Carnegie to track expenses and revenues carefully and thus follow his Scottish mother’s advice: “Take care of the pennies, and the pounds will take care of themselves.” Th is management revo- lution created the internal structure adopted by many large, complex corporations.

During these same years, the United States became an industrial power by tapping North America’s vast natural resources, particularly in the West. Industries that had once depended on water power began to use prodigious amounts of coal. Steam engines replaced human and animal labor, and kerosene replaced whale oil and wood. By 1900, America’s factories and urban homes were converting to electric power. With new management structures and dependency on fossil fuels (oil, coal, natural gas), corporations transformed both the economy and the country’s natural and built environments.

Production and Sales

Aft er Chicago’s Union Stock Yards opened in 1865, middlemen shipped cows by rail from the Great Plains to Chicago and from there to eastern cities, where slaughter took place in local butchertowns. Such a sys-

tem — a national livestock market with local processing — could have lasted, as it did in Europe. But Gustavus Swift , a shrewd Chicago cattle dealer, saw that local slaugh- terhouses lacked the scale to utilize waste by-products and cut labor costs. To improve productivity, Swift invented the assembly line, where each wageworker repeated the same slaughtering task over and over.

Swift also pioneered vertical integration, a model in which a company controlled all aspects of production from raw materials to fi nished goods. Once his engineers designed a cooling system, Swift invested in a fl eet of refrigerator cars to keep beef fresh as he shipped it eastward, priced below what local butchers could aff ord. In cities that received his chilled meat, Swift built branch houses and fl eets of delivery wagons. He also constructed factories to make fertilizer and chemicals from the by-products of slaughter, and he developed marketing strategies for those products as well. Other Chicago packers followed Swift ’s lead. By 1900, fi ve fi rms, all vertically integrated, pro- duced nearly 90 percent of the meat shipped in interstate commerce.

C H A P T E R 1 7 Industrial America: Corporations and Confl icts, 1877–1911 501

Big packers invented new sales tactics. For example, Swift & Company periodi- cally slashed prices in certain markets to below production costs, driving independent distributors to the wall. With profi ts from its sales elsewhere, a large fi rm like Swift could survive temporary losses in one locality until competitors went under. Aft er- ward, Swift could raise prices again. Th is technique, known as predatory pricing, helped give a few fi rms unprecedented market control.

Standard Oil and the Rise of the Trusts

No one used ruthless business tactics more skillfully than the king of petroleum, John D. Rockefeller. Aft er inventors in the 1850s fi gured out how to extract kerosene — a clean-burning

fuel for domestic heating and lighting — from crude oil, enormous oil deposits were discovered at Titusville, Pennsylvania. Just then, the Civil War severely disrupted whaling, forcing whale-oil customers to look for alternative lighting sources. Over- night, a forest of oil wells sprang up around Titusville. Connected to these Pennsyl- vania oil fi elds by rail in 1863, Cleveland, Ohio, became a refi ning center. John D. Rockefeller was then an up-and-coming Cleveland grain dealer. (He, like Carnegie and most other budding tycoons, hired a substitute to fi ght for him in the Civil War.) Rockefeller had strong nerves, a sharp eye for able partners, and a genius for fi nance. He went into the kerosene business and borrowed heavily to expand. Within a few years, his fi rm — Standard Oil of Ohio — was Cleveland’s leading refi ner.

Like Carnegie and Swift , Rockefeller succeeded through vertical integration: to control production and sales all the way from the oil well to the kerosene lamp, he took a big stake in the oil fi elds, added pipelines, and developed a vast distribution network.

Swift & Co.’s Packing House, Chicago, c. 1906 This photograph shows the processing system that enabled Swift and other large packers to save money through high volume and deskilled labor. The overhead pulley system shown in the upper right moved carcasses from place to place for completion of diff erent tasks. Auto manufacturer Henry Ford, who won fame for his moving assembly line, claimed he got the idea after visiting a meat-packing plant such as this. Library of Congress.

502 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

Rockefeller allied with railroad executives, who, like him, hated the oil market’s boom- and-bust cycles. What they wanted was predictable, high-volume traffi c, and they off ered Rockefeller secret rebates that gave him a leg up on competitors.

Rockefeller also pioneered a strategy called horizontal integration. Aft er driving competitors to the brink of failure through predatory pricing, he invited them to merge their local companies into his conglomerate. Most agreed, oft en because they had no choice. Th rough such mergers, Standard Oil wrested control of 95 percent of the nation’s oil refi ning capacity by the 1880s. In 1882, Rockefeller’s lawyers created a new legal form, the trust. It organized a small group of associates — the board of trust- ees — to hold stock from a group of combined fi rms, managing them as a single entity. Rockefeller soon invested in Mexican oil fi elds and competed in world markets against Russian and Middle Eastern producers.

Other companies followed Rockefeller’s lead, creating trusts to produce such products as linseed oil, sugar, and salt. Many expanded sales and production overseas. As early as 1868, Singer Manufacturing Company established a factory in Scotland to produce sewing machines. By World War I, such brands as Ford and General Electric had become familiar around the world.

Distressed by the development of near monopolies, reformers began to denounce “the trusts,” a term that in popular usage referred to any large corporation that seemed to wield excessive power. Some states outlawed trusts as a legal form. But in an eff ort to attract corporate headquarters to its state, New Jersey broke ranks in 1889, passing a law that permitted the creation of holding companies and other combinations. Dela- ware soon followed, providing another legal haven for consolidated corporations. A wave of mergers further concentrated corporate power during the depression of the 1890s, as weaker fi rms succumbed to powerful rivals. By 1900, America’s largest one hundred companies controlled a third of the nation’s productive capacity. Purchasing several steel companies in 1901, including Carnegie Steel, J. P. Morgan created U.S. Steel, the nation’s fi rst billion-dollar corporation. Such familiar fi rms as DuPont and Eastman Kodak assumed dominant places in their respective industries.

Assessing the Industrialists

Th e work of men like Swift , Rockefeller, and Carnegie was controver- sial in their lifetimes and has been ever since. Opinions have tended to be harsh in eras of economic crisis, when the shortcomings of corpo-

rate America appear in stark relief. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, a histo- rian coined the term robber barons, which is still used today. In periods of prosperity, both scholars and the public have tended to view early industrialists more favorably, calling them industrial statesmen.

Some historians have argued that industrialists benefi tted the economy by replac- ing the chaos of market competition with a “visible hand” of planning and expert management. But one recent study of railroads asserts that the main skills of early tycoons (as well as those of today) were cultivating political “friends,” defaulting on loans, and lying to the public. Whether we consider the industrialists heroes, villains, or something in between, it is clear that the corporate economy was not the creation of just a few individuals, however famous or infl uential. It was a systemic transformation of the economy.

C H A P T E R 1 7 Industrial America: Corporations and Confl icts, 1877–1911 503

A National Consumer Culture

As they integrated vertically and horizontally, corporations inno- vated in other ways. Companies such as Bell Telephone and Westinghouse set up research laboratories. Steelmakers invested

in chemistry and materials science to make their products cheaper, better, and stronger. Mass markets brought an appealing array of goods to consumers who could aff ord them. Railroads whisked Florida oranges and other fresh produce to the shelves of grocery stores. Retailers such as F. W. Woolworth and the Great Atlan- tic and Pacifi c Tea Company (A&P) opened chains of stores that soon stretched nationwide.

Th e department store was pioneered in 1875 by John Wanamaker in Philadelphia. Th ese megastores displaced small retail shops, tempting customers with large show windows and Christmas displays. Like industrialists, department store magnates developed economies of scale that enabled them to slash prices. An 1898 newspaper advertisement for Macy’s Department Store urged shoppers to “read our books, cook in our saucepans, dine off our china, wear our silks, get under our blankets, smoke our cigars, drink our wines — Shop at Macy’s — and Life will Cost You Less and Yield You More Th an You Dreamed Possible.”

While department stores became urban fi xtures, Montgomery Ward and Sears built mail-order empires. Rural families from Vermont to California pored over the companies’ annual catalogs, making wish lists of tools, clothes, furniture, and toys. Mail-order companies used money-back guarantees to coax wary customers to buy products they could not see or touch. “Don’t be afraid to make a mistake,” the Sears catalog counseled. “Tell us what you want, in your own way.” By 1900, America counted more than twelve hundred mail-order companies.

Th e active shaping of consumer demand became, in itself, a new enterprise. Out- doors, advertisements appeared everywhere: in New York’s Madison Square, the Heinz Company installed a 45-foot pickle made of green electric lights. Tourists had diffi - culty admiring Niagara Falls because billboards obscured the view. By 1900, compa- nies were spending more than $90 million a year ($2.3 billion today) on print advertising, as the press itself became a mass-market industry. Rather than charging subscribers the cost of production, magazines began to cover their costs by selling ads. Cheap subscriptions built a mass readership, which in turn attracted more adver- tisers. In 1903, the Ladies’ Home Journal became the fi rst magazine with a million subscribers.

The Corporate Workplace Before the Civil War, most American boys had hoped to become farmers, small- business owners, or independent artisans. Aft erward, more and more Americans — both male and female — began working for someone else. Because they wore white shirts with starched collars, those who held professional positions in corporations became known as white-collar workers, a term diff erentiating them from blue-collar employees, who labored with their hands. For a range of employees — managers and laborers, clerks and salespeople — the rise of corporate work had wide-ranging consequences.

504 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

Managers and Salesmen

As the managerial revolution unfolded, the headquarters of major corporations began to house departments handling specifi c activities such as purchasing and accounting. Th ese departments were super-

vised by middle managers, something not seen before in American industry. Middle managers took on entirely new tasks, directing the fl ow of goods, labor, and informa- tion throughout the enterprise. Th ey were key innovators, counterparts to the engi- neers in research laboratories who, in the same decades, worked to reduce costs and improve effi ciency.

Corporations also needed a new kind of sales force. In post–Civil War America, the drummer, or traveling salesman, became a familiar sight on city streets and in remote country stores. Riding rail networks from town to town, drummers introduced merchants to new products, off ered incentives, and suggested sales displays. Th ey built nationwide distribution networks for such popular consumer products as cigarettes and Coca-Cola. By the late 1880s, the leading manufacturer of cash registers pro- duced a sales script for its employees’ conversations with local merchants. “Take for granted that he will buy,” the script directed. “Say to him, ‘Now, Mr. Blank, what color shall I make it?’ . . . Handing him your pen say, ‘Just sign here where I have made the cross.’ ”

With such companies in the vanguard, sales became systematized. Managers set individual sales quotas and awarded prizes to top salesmen, while those who sold too little were singled out for remedial training or dismissal. Executives embraced the ideas of business psychologist Walter Dill Scott, who published Th e Psychology of Advertising in 1908. Scott’s principles — which included selling to customers based on their presumed “instinct of escape” and “instinct of combat” — were soon taught at Harvard Business School. As one historian remarks, America had entered the era of the “hard sell.”

Women in the Corporate Offi ce

Beneath the ranks of managers emerged a new class of female offi ce workers. Before the Civil War, most clerks at small fi rms had been young men who expected to rise through the ranks. In a large cor-

poration, secretarial work became a dead-end job, and employers began assigning it to women. By the turn of the twentieth century, 77 percent of all stenographers and typ- ists were female; by 1920, women held half of all low-level offi ce jobs.

For white working-class women, clerking and offi ce work represented new oppor- tunities. In an era before most families had access to day care, mothers most oft en earned money at home, where they could tend children while also taking in laundry, caring for boarders, or doing piecework (sewing or other assembly projects, paid on a per-item basis). Unmarried daughters could enter domestic service or factory work, but clerking and secretarial work were cleaner and better paid.

New technologies provide additional opportunities for women. Th e rise of the telephone, introduced by inventor Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, was a notable example. Originally intended for business use on local exchanges, telephones were eagerly adopted by residential customers. Th ousands of young women found work as telephone operators. By 1900, more than four million women worked for wages. About a third worked in domestic service; another third in industry; the rest in offi ce work, teaching, nursing, or sales. As new occupations arose, the percentage of wage-earning

C H A P T E R 1 7 Industrial America: Corporations and Confl icts, 1877–1911 505

women in domestic service dropped dramatically, a trend that continued in the twen- tieth century.

On the Shop Floor Despite the managerial revolution at the top, skilled craft workers — almost all of them men — retained considerable autonomy in many industries. A coal miner, for exam- ple, was not an hourly wageworker but essentially an independent contractor, paid by the amount of coal he produced. He provided his own tools, worked at his own pace, and knocked off early when he chose. Th e same was true for puddlers and rollers in iron works; molders in stove making; and machinists, glass blowers, and skilled work- ers in many other industries. Such workers abided by the stint, a self-imposed limit on how much they would produce each day. Th is informal system of restricting output infuriated effi ciency-minded engineers, but to the workers it signifi ed personal dig- nity, manly pride, and brotherhood with fellow employees. One shop in Lowell, Mas- sachusetts, posted regulations requiring all employees to be at their posts by the time of the opening bell and to remain, with the shop door locked, until the closing bell. A machinist promptly packed his tools, declaring that he had not “been brought up under such a system of slavery.”

Skilled workers — craft smen, inside contractors, and foremen — enjoyed a high degree of autonomy. But those who paid helpers from their own pocket could also exploit them. Subcontracting arose, in part, to enable manufacturers to distance themselves from the consequences of shady labor practices. In Pittsburgh steel mills, foremen were known as “pushers,” notorious for driving their gangs mercilessly. On the other hand, industrial labor operated on a human scale,

Telephone Operators, 1888 Like other women offi ce workers, these switchboard operators enjoyed relatively high pay and comfortable working conditions — especially in the early years of the telephone industry, before operators’ work routines speeded up. These young women worked for the Central Union Telephone Company in Canton, Ohio. Ohio Historical Society.

506 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

through personal relationships that could be close and enduring. Striking craft work- ers would commonly receive the support of helpers and laborers, and labor gangs would sometimes walk out on behalf of a popular foreman.

As industrialization advanced, however, workers increasingly lost the indepen- dence characteristic of craft work. Th e most important cause of this was the deskilling of labor under a new system of mechanized manufacturing that men like meat-packer Gustavus Swift had pioneered, and that automobile maker Henry Ford would soon call mass production. Everything from typewriters to automobiles came to be assembled from standardized parts, using machines that increasingly operated with little human oversight. A machinist protested in 1883 that the sewing machine industry was so “subdivided” that “one man may make just a particular part of a machine and may not know anything whatever about another part of the same machine.” Such a worker, noted an observer, “cannot be master of a craft , but only master of a fragment.” Employ- ers, who originally favored automatic machinery because it increased output, quickly found that it also helped them control workers and cut labor costs. Th ey could pay unskilled workers less and replace them easily.

By the early twentieth century, managers sought to further reduce costs through a program of industrial effi ciency called scientifi c management. Its inventor, a metal- cutting expert named Frederick W. Taylor, recommended that employers eliminate all brain work from manual labor, hiring experts to develop rules for the shop fl oor. Workers must be required to “do what they are told promptly and without asking questions or making sug- gestions.” In its most extreme form, scientifi c management called for engineers to time each task with a stopwatch; companies would pay workers more if they met the stopwatch standard. Taylor assumed that workers would respond automatically to the lure of higher earnings. But scientifi c management was not, in practice, a great success. Implementing it proved to be expensive, and workers stubbornly resisted. Corporate managers, however, adopted bits and pieces of Taylor’s system, and they enthusiastically agreed that decisions should lie with “management alone.” Over time, in comparison with businesses in other countries, American corporations created a particularly wide gap between the roles of managers and those of the blue-collar workforce.

Blue-collar workers had little freedom to negotiate, and their working conditions deteriorated markedly as mass production took hold. At the same time, industrializa- tion brought cheaper products that enabled many Americans to enjoy new consumer products — if they could avoid starvation. From executives down to unskilled workers, the hierarchy of corporate employment contributed to sharper distinctions among three economic classes: the wealthy elite; an emerging, self-defi ned “middle class”; and a struggling class of workers, who bore the brunt of the economy’s new risks and included many Americans living in dire poverty. As it wrought these changes, indus- trialization prompted intense debate over inequality.

Health Hazards and Pollution

Industrialized labor also damaged workers’ health. In 1884, a study of the Illinois Central Railroad showed that, over the previous decade, one in twenty of its workers had been killed or permanently

disabled by an accident on the job. For brakemen — one of the most dangerous jobs — the rate was one in seven. Due to lack of regulatory laws and inspections, mining was 50 percent more dangerous in the United States than in Germany; between 1876 and

C H A P T E R 1 7 Industrial America: Corporations and Confl icts, 1877–1911 507

1925, an average of over 2,000 U.S. coal miners died each year from cave-ins and explosions. Silver, gold, and copper mines were not immune from such tragedies, but mining companies resisted demands for safety regulation.

Extractive industries and factories also damaged nearby environments and the people who lived there. In big cities, poor residents suff ered from polluted air and the dumping of noxious by-products into the water supply. Mines like those in Leadville, Colorado, contaminated the land and water with mercury and lead. Alabama convicts, forced to work in coal mines, faced brutal working conditions and fatal illnesses caused by the mines’ contamination of local water. At the time, people were well aware of many of these dangers, but workers had an even more urgent priority: work. Pitts- burgh’s belching smokestacks meant coughing and lung damage, but they also meant running mills and paying jobs.

Unskilled Labor and Discrimination

As managers deskilled production, the ranks of factory workers came to include more and more women and children, who were almost always unskilled and low paid. Men oft en resented wom-

en’s presence in factories, and male labor unions oft en worked to exclude women — especially wives, who they argued should remain in the home. Women vigorously defended their right to work. On hearing accusations that married women worked only to buy frivolous luxuries, one female worker in a Massachusetts shoe factory wrote a heated response to the local newspaper: “When the husband and father cannot provide for his wife and children, it is perfectly natural that the wife and mother should desire to work. . . . Don’t blame married women if the land of the free has become a land of slavery and oppression.”

In 1900, one of every fi ve children under the age of sixteen worked outside the home. Child labor was most widespread in the South, where a low-wage industrial sec- tor emerged aft er Reconstruction (Map 17.1). Textile mills sprouted in the Carolinas and Georgia, recruiting workers from surrounding farms; whole families oft en worked in the mills. Many children also worked in Pennsylvania coal fi elds, where death and injury rates were high. State law permitted children as young as twelve to labor with a family member, but turn-of-the-century investigators estimated that about 10,000 additional boys, at even younger ages, were illegally employed in the mines.

Also at the bottom of the pay scale were most African Americans. Corporations and industrial manufacturers widely discriminated against them on the basis of race, and such prejudice was hardly limited to the South. Aft er the Civil War, African Ameri- can women who moved to northern cities were largely barred from offi ce work and other new employment options; instead, they remained heavily concentrated in domes- tic service, with more than half employed as cooks or servants. African American men con- fronted similar exclusion. America’s booming vertically integrated corporations turned black men away from all but the most menial jobs. In 1890, almost a third of black men worked in personal service. Employers in the North and West recruited, instead, a diff erent kind of low- wage labor: newly arrived immigrants.

Why did large corporations arise in the late nineteenth century, and how did leading industrialists consolidate their power?

How did conditions change for industrial workers in the late nine- teenth century, and why?

508 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

Immigrants, East and West Across the globe, industrialization set people in motion with the lure of jobs. Between the Civil War and World War I, over 25 million immigrants entered the United States. Th e American working class became truly global, including not only people of African and Western European descent but also Southern and Eastern Europeans, Mexicans, and Asians. In 1900, census takers found that more than 75 percent of San Francisco and New York City residents had at least one parent who was foreign-born.

In the new industrial order, immigrants made an ideal labor supply. Th ey took the worst jobs at low pay, and during economic downturns tens of thousands returned to their home countries, reducing the shock of unemployment in the United States. But many native-born Americans viewed immigrants with hostility, through the lens of racial, ethnic, and religious prejudices. Th ey also feared that immigrants would take

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MAP 17.1 The New South, 1900 The economy of the Old South focused on raising staple crops, especially cotton and tobacco. In the New South, staple agriculture continued to dominate, but there was marked industrial development as well. Industrial regions evolved, producing textiles, coal, and iron. By 1900, the South’s industrial pattern was well defi ned, though the region still served — like the West — as a major producer of raw materials for the industrial region that stretched from New England to Chicago.

C H A P T E R 1 7 Industrial America: Corporations and Confl icts, 1877–1911 509

more coveted jobs and erode white men’s wages. For immigrants themselves, America could be disorienting, liberating, and disappointing.

Newcomers from Europe Mass migration from Western Europe had started in the 1840s, when more than one million Irish fl ed a terrible famine. In the following decades, as Europe’s population grew rapidly and agriculture became commercialized, peasant economies suff ered, fi rst in Germany and Scandinavia, then across Austria-Hungary, Russia, Italy, and the Balkans. Th is upheaval displaced millions of rural people. Some went to Europe’s mines and factories; others headed for South America and the United States (Map 17.2; America Compared, p. 510).

“America was known to foreigners,” remembered one Jewish woman from Lithu- ania, “as the land where you’d get rich.” But the reality was much harsher. Even in the age of steam, a transatlantic voyage was grueling. For ten to twenty days, passengers in steerage class crowded belowdecks, eating terrible food and struggling with seasick- ness. An investigator who traveled with immigrants from Naples asked, “How can a

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MAP 17.2 Sources of European Immigration to the United States, 1871–1910 Around 1900, Americans began to speak of the “new” immigration. They meant the large numbers of immigrants arriving from Eastern and Southern Europe — Poles, Slovaks and other Slavic peoples, Yiddish-speaking Jews, Italians — who overwhelmed the still substantial number of immigrants from the British Isles and Northern Europe.

A M E R I C A C O M PA R E D

510

E m i g r a n t s a n d D e s t i n a t i o n s , 18 81–1915 Th e United States received more new residents than any other nation during the era of industrialization, but it was not the only place where emigrants (those departing) became immigrants (those arriving). Th e graph below shows six major destinations for emigrants from four European countries.

FIGURE 17.2 Major Destinations for Emigrants, 1881–1915

steerage passenger remember that he is a human being when he must fi rst pick the worms from his food?” Aft er 1892, European immigrants were routed through the enormous receiving station at New York’s Ellis Island.

Some immigrants brought skills. Many Welshmen, for example, arrived in the United States as experienced tin-plate makers; Germans came as machinists and car- penters, Scandinavians as sailors. But industrialization required, most of all, increas- ing quantities of unskilled labor. As poor farmers from Italy, Greece, and Eastern Europe arrived in the United States, heavy, low-paid labor became their domain.

In an era of cheap railroad and steamship travel, many immigrants expected to work and save for a few years and then head home. More than 800,000 French Cana-

United States 57% Canada 22%

Oceania* 13%

Africa 8%

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Argentina 23%

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Canada 1% Brazil 2 %

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British Emigrants (excluding Ireland)

Italian Emigrants

German Emigrants

Swedish Emigrants

C H A P T E R 1 7 Industrial America: Corporations and Confl icts, 1877–1911 511

dians moved to New England in search of textile jobs, many families with hopes of scraping together enough savings to return to Quebec and buy a farm. Th ousands of men came alone, especially from Ireland, Italy, and Greece. Many single Irishwomen also immigrated. But some would-be sojourners ended up staying a lifetime, while immigrants who had expected to settle permanently found themselves forced to leave by an accident or sudden economic depression. One historian has estimated that a third of immigrants to the United States in this era returned to their home countries.

Along with Italians and Greeks, Eastern European Jews were among the most numerous arrivals. Th e fi rst American Jews, who numbered around 50,000 in 1880, had been mostly of German-Jewish descent. In the next four decades, more than 3 million poverty-stricken Jews arrived from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and other parts of Eastern Europe, transforming the Jewish presence in the United States. Like other immigrants, they sought economic opportunity, but they also came to escape religious repression.

Wherever they came from, immigrants took a considerable gamble in traveling to the United States. Some prospered quickly, especially if they came with education, money, or well-placed business contacts. Others, by toiling many years in harsh condi- tions, succeeded in securing a better life for their children or grandchildren. Still oth- ers met with catastrophe or early death. One Polish man who came with his parents in 1908 summed up his life over the next thirty years as “a mere struggle for bread.” He added: “Sometimes I think life isn’t worth a damn for a man like me. . . . Look at my wife and kids — undernourished, seldom have a square meal.” But an Orthodox Rus- sian Jewish woman told an interviewer that she “thanked God for America,” where she had married, raised three children, and made a good life. She “liked everything about this country, especially its leniency toward the Jews.”

Asian Americans and Exclusion Compared with Europeans, newcomers from Asia faced even harsher treatment. Th e fi rst Chinese immigrants had arrived in the late 1840s during the California gold rush. Aft er the Civil War, the Burlingame Treaty between the United States and China opened the way for increasing numbers to emigrate (American Voices, p. 512). Fleeing poverty and upheaval in southern China, they, like European immigrants, fi lled low- wage jobs in the American economy. Th e Chinese confronted threats and violence. “We kept indoors aft er dark for fear of being shot in the back,” remembered one Chi- nese immigrant to California. During the depression of the 1870s, a rising tide of rac- ism was especially extreme in the Pacifi c coast states, where the majority of Chinese immigrants lived. “Th e Chinese must go!” railed Dennis Kearney, leader of the Cali- fornia Workingmen’s Party, who referred to Asians as “almond-eyed lepers.” Incited by Kearney in July 1877, a mob burned San Francisco’s Chinatown and beat up residents. In the 1885 Rock Springs massacre in Wyoming, white men burned the local China- town and murdered at least twenty-eight Chinese miners.

Despite such atrocities, some Chinese managed to build profi table businesses and farms. Many did so by fi lling the only niches native-born Americans left open to them: running restaurants and laundries. Facing intense political pressure, Congress in 1882 passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, specifi cally barring Chinese laborers from entering

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S

512

S o l d i n t o S e x u a l S l a v e r y S U E Y H I N In 1899, Helen Grey, a reporter for the San Francisco Call, published a remarkable interview with Suey Hin, a Chinese woman sold into sexual slavery in the United States. Many such girls, who began work as young as age ten, died of abuse before they fi nished serving their illegal contracts. Suey Hin survived.

I was born in Shantung, where the fl owers are more beautiful and the birds sing more sweetly than in any other place. But my people were poor. Th ere was not enough for all our stomachs. Two baby girls had been left exposed — that is, to die, you know. Th ey were born aft er me and my father said oft en, “She is too many.”

Once there was an old woman came to our house and . . . talked to my father and mother. She put a piece of gold money in my hand and told me to give it to my father. . . . Th at night the old woman carried me away, and I kicked and screamed. . . . I remember the ship, and I remember playing with other little girls. We were brought to San Francisco, and there were fi ve or ten of us and we all lived with a woman on Ross alley. Every little while some one would come and see us, and as we grew older the girls were sold.

[When I was twelve] it was my turn. . . . I was a slave for ten years. Th ere was a man who loved me, but he was a poor washman, and he worked eight years and saved all, all the time. I saved all I could get, too, but it took eight years before we had saved $3000. Th en we bought me from my owner and we were married.

Th en, ah, it’s all of my life I like to think about. It wasn’t but two next years, three years. My husband got sick and didn’t get any better, and then he died. I didn’t have anything but just myself, and I had to

live. . . . So I got a little house [i.e., she went back to prostitution]. . . .

Pretty soon I went back to China, but I did not go to my own village. No, my parents would not want to see me. I went to Hongkong and I bought three girls. Two of them are dead. . . . I went back to China again. I wanted to see my village . . . but I didn’t let anybody know I was there. I went to the place where they put the babies to die. Th ere was a baby there. A little bit of a brown baby, and she didn’t look much good anyway. But I wanted some one from my own village, and so I took the baby, and she is Ah Lung. . . . She’s not a slave you know. She’s a good girl, just the same as white girls. She comes from Shantung, so I say she shall never be like the others. Slave girls most all die soon. It’s bad, yes. . . .

Th at trip I brought home four girls besides Ah Lung. You see it was not hard to smuggle the girls into this country then. You can’t do it so easy now. . . . [Last year] I brought back six girls. One girl I sold to Loo Wing. All the other girls are here now. I will not make them bad any more. . . . I suppose they get married. Only they must marry Christians. I Christian now. . . . I used to work hard for the devil, him you call, Satan, but now I work harder for Jesus.

SOURCE: Judy Yung, Unbound Voices: A Documentary History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 144–153.

C H A P T E R 1 7 Industrial America: Corporations and Confl icts, 1877–1911 513

the United States. Each decade thereaft er, Congress renewed the law and tightened its provisions; it was not repealed until 1943. Exclusion barred almost all Chinese women, forcing husbands and wives to spend many years apart when men took jobs in the United States.

Asian immigrants made vigorous use of the courts to try to protect their rights. In a series of cases brought by Chinese and later Japanese immigrants, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all persons born in the United States had citizenship rights that could not be revoked, even if their parents had been born abroad. Nonetheless, well into the twentieth century, Chinese immigrants (as opposed to native-born Chinese Ameri- cans) could not apply for citizenship. Meanwhile, Japanese and a few Korean immi- grants also began to arrive; by 1909, there were 40,000 Japanese immigrants working in agriculture, 10,000 on railroads, and 4,000 in canneries. In 1906, the U.S. attorney general ruled that Japanese and Koreans, like Chinese immigrants, were barred from citizenship.

Th e Chinese Exclusion Act created the legal foundations on which far-reaching exclusionary policies would be built in the 1920s and aft er (Chapter 22). To enforce the law, Congress and the courts gave sweeping new powers to immigration offi cials, transforming the Chinese into America’s fi rst illegal immigrants. Drawn, like others, by the promise of jobs in America’s expanding economy, Chinese men stowed away on ships or walked across the borders. Disguising themselves as Mexicans — who at that time could freely enter the United States — some perished in the desert as they tried to reach California.

Huang Zunxian, a Chinese consul general who served in San Francisco in the early 1880s, became increasingly disillusioned as he tried to aid his immigrant coun- trymen. He expressed his bitterness in a poem:

Anti-Chinese Racism This cartoon from the magazine Puck, drawn by James A. Wales during the 1880 presiden- tial campaign, off ers vivid evidence of the widespread and virulent American prejudice against Chinese immigrants. Republican candidate James Garfi eld, on the left, and Democratic candidate Winfi eld Scott Hancock, on the right, both nail up their party’s “planks” in favor of restricting Chinese immigration. Asian immigrants were not permitted to apply for naturalization as U.S. citizens; they thus had no vote and no power in politics. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, with bipartisan support, soon after Garfi eld’s victory. Library of Congress.

514 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

Th ey have sealed all the gates tightly, Door aft er door with guards beating alarms. . . . Th ose who do not carry passports Are arrested as soon as they arrive. Anyone with a yellow-colored face Is beaten even if guiltless. . . . Th e American eagle strides the heavens soaring, With half of the globe clutched in his claw. Although the Chinese arrived later, Couldn’t you leave them a little space?

Some would-be immigrants, known as paper sons, relied on Chinese residents in the United States, who generated documents falsely claiming the newcomers as Ameri- can-born children. Paper sons memorized pages of information about their supposed relatives and hometowns. Th e San Francisco earthquake of 1906 helped their cause by

destroying all the port’s records. “Th at was a big chance for a lot of Chinese,” remembered one immigrant. “Th ey forged themselves certifi - cates saying they could go back to China and bring back four or fi ve sons, just like that!” Such persistence ensured that, despite the harsh poli- cies of Chinese exclusion, the fl ow of Asian immigrants never fully ceased.

Labor Gets Organized In the American political system, labor has typically been weak. Industrial workers cluster in cities, near factories and jobs; compared with small towns and rural areas, urban areas have been underrepresented in bodies such as the U.S. Senate and the presidential electoral college, in which representation is calculated by state, rather than (or in addition to) individuals. Th is problem became acute in the era of industrializa- tion, and it has lingered. Even today, the twenty-two U.S. senators elected from Alaska, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming represent a smaller number of people, combined, than the two U.S. senators who represent heavily urban California.

Faced with this obstacle, labor advocates could adopt one of two strategies. First, they could try to make political alliances with sympathetic rural voters who shared their problems. Second, they could reject politics and create narrowly focused trade unions to negotiate directly with employers. In general, labor advocates emphasized the fi rst strategy between the 1870s and the early 1890s, and the latter in the early twentieth century. Across this era, while industrialization made America increasingly rich and powerful, it also brought large-scale confl ict between labor and capital.

What factors accounted for the diff erent expectations and experi- ences of immigrants in this era?

What were the long-term conse- quences of the Chinese Exclusion Act for U.S. immigration policy?

C H A P T E R 1 7 Industrial America: Corporations and Confl icts, 1877–1911 515

The Emergence of a Labor Movement Th e problem of industrial labor entered Americans’ consciousness dramatically with the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Protesting steep wage cuts amid the depression that had begun in 1873, thousands of railroad workers walked off the job. Broader issues were at stake. “Th e offi cers of the road,” reported strike leader Barney Donahue in upstate New York, “were bound to break the spirit of the men, and any or all organiza- tions they belonged to.” He believed railroad companies wanted to block workers from “all fellowship for mutual aid.” Th e strike brought rail travel and commerce to a halt. Th ousands of people poured into the streets of Buff alo, Pittsburgh, and Chicago to protest the economic injustice wrought by railroads — as well as fi res caused by stray sparks from locomotives and injuries and deaths on train tracks in urban neighbor- hoods. When Pennsylvania’s governor sent state militia to break the strike, Pittsburgh crowds reacted by burning railroad property and overturning locomotives. Similar clashes between police and protesters occurred in other cities across the country, from Galveston, Texas, to San Francisco.

Th e 1877 strike left more than fi fty people dead and caused $40 million worth of damage, primarily to railroad property. “It seemed as if the whole social and political structure was on the very brink of ruin,” wrote one journalist. For their role in the strike, many railroad workers were fi red and blacklisted: railroad companies circu- lated their names on a “do not hire” list to prevent them from getting any work in the industry. In the aft ermath of the strike, the U.S. government created the National Guard, intended not to protect Americans against foreign invasion but to enforce order at home.

Watching the upheavals of industrialization, some radical thinkers pointed out its impact on workers. Among the most infl uential was Henry George, whose book Prog- ress and Poverty (1879) was a best-seller for decades aft er publication. George warned that Americans had been too optimistic about the impact of railroads and manufac- turing, which they hoped would — aft er an initial period of turmoil — bring prosperity to all. George believed the emerging industrial order meant permanent poverty. Industrialization, he wrote, was driving a wedge through society, lift ing the fortunes of professionals and the middle class but pushing the working class down by forcing them into deskilled, dangerous, and low-paid labor. George’s proposed solution, a fed- eral “single tax” on landholdings, did not win widespread support, but his insightful diagnosis of the problem helped encourage radical movements for economic reform.

Many rural people believed they faced the same problems as industrial workers. In the new economy, they found themselves at the mercy of large corporations, from equipment dealers who sold them harvesters and plows to railroads and grain eleva- tors that shipped and stored their products. Th ough farmers appeared to have more independence than corporate employees, many felt trapped in a web of middlemen who chipped away at their profi ts while international forces robbed them of decision- making power.

Farmers denounced not only corporations but also the previous two decades of government eff orts to foster economic development — policies that now seemed wrongheaded. Farmers’ advocates argued that high tariff s forced rural families to pay too much for basic necessities while failing to protect America’s great export crops,

516 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

cotton and wheat. At the same time, they charged, Republican fi nancial policies ben- efi tted banks, not borrowers. Farmers blamed railroad companies for taking govern- ment grants and subsidies to build but then charging unequal rates that privileged big manufacturers. From the farmers’ point of view, public money had been used to build giant railroad companies that turned around and exploited ordinary people.

Th e most prominent rural protest group of the early postwar decades was the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, founded in 1867. Like industrial work- ers, Grange farmers sought to counter the rising power of corporate middlemen through cooperation and mutual aid. Local Grange halls brought farm families together for recreation and conversation. Th e Grange set up its own banks, insurance companies, and grain elevators, and, in Iowa, even a farm implement factory. Many Grange members also advocated political action, building independent local parties that ran on anticorporate platforms.

During the 1870s depression, Grangers, labor advocates, and local workingmen’s parties forged a national political movement, the Greenback-Labor Party. In the South, Greenbackers protested the collapse of Reconstruction and urged that every man’s vote be protected. Across the country, Greenbackers advocated laws to regulate corpo- rations and enforce an eight-hour workday to reduce long, grueling work hours. Th ey called for the federal government to print more greenback dollars and increase the amount of money in circulation; this, they argued, would stimulate the economy, cre- ate jobs, and help borrowers by allowing them to pay off debts in dollars that, over time, slowly decreased in value. Greenbackers, like many industrial labor leaders, sub- scribed to the ideal of producerism: they dismissed middlemen, bankers, lawyers, and investors as idlers who lived off the sweat of people who worked with their hands. As a Pittsburgh worker put it in an 1878 poem, it was not the money-handlers or exec- utives at the top but the “noble sons of Labor . . . / Who with bone, and brain, and fi ber / Make the nation’s wealth.”

Th e Greenback movement radicalized thousands of farmers, miners, and indus- trial workers. In Alabama’s coal-mining regions, black and white miners cooperated in the party. Texas boasted seventy African American Greenback clubs. In 1878, Greenback-Labor candidates won more than a million votes, and the party elected fi ft een congressmen nationwide. In the Midwest, Greenback pressure helped trigger a wave of economic regulatory actions known as Granger laws. By the early 1880s, twenty-nine states had created railroad commissions to supervise railroad rates and policies; others appointed commissions to regulate insurance and utility companies. Such early regulatory eff orts were not always eff ective, but they were crucial starting points for reform. While short-lived, the Greenback movement created the foundation for more sustained eff orts to regulate big business.

The Knights of Labor Th e most important union of the late nineteenth century, the Knights of Labor, was founded in 1869 as a secret society of garment workers in Philadelphia. In 1878, as the Greenback movement reached its height, some Knights served as delegates to Greenback-Labor conventions. Like Grangers, Knights believed that ordinary people needed control over the enterprises in which they worked. Th ey proposed to set up

C H A P T E R 1 7 Industrial America: Corporations and Confl icts, 1877–1911 517

shops owned by employees, transforming America into what they called a cooperative commonwealth. In keeping with this broad-based vision, the order practiced open membership, irrespective of race, gender, or fi eld of employment — though, like other labor groups, the Knights excluded Chinese immigrants.

Th e Knights had a strong political bent. Th ey believed that only electoral action could bring about many of their goals, such as government regulation of corporations and laws that required employers to negotiate during strikes. Th eir 1878 platform denounced the “aggressiveness of great capitalists and corporations.” “If we desire to enjoy the full blessings of life,” the Knights warned, “a check [must] be placed upon unjust accumulation, and the power for evil of aggregated wealth.” Among their demands were workplace safety laws, prohibition of child labor, a federal tax on the nation’s highest incomes, public ownership of telegraphs and railroads, and govern- ment recognition of workers’ right to organize. Th e Knights also advocated personal responsibility and self-discipline. Th eir leader, Terence Powderly, warned that the abuse of liquor robbed as many workers of their wages as did ruthless employers.

Growing rapidly in the 1880s, the Knights union was sprawling and decentralized. It included not only skilled craft smen such as carpenters, ironworkers, and beer brew- ers but also textile workers in Rhode Island, domestic workers in Georgia, and ten- ant farmers in Arkansas. Knights organized working- men’s parties to advocate a host of reforms, ranging from an eight-hour workday to cheaper streetcar fares and better garbage collection in urban areas. One of their key innovations was hiring a full-time women’s organizer, Leonora Barry. An Irish

The Knights of Labor The caption on this union card — “By Industry we Thrive” — expresses the core principle of the Knights of Labor that everything of value is the product of honest labor. The two fi gures are ideal representations of that “producerist” belief — hand- some workers, respectably attired, doing productive labor. A picture of the Grand Master Workman, Terence V. Powderly, hangs on the wall, benignly watching them. Pic- ture Research Consultants & Archives.

518 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

American widow who was forced into factory work aft er her husband’s death, Barry became a labor advocate out of horror at the conditions she experienced on the job. To the discomfort of some male Knights, she investigated and exposed widespread evi- dence of sexual harassment on the job.

Th e Knights’ growth in the 1880s showed the grassroots basis of labor activism. Powderly tried to avoid strikes, which he saw as costly and risky. But the organization’s greatest growth resulted from spontaneous, grassroots striking. In 1885, thousands of workers on the Southwest Railroad walked off the job to protest wage cuts; aft erward, they telegraphed the Knights and asked to be admitted as members. Th e strike enhanced the Knights’ reputation among workers and built membership to 750,000. By the following year, local assemblies had sprung up in every state and almost every county in the United States.

Just as the Knights reached this pinnacle of infl uence, an episode of violence brought them down. In 1886, a protest at the McCormick reaper works in Chicago led to a clash with police that left four strikers dead. (Th ree unions, including a Knights of Labor assembly, had struck, but the Knights had reached an agreement and returned to work. Only the machinists’ union remained on strike when the incident occurred.) Chicago was a hotbed of anarchism, the revolutionary advocacy of a stateless society. Local anarchists, many of them German immigrants, called a protest meeting the next day, May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square. When police tried to disperse the crowd, someone threw a bomb that killed several policemen. Offi cers responded with gunfi re. In the trial that followed, eight anarchists were found guilty of murder and criminal conspiracy. All were convicted, not on any defi nitive evidence that one of them threw the bomb (the bomber’s identity still remains unknown) but on the basis of their anti- government speeches. Four of the eight were executed by hanging, one committed suicide in prison, and the others received long sentences.

Th e Haymarket violence profoundly damaged the American labor movement. Seizing on resulting antiunion hysteria, employers took the off ensive. Th ey broke strikes with mass arrests, tied up the Knights in expensive court proceedings, and forced workers to sign contracts pledging not to join labor organizations. Th e Knights of Labor never recovered. In the view of the press and many prosperous Americans, they were tainted by their alleged links with anarchism. Struggles between industrial- ists and workers had created bitter divides.

Farmers and Workers: The Cooperative Alliance In the aft ermath of Haymarket, the Knights’ cooperative vision did not entirely fade. A new rural movement, the Farmers’ Alliance, arose to take up many of the issues that Grangers and Greenbackers had earlier sought to address. Founded in Texas during the depression of the 1870s, the Farmers’ Alliance spread across the plains states and the South, becoming by the late 1880s the largest farmer-based movement in Ameri- can history. A separate Colored Farmers’ Alliance arose to represent rural African Americans. Th e harsh conditions farmers were enduring — including drought in the West and plunging global prices for corn, cotton, and wheat — intensifi ed the move- ment’s appeal. Traveling Alliance lecturers exhorted farmers to “stand as a great con- servative body against . . . the growing corruption of wealth and power.”

C H A P T E R 1 7 Industrial America: Corporations and Confl icts, 1877–1911 519

Industrial Violence: A Dynamited Mine, 1894 Strikes in the western mining regions pitted ruthless owners, bent on control of their property and workforce, against fi ercely independent miners who knew how to use dynamite. Some of the bloodiest confl icts occurred in Colorado mining towns, where the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) had strong support and a series of Republican governors sent state militia to back the mine owners. Violence broke out repeatedly between the early 1890s and the 1910s. At Victor, Colorado, in May 1894, as dozens of armed sheriff s’ deputies closed in on angry WFM members occupying the Strong Mine in protest, the miners blew up the mine’s shaft house and boiler. Showered with debris, the deputies boarded the next train out of town. Because Colorado then had a Populist governor, Davis Waite, who sympathized with the miners and ordered the deputies to disband, this strike was one of the few in which owners and miners reached a peaceful settlement — a temporary victory for the union. Library of Congress.

Like earlier movements, Alliance leaders pinned their initial hopes on cooperative stores and exchanges that would circumvent middlemen. Cooperatives gathered farm- ers’ orders and bought in bulk at wholesale prices, passing the savings along. Alliance cooperatives achieved notable victories in the late 1880s. Th e Dakota Alliance, for example, off ered members cheap hail insurance and low prices on machinery and farm supplies. Th e Texas Alliance established a huge cooperative enterprise to market cotton and provide farmers with cheap loans. When cotton prices fell further in 1891, however, the Texas exchange failed. Other cooperatives also suff ered from chronic underfunding and lack of credit, and they faced hostility from merchants and lenders they tried to circumvent.

Th e Texas Farmers’ Alliance thus proposed a federal price-support system for farm products, modeled on the national banks. Under this plan, the federal govern- ment would hold crops in public warehouses and issue loans on their value until they could be profi tably sold. When Democrats — still wary of big-government schemes — declared the idea too radical, Alliances in Texas, Kansas, South Dakota, and elsewhere

520 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

decided to create a new political party, the Populists (see Chapter 20). In this venture, the Alliance cooperated with the weakened Knights of Labor, seeking to use rural vot- ers’ substantial clout on behalf of urban workers who shared their vision.

By this time, farmer-labor coalitions had made a considerable impact on state politics. But state laws and commissions were proving ineff ective against corporations of national and even global scope. It was diffi cult for Wisconsin, for instance, to enforce new laws against a railroad company whose lines might stretch from Chicago to Seattle and whose corporate headquarters might be in Minnesota. Militant farmers and labor advocates demanded federal action.

In 1887, responding to this pressure, Congress and President Grover Cleveland passed two landmark laws. Th e Hatch Act provided federal funding for agricultural research and education, meeting farmers’ demands for government aid to agriculture. Th e Interstate Commerce Act counteracted a Supreme Court decision of the previous year, Wabash v. Illinois (1886), that had struck down states’ authority to regulate rail- roads. Th e act created the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), charged with investigating interstate shipping, forcing railroads to make their rates public, and suing in court when necessary to make companies reduce “unjust or unreasonable” rates.

Th ough creation of the ICC was a direct response to farmer-labor demands, its fi nal form represented a compromise. Radical leaders wanted Congress to establish a direct set of rules under which railroads must operate. If a railroad did not comply, any citizen could take the company to court; if the new rules triggered bankruptcy, the railroad could convert to public ownership. But getting such a plan through Congress proved impossible. Lawmakers more sympathetic to business called instead for an expert commission to oversee the railroad industry. In a pattern that repeated fre- quently over the next few decades, the commission model proved more acceptable to the majority of congressmen.

Th e ICC faced formidable challenges. Th ough the new law forbade railroads from reaching secret rate-setting agreements, evidence was diffi cult to gather and secret “pooling” continued. A hostile Supreme Court also undermined the commission’s powers. In a series of sixteen decisions over the two decades aft er the ICC was created, the Court sided with railroads fi ft een times. Th e justices delivered a particularly hard blow in 1897 when they ruled that the ICC had no power to interfere with shipping rates. Nonetheless, the ICC’s existence was a major achievement. In the early twentieth century, Congress would strengthen the commission’s powers, and the ICC would become one of the most powerful federal agencies charged with overseeing private business.

Another Path: The American Federation of Labor While the Knights of Labor exerted political pressure, other workers pursued a diff er- ent strategy. In the 1870s, printers, ironworkers, bricklayers, and other skilled workers organized nationwide trade unions. Th ese “brotherhoods” focused on the everyday needs of workers in skilled occupations. Trade unions sought a closed shop — with all jobs reserved for union members — that kept out lower-wage workers. Union rules specifi ed terms of work, sometimes in minute detail. Many unions emphasized mutual aid. Because working on the railroads was a high-risk occupation, for example, broth-

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erhoods of engineers, brakemen, and fi remen pooled contributions into funds that provided accident and death benefi ts. Above all, trade unionism asserted craft work- ers’ rights as active decision-makers in the workplace, not just cogs in a management- run machine.

In the early 1880s, many trade unionists joined the Knights of Labor coalition. But the aft ermath of the Haymarket violence persuaded them to leave and create the sepa rate American Federation of Labor (AFL). Th e man who led them was Samuel Gompers, a Dutch-Jewish cigar maker whose family had emigrated to New York in 1863. Gompers headed the AFL for the next thirty years. He believed the Knights relied too much on electoral politics, where victories were likely to be limited, and he did not share their sweeping critique of capitalism. Th e AFL, made up of relatively skilled and well-paid workers, was less interested in challenging the corporate order than in winning a larger share of its rewards.

Having gone to work at age ten, Gompers always contended that what he missed at school he more than made up for in the shop, where cigar makers paid one of their members to read to them while they worked. As a young worker-intellectual, Gompers gravitated to New York’s radical circles, where he participated in lively debates about which strategies workingmen should pursue. Partly out of these debates, and partly from his own experience in the Cigar Makers Union, Gompers hammered out a doc- trine that he called pure-and-simple unionism. Pure referred to membership: strictly limited to workers, organized by craft and occupation, with no reliance on outside advisors or allies. Simple referred to goals: only those that immediately benefi tted workers — better wages, hours, and working conditions. Pure-and-simple unionists distrusted politics. Th eir aim was collective bargaining with employers.

On one level, pure-and-simple unionism worked. Th e AFL was small at fi rst, but by 1904 its membership rose to more than two million. In the early twentieth century, it became the nation’s leading voice for workers, lasting far longer than movements like the Knights of Labor. Th e AFL’s strategy — personifi ed by Gompers — was well suited to an era when Congress and the courts were hostile to labor. By the 1910s, the politi- cal climate would become more responsive; at that later moment, Gompers would soft en his antipolitical stance and join the battle for new labor laws (Chapter 20).

What Gompers gave up most crucially, in the meantime, was the inclusiveness of the Knights. By comparison, the AFL was far less welcoming to women and blacks; it included mostly skilled craft smen. Th ere was little room in the AFL for department- store clerks and other service workers, much less the farm tenants and domestic ser- vants whom the Knights had organized. Despite the AFL’s success among skilled craft smen, the narrowness of its base was a problem that would come back to haunt the labor movement later on. Gompers, however, saw that corporate titans and their political allies held tremendous power, and he advocated what he saw as the most practical defensive plan. In the meantime, the upheaval wrought by industrialization spread far beyond the workplace, transforming every aspect of American life.

How did the methods used by railroad workers to protest their working conditions compare with the tactics employed by the Green- backers, who also sought reform?

How did the key institutions and goals of the labor movement change, and what gains and losses resulted from this shift?

522 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

S U M M A RY Th e end of the Civil War ushered in the era of American big business. Exploiting the continent’s vast resources, vertically integrated corporations emerged as the dominant business form, and giant companies built near monopolies in some sectors of the economy. Corporations devised new modes of production, distribution, and market- ing, extending their reach through the department store, the mail-order catalog, and the new advertising industry. Th ese developments laid the groundwork for mass con- sumer culture.

Rapid industrialization drew immigrants from around the world. Until the 1920s, most European and Latin American immigrants were welcome to enter the United States, though they oft en endured harsh conditions aft er they arrived. Asian immi- grants, by contrast, faced severe discrimination. Th e Chinese Exclusion Act blocked all Chinese laborers from coming to the United States; it was later extended to other Asians, and it built the legal framework for broader forms of exclusion.

Nationwide movements for workers’ rights arose in response to industrialization. During the 1870s and 1880s, coalitions of workers and farmers, notably the Knights of Labor and the Farmers’ Alliance, sought political solutions to what they saw as large corporations’ exploitation of working people. Pressure from such movements led to the fi rst major attempts to regulate corporations, such as the federal Interstate Com- merce Act. Radical protest movements were weakened, however, aft er public condem- nation of anarchist violence in 1886 at Chicago’s Haymarket Square. Meanwhile, trade unions such as the American Federation of Labor organized skilled workers and nego- tiated directly with employers, becoming the most popular form of labor organization in the early twentieth century.

Fo r Fu r t h e r E x p l o rat i o n Roger Daniels, Coming to America (2002). A sweeping overview of immigration to the United

States from colonial times to the 1980s. Walter Friedman, Birth of a Salesman (2004). A lively treatment of the rise of salesmanship. Erika Lee, At America’s Gates (2003). One of several superb recent treatments of Chinese im-

migration and exclusion. Harold Livesay, Samuel Gompers and Organized Labor in America (1978). A classic biography

of the AFL’s founder. David Montgomery, Citizen Worker (1993). A brief exploration of workers’ experiences with

government, electoral politics, and the marketplace in the late nineteenth century. Richard White, Railroaded (2011). A recent reassessment of big business and its impact, fo-

cusing on the railroad industry.

C H A P T E R 1 7 Industrial America: Corporations and Confl icts, 1877–1911 523

T I M E L I N E

1863 Cleveland, Ohio, becomes nation’s petroleum refi ning center

1865 Chicago’s Union Stock Yard opens

1867 National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry founded

1869 Knights of Labor founded 1875 John Wanamaker opens

nation’s fi rst department store in Philadelphia

1876 Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone

1877 San Francisco mob attacks Chinatown

Great Railroad Strike 1879 Henry George publishes

Progress and Poverty 1882 John D. Rockefeller creates

Standard Oil Trust Congress passes Chinese

Exclusion Act 1885 Rock Springs massacre of

Chinese miners

1886 Haymarket Square violence American Federation of Labor

(AFL) founded 1887 Hatch Act Interstate Commerce Act 1889 New Jersey passes law

enabling trusts to operate in the state

1892 Homestead lockout 1893 Severe depression hits; causes

mass unemployment and wave of corporate mergers

1900 America’s one hundred largest companies control one-third of national productive capacity

1901 J. P. Morgan creates U.S. Steel, America’s fi rst billion-dollar corporation

1907 Marianna, Pennsylvania, mine disaster

1908 Walter Dill publishes The Psychology of Advertising

M AK E IT S T I C K

Go online and use LearningCurve to retain what you’ve read.

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18 The Victorians Make the Modern 1880–1917 When Philadelphia hosted the 1876 Centennial Exposition, Americans weren’t sure what to expect from their fi rst world’s fair — including what foods exhibitors would off er. One cartoonist humorously pro- posed that Russians would serve castor oil, Arabs would bring camel’s milk punch, and Germans would off er beer. Refl ecting widespread racial prejudices, the cartoon showed Chinese men selling “hashed cat”

and “rat pie.” In reality, though, the 1876 Exposition off ered only plain lunchrooms and, for the wealthiest visitors, expensive French fare.

By the early twentieth century, American food had undergone a revolution. Visi- tors to the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 could try food from Scandinavia, India, and the Philippines. Across the United States, Chinese American restaurants fl ourished as a chop suey craze swept the nation. New Yorkers could sample Hungarian and Syr- ian cuisine; a San Francisco journalist enthusiastically reviewed local Mexican and Japanese restaurants. Even small-town diners could oft en fi nd an Italian or German meal.

What had happened? Americans had certainly not lost all their prejudices: while plates of chop suey were being gobbled up, laws excluding Chinese immigrants remained fi rmly in place. Industrialization reshaped class identities, however, and pro- moted a creative consumer culture. In the great cities, amusement parks and vaudeville theaters catered to industrial workers (Chapter 19). Other institutions served middle- class customers who wanted novelty and variety at a reasonable price. A Victorian ethos of self-restraint and moral uplift gave way to expectations of leisure and fun. As African Americans and women claimed a right to public spaces — to shop, dine, and travel freely — they built powerful reform movements. At the same time, the new pres- sures faced by professional men led to aggressive calls for masculine fi tness, exempli- fi ed by the rise of sports.

Stunning scientifi c discoveries — from dinosaur fossils to distant galaxies — also challenged long-held beliefs. Faced with electricity, medical vaccines, and other wonders, Americans celebrated technological solutions to human problems. But while science

IDENTIFY THE BIG IDEA How did the changes wrought by industrialization shape Americans’ identities, beliefs, and culture?

C H A P T E R 1 8 The Victorians Make the Modern, 1880–1917 525

gained popularity, religion hardly faded. In fact, religious diversity grew, as immi- grants brought new faiths and Protestants responded with innovations of their own. Americans found themselves living in a modern world — one in which their grand- parents’ beliefs and ways of life no longer seemed to apply. In a market-driven society that claimed to champion individual freedom, Americans took advantage of new ideas while expressing anxiety over the accompanying upheavals and risks.

Commerce and Culture As the United States industrialized, the terms middle class and working class came widely into use. Americans adopted these broad identities not only in the workplace but also in their leisure time. Professionals and corporate managers prospered; they and their families enjoyed rising income and an array of tempting ways to spend their dollars. Celebrating these new technological wonders, Americans hailed inventors as heroes. Th e most famous, Th omas Edison, operated an independent laboratory rather than working for a corporation. Edison, like many of the era’s businessmen, was a shrewd entrepreneur who focused on commercial success. He and his colleagues

Horatio Alger Jr. In dozens of popular boys’ books published between 1867 and 1917, Horatio Alger Jr. assured young readers that if they were honest, worked hard, and cultivated good character, they could succeed in the new competitive economy. His heroes, such as the famous “Ragged Dick,” often grew up in poverty on the streets of big cities. Brave and Bold (1874) told the story of a small-town boy forced to work in a factory; he is unfairly fi red, but through persistence and courage he wins a good job and recovers an inheritance for his mother. Alger’s books were republished often, as in this boys’ magazine from 1911, and many remain in print today. Courtesy Stanford University Archives.

526 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

helped introduce such lucrative products as the incandescent lightbulb and the pho- nograph, which came widely into use in American homes.

Even working-class Americans enjoyed cheaper products delivered by global trade and mass production, from bananas and cigarettes to colorful dime novels and magazines. Edison’s moving pictures, for example, fi rst found popularity among the urban working class (Chapter 19). Consumer culture appeared, at least, to be demo- cratic: anyone should be able to eat at a restaurant or buy a rail ticket for the “ladies’ car” — as long as she or he could pay. In practice, though, this was not the case, and consumer venues became sites of struggle over class inequality, race privilege, and proper male and female behavior.

Consumer Spaces America’s public spaces — from election polls to saloons and circus shows — had long been boisterous and male-centered. A woman who ventured there without a male chaperone risked damaging her reputation. But the rise of new businesses encouraged change. To attract an eager public, purveyors of consumer culture invited women and families, especially those of the middle class, to linger in department stores and enjoy new amusements.

No one promoted commercial domesticity more successfully than showman P. T. Barnum (1810–1891), who used the country’s expanding rail network to develop his famous traveling circus. Barnum condemned earlier circus managers who had opened their tents to “the rowdy element.” Proclaiming children as his key audience, he cre- ated family entertainment for diverse audiences (though in the South, black audiences sat in segregated seats or attended separate shows). He promised middle-class parents that his circus would teach children courage and promote the benefi ts of exercise. To encourage women’s attendance, Barnum emphasized the respectability and refi nement of his female performers.

Department stores also lured middle-class women by off ering tearooms, chil- dren’s play areas, umbrellas, and clerks to wrap and carry every purchase. Store credit plans enabled well-to-do women to shop without handling money in public. Such tactics succeeded so well that New York’s department store district became known as Ladies’ Mile. Boston department store magnate William Filene called the department store an “Adamless Eden.”

Th ese Edens were for the elite and middle class. Th ough bargain basements and neighborhood stores served working-class families, big department stores enlisted vagrancy laws and police to discourage the “wrong kind” from entering. Working- class women gained access primarily as clerks, cashiers, and cash girls, who at age twelve or younger served as internal store messengers, carrying orders and change for $1.50 a week. Th e department store was no Eden for these women, who worked long hours on their feet, oft en dealing with diffi cult customers. Nevertheless, many clerks claimed their own privileges as shoppers, making enthusiastic use of employee dis- counts and battling employers for the right to wear their fashionable purchases while they worked in the store.

In similar ways, class status was marked by the ways technology entered Ameri- can homes. Th e rise of electricity, in particular, marked the gap between affl uent urban

C H A P T E R 1 8 The Victorians Make the Modern, 1880–1917 527

consumers and rural and working-class families. In elite houses, domestic servants began to use — or fi nd themselves replaced by — an array of new devices, from wash- ing machines to vacuum cleaners. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the tele- phone in 1876, entrepreneurs introduced the device for business use, but it soon found eager residential customers. Telephones changed etiquette and social relations for middle-class suburban women — while providing their working-class counterparts with new employment options.

Railroads also refl ected the emerging privileges of professional families. Finding prosperous Americans eager for excursions, railroad companies, like department stores, made things comfortable for middle-class women and children. Boston’s South Terminal Station boasted of its modern amenities, including “everything that the trav- eler needs down to cradles in which the baby may be soothed.” An 1882 tourist guide promised readers that they could live on the Pacifi c Railroad “with as much true enjoy- ment as the home drawing room.” Rail cars manufactured by the famous Pullman Company of Chicago set a national standard for taste and elegance. Fitted with rich carpets, upholstery, and woodwork, Pullman cars embodied the growing prosperity of America’s elite, infl uencing trends in home decor. Part of their appeal was the chance for people of modest means to emulate the rich. An experienced train conductor observed that the wives of grocers, not millionaires, were the ones most likely to “sweep . . . into a parlor car as if the very carpet ought to feel highly honored by their tread.”

First-class “ladies’ cars” soon became sites of struggle for racial equality. For three decades aft er the end of the Civil War, state laws and railroad regulations varied, and African Americans oft en succeeded in securing seats. One reformer noted, however, “Th ere are few ordeals more nerve-wracking than the one which confronts a colored woman when she tries to secure a Pullman reservation in the South and even in some parts of the North.” When they claimed fi rst-class seats, black women oft en faced con- frontations with conductors, resulting in numerous lawsuits in the 1870s and 1880s. Riding the Chesapeake & Ohio line in 1884, young African American journalist Ida B. Wells was told to leave. “I refused,” she wrote later, “saying that the [nearest alternative] car was a smoker, and as I was in the ladies’ car, I proposed to stay.” Wells resisted, but the conductor and a baggage handler threw her bodily off the train. Returning home to Memphis, Wells sued and won in local courts, but Tennessee’s supreme court reversed the ruling.

In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court settled such issues decisively — but not justly. Th e case, Plessy v. Ferguson, was brought by civil rights advocates on behalf of Homer Plessy, a New Orleans resident who was one-eighth black. Ordered to leave a fi rst-class car and move to the “colored” car of a Louisiana train, Plessy refused and was arrested. Th e Court ruled that such segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment as long as blacks had access to accommodations that were “separate but equal” to those of whites. “Separate but equal” was a myth: segregated facilities in the South were fl a- grantly inferior. Jim Crow segregation laws, named for a stereotyped black character who appeared in minstrel shows, clearly discriminated, but the Court allowed them to stand.

Jim Crow laws applied to public schools and parks and also to emerging commer- cial spaces — hotels, restaurants, streetcars, trains, and eventually sports stadiums and

528 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

movie theaters. Placing a national stamp of approval on segregation, the Plessy deci- sion remained in place until 1954, when the Court’s Brown v. Topeka Board of Educa- tion ruling fi nally struck it down. Until then, blacks’ exclusion from fi rst-class “public accommodations” was one of the most painful marks of racism. Th e Plessy decision, like the rock-bottom wages earned by twelve-year-old girls at Macy’s, showed that consumer culture could be modern and innovative without being politically progres- sive. Business and consumer culture were shaped by, and themselves shaped, racial and class injustices.

Masculinity and the Rise of Sports While industrialization spawned public domesticity — a consumer culture that courted affl uent women and families — it also changed expectations for men in the workplace. Traditionally, the mark of a successful American man was economic inde- pendence: he was his own boss. Now, tens of thousands worked for other men in big companies — and in offi ces, rather than using their muscles. Would the professional American male, through his concentration on “brain work,” become “weak, eff emi- nate, [and] decaying,” as one editor warned? How could well-to-do men assert their independence if work no longer required them to prove themselves physically? How could they develop toughness and strength? One answer was athletics.

“Muscular Christianity”

Th e Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) was one of the earli- est and most successful promoters of athletic fi tness. Introduced in Boston in 1851, the group promoted muscular Christianity, combining

evangelism with gyms and athletic facilities where men could make themselves “clean and strong.” Focusing fi rst on white-collar workers, the YMCA developed a substantial industrial program aft er 1900. Railroad managers and other corporate titans hoped YMCAs would foster a loyal and contented workforce, discouraging labor unrest. Business leaders also relied on sports to build physical and mental discipline and help men adjust their bodies to the demands of the industrial clock. Sports honed men’s competitive spirit, they believed; employer-sponsored teams instilled teamwork and company pride.

Working-class men had their own ideas about sports and leisure, and YMCAs quickly became a site of negotiation. Could workers come to the “Y” to play billiards or cards? Could they smoke? At fi rst, YMCA leaders said no, but to attract working- class men they had to make concessions. As a result, the “Y” became a place where middle-class and working-class customs blended — or existed in uneasy tension. At the same time, YMCA leaders innovated. Searching for winter activities in the 1890s, YMCA instructors invented the new indoor games of basketball and volleyball.

For elite Americans, meanwhile, country clubs fl ourished; both men and women could enjoy tennis, golf, and swimming facilities as well as social gatherings. By the turn of the century — perhaps because country club women were encroaching on their athletic turf — elite men took up even more aggressive physical sports, including boxing, weightlift ing, and martial arts. As early as 1890, future president Th eodore Roosevelt argued that such “virile” activities were essential to “maintain and defend this very civilization.” “Most masterful nations,” he claimed, “have shown a strong taste for

C H A P T E R 1 8 The Victorians Make the Modern, 1880–1917 529

manly sports.” Roosevelt, son of a wealthy New York family, became one of the fi rst American devotees of jujitsu. During his presidency (1901–1909), he desig- nated a judo room in the White House and hired an expert Japanese instructor. Roosevelt also wrestled and boxed, urging other American men — especially among the elite — to increase their leadership fi tness by pursuing the “strenuous life.”

America’s Game Before the 1860s, the only distinctively American game was Native American lacrosse, and the most popular team sport among Euro-

pean Americans was cricket. Aft er the Civil War, however, team sports became a fun- damental part of American manhood, none more successfully than baseball. A derivative of cricket, the game’s formal rules had begun to develop in New York in the 1840s and 1850s. Its popularity spread in military camps during the Civil War. Aft er- ward, the idea that baseball “received its baptism in the bloody days of our Nation’s direst danger,” as one promoter put it, became part of the game’s mythology.

Until the 1870s, most amateur players were clerks and white-collar workers who had leisure to play and the income to buy their own uniforms. Business frowned on baseball and other sports as a waste of time, especially for working-class men. But late- nineteenth-century employers came to see baseball, like other athletic pursuits, as a benefi t for workers. It provided fresh air and exercise, kept men out of saloons, and promoted discipline and teamwork. Players on company-sponsored teams, wearing uniforms emblazoned with their employers’ names, began to compete on paid work time. Baseball thus set a pattern for how other American sports developed. Begun among independent craft smen, it was taken up by elite men anxious to prove their strength and fi tness. Well-to-do Americans then decided the sport could benefi t the working class.

Big-time professional baseball arose with the launching of the National League in 1876. Th e league quickly built more than a dozen teams in large cities, from the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers to the Cleveland Spiders. Team owners were, in their own right, profi t-minded entrepreneurs who shaped the sport to please consumers. Wooden grandstands soon gave way to concrete and steel stadiums. By 1900, boys col- lected lithographed cards of their favorite players, and the baseball cap came into fash- ion. In 1903, the Boston Americans defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates in the fi rst World Series. American men could now adopt a new consumer identity — not as athletes, but as fans.

Rise of the Negro Leagues

Baseball stadiums, like fi rst-class rail cars, were sites of racial negotia- tion and confl ict. In the 1880s and 1890s, major league managers hired a few African American players. As late as 1901, the Baltimore

Orioles succeeded in signing Charlie Grant, a light-skinned black player from Cincin- nati, by renaming him Charlie Tokohoma and claiming he was Cherokee. But as this subterfuge suggested, black players were increasingly barred. A Toledo team received a threatening note before one game in Richmond, Virginia: if their “negro catcher” played, he would be lynched. Toledo put a substitute on the fi eld, and at the end of the season the club terminated the black player’s contract.

To see a longer excerpt of Theodore Roosevelt’s views on sports, along with other primary sources from this period, see Sources for America’s History.

530 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

Shut out of white leagues, players and fans turned to all-black professional teams, where black men could showcase athletic ability and race pride. Louisiana’s top team, the New Orleans Pinchbacks, pointedly named themselves aft er the state’s black Reconstruction governor. By the early 1900s, such teams organized into separate Negro Leagues. Th ough players suff ered from erratic pay and rundown ball fi elds, the leagues thrived until the desegregation of baseball aft er World War II. In an era of stark discrimination, they celebrated black manhood and talent. “I liked the way their uniform fi t, the way they wore their cap,” wrote an admiring fan of the Newark Eagles. “Th ey showed a style in almost everything they did.”

American Football Th e most controversial sport of the industrializing era was foot- ball, which began at elite colleges during the 1880s. Th e great

powerhouse was the Yale team, whose legendary coach Walter Camp went on to become a watch manufacturer. Between 1883 and 1891, under Camp’s direction, Yale scored 4,660 points; its opponents scored 92. Drawing on the workplace model of scientifi c management, Camp emphasized drill and precision. He and other coaches argued that football off ered perfect training for the competitive world of business. Th e game was violent: six players’ deaths in the 1908 college season provoked a public out- cry. Eventually, new rules protected quarterbacks and required coaches to remove injured players from the game. But such measures were adopted grudgingly, with sup- porters arguing that they ruined football’s benefi ts in manly training.

Like baseball and the YMCA, football attracted sponsorship from business leaders hoping to divert workers from labor activism. Th e fi rst professional teams emerged in western Pennsylvania’s steel towns, soon aft er the defeat of the steelworkers’ union. Car negie Steel executives organized teams in Homestead and Braddock; the fi rst league appeared during the anthracite coal strike of 1902. Other teams arose in the midwestern industrial heartland. Th e Indian-Acme Packing Company sponsored the Green Bay Packers; the future Chicago Bears, fi rst known as the Decatur Staleys, were funded by a manufacturer of laundry starch. Like its baseball equivalent, professional football encouraged men to buy in as spectators and fans.

The Great Outdoors As the rise of sports suggests, elite and middle-class Americans began by the 1880s and 1890s to see Victorian culture as stuff y and claustrophobic. Th ey revolted by heading outdoors. A craze for bicycling swept the country; in 1890, at the height of the mania, U.S. manufacturers sold an astonishing ten million bikes. Women were not far behind men in taking up athletics. By the 1890s, even elite women, long confi ned to corsets and heavy clothes that restricted their movement, donned lighter dresses and pursued archery and golf. Artist Charles Gibson became famous for his portraits of the Gibson Girl, an elite beauty depicted on the tennis court or swimming at the beach. Th e Gib- son Girl personifi ed the ideal of “New Women,” more educated, athletic, and indepen- dent than their mothers.

Th ose with money and leisure time used railroad networks to get to the national parks of the West, which, as one senator put it, became a “breathing-place for the national lungs.” People of more modest means began to take up camping. As early as

C H A P T E R 1 8 The Victorians Make the Modern, 1880–1917 531

1904, California’s Coronado Beach off ered tent rentals for $3 a week. A decade later, campgrounds and cottages in many parts of the country catered to a working-class clientele. In an industrial society, the outdoors became associated with leisure and renewal, rather than danger and hard work. One journalist, refl ecting on urban life from the vantage point of a western vacation, wrote, “How stupid it all seems: the mad eagerness of money-making men, the sham pleasures of conventional society.” In the wilderness, he wrote, “your blood clarifi es; your brain becomes active. You get a new view of life.”

As Americans searched for such renewal in remnants of unexploited land, the nation’s fi rst environmental movement arose. John Muir, who fell in love with the Yosemite Valley in 1869, became the most famous voice for wilderness. Raised in a stern Scots Presbyterian family on a Wisconsin farm, Muir knew much of the Bible by heart. He was a keen observer who developed a deeply spiritual relationship with the natural world. His contemporary Mary Austin, whose book Land of Little Rain (1905) celebrated the austere beauty of the California desert, called him “a devout man.” In cooperation with his editor at Century magazine, Muir founded the Sierra Club in 1892. Like the earlier Appalachian Mountain Club, founded in Boston in 1876, the Sierra Club dedicated itself to preserving and enjoying America’s great mountains.

Encouraged by such groups, national and state governments set aside more public lands for preservation and recreation. Th e United States substantially expanded its park system and, during Th eodore Roosevelt’s presidency, extended the reach of national forests. Starting in 1872 with the preservation of Yellowstone in Wyoming, Congress had begun to set aside land for national parks. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson provided comprehensive oversight of these national parks, signing an act cre- ating the National Park Service (Map 18.1). A year later, the system numbered thirteen parks — including Maine’s Acadia, the fi rst east of the Mississippi River.

Environmentalists also worked to protect wildlife. By the 1890s, several state Audubon Societies, named in honor of antebellum naturalist John James Audubon, banded together to advocate broader protections for wild birds, especially herons and egrets that were being slaughtered by the thousands for their plumes. Th ey succeeded in winning the Lacey Act (1900), which established federal penalties for selling speci- fi ed birds, animals, and plants. Soon aft erward, state organizations joined together to form the National Audubon Society. Women played prominent roles in the move- ment, promoting boycotts of hats with plumage. In 1903, President Th eodore Roosevelt created the fi rst National Wildlife Refuge at Pelican Island, Florida.

Roosevelt also expanded preservation under the Antiquities Act (1906), which enabled the U.S. president, without congressional approval, to set aside “objects of historic and scientifi c interest” as national monuments. Two years later, Roosevelt used these powers to preserve 800,000 acres at Arizona’s magnifi cent Grand Canyon. Th e act proved a mixed blessing for conservation. Monuments received weaker protec- tion than national parks did; many fell under the authority of the U.S. Forest Service, which permitted logging and grazing. Business interests thus lobbied to have coveted lands designated as monuments rather than national parks so they could more easily exploit resources. Nonetheless, the creation of national monuments off ered some pro- tection, and many monuments (such as Alaska’s Katmai) later obtained park status. Th e

532 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

expanding network of parks and monuments became popular places to hike, camp, and contemplate natural beauty.

Th e great outdoors provided new opportunities for women with the means to travel. One writer, advising women to enjoy mountain hikes, hinted at liberating pos- sibilities: “For those loving freedom and health,” he recommended “short skirts, pant- lets, stout shoes, tasty hat.” And like other leisure venues, “wilderness” did not remain in the hands of elite men and women. As early as the late 1880s, the lakes and hiking trails of the Catskill Mountains became so thronged with working-class tourists from nearby New York City, including many Jewish immigrants, that elite visitors began to segregate themselves into gated summer communities. Th ey thus preserved the “seclu- sion and privacy” that they snobbishly claimed as the privilege of those who could demonstrate “mental and personal worth.”

At the state level, meanwhile, new game laws triggered confl icts between elite con- servationists and the poor. Shift ing from year-round subsistence hunting to a limited, recreational hunting season brought hardship to poor rural families who depended on game for food. Regulation brought undeniable benefi ts: it suppressed such popular practices as songbird hunting and the use of dynamite to kill fi sh. Looking back on the era before game laws, one Alabama hunter remembered that “the slaughter was ter-

National parks (date established)

National forests

0 250 500 kilometers

0 500 miles250

N

S

E W

A T L A N T I C O C E A N

P A C I F I C O C E A N

C A N A D A

M E X I C O

North Cascades (1968)

Olympic (1909)

Mt. Rainier (1899)

Crater Lake (1902)Redwood

(1968)

Lassen Volcanic (1916)

Lava Beds (1925)

Yosemite (1890)

Kings Canyon (1940)

(General Grant 1890)

Channel Islands (1938)

Glacier (1910)Coulee Dam

(1946)

Yellowstone (1872)Craters of

the Moon (1924) Grand Teton

(1929)

Great Basin (1922) Arches

(1929)

Canyonlands (1964)

Capitol Reef

(1937)

Zion (1909)

Bryce Canyon (1924)

Mesa Verde (1906) Canyon de Chelly (1931)

Lake Meredith (1965)

Alibates Flint Quarries (1965)

Great Sand Dunes (1932)

Grand Canyon (1893)

Petrified Forest (1906) El Malpais (1987)

Rocky Mountain (1915)

Carlsbad Caverns (1923)

Saguaro (1933) White Sands

(1933) Guadalupe Mountains (1966)

Big Bend (1935) Amistad (1965)

Theodore Roosevelt (1947)

Wind Cave (1903)

Badlands (1929)

Dinosaur (1915)

Voyageurs (1971)

Isle Royale (1931)

Pictured Rocks (1966)

Hot Springs (1921)

Mammoth Cave (1926)

Great Smoky Mountains (1926)

Shenandoah (1926)

Cape Cod

(1966)

Acadia (1916)

Biscayne (1968)

Everglades (1934)Dry Tortugas

(1935)

Death Valley (1933)

Sequoia (1890)

Joshua Tree (1936)

Katmai (1980)

Aniakchak (1978)

Lake Clark (1980)

Denali (1917)

Kobuk Valley (1980)

Bering Land

Bridge (1978)

Gates of the Arctic (1980)

Wrangel- St. Elias (1980)

Kenai Fjords (1980)

Glacier Bay

(1980)

Haleakala (1960)

Hawaii Volcanoes (1916)

Puerto Rico VIRGIN IS.

Virgin Islands (1956)

MAP 18.1 National Parks and Forests, 1872–1980 Yellowstone, the fi rst national park in the United States, dates from 1872. In 1893, the federal govern- ment began to intervene to protect national forests. Without Theodore Roosevelt, however, the national forest program might have languished; during his presidency, he added 125 million acres to the forest system, plus six national parks in addition to several that had already been created during the 1890s. America’s national forest and park systems remain one of the most visible and beloved legacies of federal policy innovation in the decades between the Civil War and World War I.

C H A P T E R 1 8 The Victorians Make the Modern, 1880–1917 533

rifi c.” But while game laws prevented further extinctions like that of the passenger pigeon, which vanished around 1900, they made it harder for rural people to support themselves from the bounty of the land.

Women, Men, and the Solitude of Self Speaking to Congress in 1892, women’s rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton described what she called the “solitude of self.” Stanton rejected the claim that women did not need equal rights because they enjoyed men’s protection. “Th e talk of sheltering woman from the fi erce storms of life is the sheerest mockery,” she declared. “Th ey beat on her from every point of the compass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself.”

Stanton’s argument captured one of the dilemmas of industrialization: the marketplace of labor brought both free- dom and risk, and working-class women were particularly vulnerable. At the same time, middle-class women — expected

How did new consumer practices, arising from industrialization, reshape Americans’ gender, class, and race relationships?

What changes in American society precipitated the rise of national parks and monuments?

John Singer Sargent, Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes, 1897 This painting was a wedding gift to this wealthy young couple, both of whom inherited substantial fortunes. In what ways does the artist, a famous portraitist, represent Edith Minturn Stokes as a “New Woman” of the 1890s? What does he suggest about the relationship between husband and wife? How might we reconcile this with the painting’s title, which identifi es the central fi gure as “Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes,” not as “Edith”? Mrs. Stokes was a noted beauty and active in an array of charitable causes. Here she wears a shirtwaist and skirt, more practical than the traditional heavy dresses and bustles of the previous decade. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

534 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

to engage in selfl ess community service — oft en saw the impact of industrialization more clearly than fathers, brothers, and husbands did. In seeking to address alcohol- ism, poverty, and other social and economic ills, they gained a new sense of their own collective power. Women’s protest and reform work thus helped lay the foundations for progressivism (Chapter 20) and modern women’s rights.

Changes in Family Life Th e average American family, especially among the middle class, decreased in size during the industrial era. In 1800, white women who survived to menopause had borne an average of 7.0 children; by 1900, the average was 3.6. On farms and in many working-class families, youngsters counted as assets on the family balance sheet: they worked in fi elds or factories. But parents who had fewer sons and daughters could concentrate their resources, educating and preparing each child for success in the new economy. Among the professional classes, education became a necessity, while limit- ing family size became, more broadly, a key to upward mobility.

Several factors limited childbearing. Americans married at older ages, and many mothers tried to space pregnancies more widely — as their mothers and grandmothers had — by nursing children for several years, which suppressed fertility. By the late nineteenth century, as vulcanized rubber became available, couples also had access to a range of other contraceptive methods, such as condoms and diaphragms. With pressure for family limitation rising, these methods were widely used and apparently eff ective. But couples rarely wrote about them. Historians’ evidence comes from the occasional frank diary and from the thriving success of the mail-order contraceptive industry, which advertised prominently and shipped products — wrapped in discreet brown paper packages — to customers nationwide.

Reluctance to talk about contraceptives was understandable, since information about them was stigmatized and, aft er 1873, illegal to distribute. During Reconstruc- tion, Anthony Comstock, crusading secretary of the New York Society for the Sup- pression of Vice, secured a federal law banning “obscene materials” from the U.S. mail. Th e Comstock Act (1873) prohibited circulation of almost any information about sex and birth control. Comstock won support for the law, in part, by appealing to parents’ fears that young people were receiving sexual information through the mail, promot- ing the rise of “secret vice.” Th ough critics charged Comstock with high-handed inter- ference in private matters, others supported his work, fearful of the rising tide of pornography, sexual information, and contraceptives made available by industrialization. A committee of the New York legislature declared Comstock’s crusade “wholly essen- tial to the safety and decency of the community.” It appears, however, that Comstock had little success in stopping the lucrative and popular trade in contraceptives.

Education In the industrial economy, the watchword for young people who hoped to secure good jobs was education. A high school diploma — now a gateway to a college degree — was valuable for boys who hoped to enter professional or managerial work. Daughters attended in even larger numbers than their brothers. Parents of the Civil War genera-

C H A P T E R 1 8 The Victorians Make the Modern, 1880–1917 535

tion, who had witnessed the plight of war widows and orphans, encouraged girls to prepare themselves for teaching or offi ce jobs, work before marriage, and gain skills they could fall back on, “just in case.” By 1900, 71 percent of Americans between the ages of fi ve and eighteen attended school. Th at fi gure rose further in the early twenti- eth century, as public offi cials adopted laws requiring school attendance.

Most high schools were coeducational, and almost every high school featured ath- letics. Recruited fi rst as cheerleaders for boys’ teams, girls soon established fi eld hockey and other sports of their own. Boys and girls engaged in friendly — and sometimes not-so-friendly — rivalry in high school. In 1884, a high school newspaper in Con- cord, New Hampshire, published this poem from a disgruntled boy who caricatured his female classmates:

We know many tongues of living and dead, In science and fi ction we’re very well read, But we cannot cook meat and cannot make bread And we’ve wished many times that we were all dead.

A female student shot back a poem of her own, denouncing male students’ smoking habit:

But if boys will smoke cigarettes Although the smoke may choke them, One consolation still remains — Th ey kill the boys that smoke them.

Th e rate of Americans attending college had long hovered around 2 percent; driven by public universities’ expansion, the rate rose in the 1880s, reaching 8 percent by 1920. Much larger numbers attended a growing network of business and technical schools. “GET A PLACE IN THE WORLD,” advertised one Minneapolis business col- lege in 1907, “where your talents can be used to the best advantage.” Typically, such schools off ered both day and night classes in subjects such as bookkeeping, typewrit- ing, and shorthand.

Th e needs of the new economy also shaped the curriculum at more traditional collegiate institutions. State universities emphasized technical training and fed the growing professional workforce with graduates trained in fi elds such as engineering. Many private colleges distanced themselves from such practical pursuits; their admin- istrators argued that students who aimed to be leaders needed broad-based knowl- edge. But they modernized course off erings, emphasizing French and German, for example, rather than Latin and Greek. Harvard, led by dynamic president Charles W. Eliot from 1869 to 1909, pioneered the liberal arts. Students at the all-male college chose from a range of electives, as Eliot called for classes that developed each young man’s “individual reality and creative power.”

In the South, one of the most famous educational projects was Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, founded in 1881. Washington both taught and exem- plifi ed the goal of self-help; his autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), became a best- seller. Because of the deep poverty in which most southern African Americans lived, Washington concluded that “book education” for most “would be almost a waste of time.” He focused instead on industrial education. Students, he argued, would “be sure

536 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

of knowing how to make a living aft er they had left us.” Tuskegee sent female graduates into teaching and nursing; men more oft en entered the industrial trades or farmed by the latest scientifi c methods.

Washington gained national fame in 1895 with his Atlanta Compromise address, delivered at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. For the exposition’s white organizers, the racial “compromise” was inviting Washington to speak at all. It was a move intended to show racial progress in the South. Washington, in turn, deliv- ered an address that many interpreted as approving racial segregation. Stating that African Americans had, in slavery days, “proved our loyalty to you,” he assured whites that “in our humble way, we shall stand by you . . . ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours.” Th e races could remain socially detached: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fi ngers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Washington urged, however, that whites join him in working for “the highest intelligence and development of all.”

Whites greeted this address with enthusiasm, and Washington became the most prominent black leader of his generation. His soothing rhetoric and style of leadership, based on avoiding confrontation and cultivating white patronage and private infl u- ence, was well suited to the diffi cult years aft er Reconstruction. Washington believed that money was color-blind, that whites would respect economic success. He repre- sented the ideals of millions of African Americans who hoped education and hard work would erase white prejudice. Th at hope proved tragically overoptimistic. As the

tide of disenfranchisement and segregation rolled in, Washington would come under fi re from a younger generation of race leaders who argued that he accommodated too much to white racism.

In addition to African American educa- tion, women’s higher education expanded notably. In the Northeast and South, women most oft en attended single-sex institutions, including teacher-training colleges. For affl u-

Booker T. Washington In an age of severe racial oppression, Booker T. Washington emerged as the leading public voice of African Americans. He was remarkable both for his eff ectiveness in speaking to white Americans and for his deep understanding of the aspirations of blacks. Born a slave, Washington had plenty of fi rsthand experience with racism. But having befriended several whites in his youth, he also believed that African Americans could appeal to whites of good will — and maneuver around those who were hostile — in the struggle for equality. He hoped, most of all, that economic achievement would erase white prejudice. Brown Brothers.

C H A P T E R 1 8 The Victorians Make the Modern, 1880–1917 537

ent families, private colleges off ered an education equivalent to men’s — for an equally high price. Vassar College started the trend when it opened in 1861; Smith, Wellesley, and others followed. Anxious doctors warned that these institutions were dangerous: intensive brain work would unsex young women and drain energy from their ovaries, leading them to bear weak children. But as thousands of women earned degrees and suff ered no apparent harm, fears faded. Single-sex higher education for women spread from private to public institutions, especially in the South, where the Mississippi State College for Women (1885) led the way.

Coeducation was more prevalent in the Midwest and West, where many state uni- versities opened their doors to female students aft er the Civil War. Women were also admitted to most African American colleges founded during Reconstruction. By 1910, 58 percent of America’s colleges and universities were coeducational. While students at single-sex institutions forged strong bonds with one another, women also gained benefi ts from learning with men. When male students were friendly, they built com- fortable working relationships; when men were hostile, women learned coping skills that served them well in later employment or reform work. One doctor who studied at the University of Iowa remembered later that he and his friends mercilessly harassed the fi rst women who entered the medical school. But when the women showed they were good students, the men’s attitudes changed to “wholesome respect.”

Whether or not they got a college education, more and more women recognized, in the words of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, their “solitude of self.” In the changing econ- omy, they could not always count on fathers and husbands. Women who needed to support themselves could choose from dozens of guidebooks such as What Girls Can Do (1880) and How to Make Money Although a Woman (1895). Th e Association for the Advancement of Women, founded in 1873 by women’s college graduates, defended women’s higher education and argued that women’s paid employment was a positive good.

Today, many economists argue that education and high-quality jobs for women are keys to reducing poverty in the developing world. In the United States, that process also led to broader gains in women’s political rights. As women began to earn advanced degrees, work for wages and salaries, and live independently, it became harder to argue that women were “dependents” who did not need to vote.

From Domesticity to Women’s Rights As the United States confronted industrialization, middle-class women steadily expanded their place beyond the household, building reform movements and taking political action. Starting in the 1880s, women’s clubs sprang up and began to study such problems as pollution, unsafe working conditions, and urban poverty. So many formed by 1890 that their leaders created a nationwide umbrella organization, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Women justifi ed such work through the ideal of maternalism, appealing to their special role as mothers. Maternalism was an inter- mediate step between domesticity and modern arguments for women’s equality. “Women’s place is Home,” declared the journalist Rheta Childe Dorr. But she added, “Home is the community. Th e city full of people is the Family. . . . Badly do the Home and Family need their mother.”

538 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union

One maternalist goal was to curb alcohol abuse by prohibiting liquor sales. Th e Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1874, spread rapidly aft er 1879, when

charismatic Frances Willard became its leader. More than any other group of the late nineteenth century, the WCTU launched women into reform. Willard knew how to frame political demands in the language of feminine self-sacrifi ce. “Womanliness fi rst,” she advised her followers; “aft erward, what you will.” WCTU members vividly described the plight of abused wives and children when men suff ered in the grip of alcoholism. Willard’s motto was “Home Protection,” and though it placed all the blame on alcohol rather than other factors, the WCTU became the fi rst organization to iden- tify and combat domestic violence.

Th e prohibitionist movement drew activists from many backgrounds. Middle- class city dwellers worried about the link between alcoholism and crime, especially in the growing immigrant wards. Rural citizens equated liquor with big-city sins such as prostitution and political corruption. Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, and members of other denominations condemned drinking for religious reasons. Immigrants pas- sionately disagreed, however: Germans and Irish Catholics enjoyed their Sunday beer and saw no harm in it. Saloons were a centerpiece of working-class leisure and com- munity life, off ering free lunches, public toilets, and a place to share neighborhood news. Th us, while some labor unions advocated voluntary temperance, attitudes toward prohibition divided along ethnic, religious, and class lines.

WCTU activism led some leaders to raise radical questions about the shape of industrial society. As she investigated alcohol abuse, Willard increasingly confronted poverty, hunger, unemployment, and other industrial problems. “Do Everything,” she urged her members. Across the United States, WCTU chapters founded soup kitchens and free libraries. Th ey introduced a German educational innovation, the kindergar- ten. Th ey investigated prison conditions. Th ough she did not persuade most prohibi- tionists to follow her lead, Willard declared herself a Christian Socialist and urged more attention to workers’ plight. She advocated laws establishing an eight-hour workday and abolishing child labor.

Willard also called for women’s voting rights, lending powerful support to the independent suff rage movement that had emerged during Reconstruction. Contro- versially, the WCTU threw its energies behind the Prohibition Party, which exercised considerable clout during the 1880s. Women worked in the party as speakers, conven- tion delegates, and even local candidates. Liquor was big business, and powerful inter- ests mobilized to block antiliquor legislation. In many areas — particularly the cities — prohibition simply did not gain majority support. Willard retired to England, where she died in 1898, worn and discouraged by many defeats. But her legacy was powerful. Other groups took up the cause, eventually winning national prohibition aft er World War I.

Th rough its emphasis on human welfare, the WCTU encouraged women to join the national debate over poverty and inequality of wealth. Some became active in the People’s Party of the 1890s, which welcomed women as organizers and stump speak- ers. Others led groups such as the National Congress of Mothers, founded in 1897, which promoted better child-rearing techniques in rural and working-class families.

C H A P T E R 1 8 The Victorians Make the Modern, 1880–1917 539

Th e WCTU had taught women how to lobby, raise money, and even run for offi ce. Willard wrote that “perhaps the most signifi cant outcome” of the movement was women’s “knowledge of their own power.”

Women, Race, and Patriotism

As in temperance work, women played central roles in patriotic movements and African American community activism. Members of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), founded in 1890,

celebrated the memory of Revolutionary War heroes. Equally infl uential was the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), founded in 1894 to extol the South’s “Lost Cause.” Th e UDC’s elite southern members shaped Americans’ memory of the Civil War by constructing monuments, distributing Confederate fl ags, and promoting school textbooks that defended the Confederacy and condemned Reconstruction. Th e UDC’s work helped build and maintain support for segregation and disenfranchisement.

African American women did not sit idle in the face of this challenge. In 1896, they created the National Association of Colored Women. Th rough its local clubs, black women arranged for the care of orphans, founded homes for the elderly, advo- cated temperance, and undertook public health campaigns. Such women shared with white women a determination to carry domesticity into the public sphere. Journalist Victoria Earle Matthews hailed the American home as “the foundation upon which nationality rests, the pride of the citizen, and the glory of the Republic.” She and other African American women used the language of domesticity and respectability to jus- tify their work.

One of the most radical voices was Ida B. Wells, who as a young Tennessee school- teacher sued the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad for denying her a seat in the ladies’ car. In 1892, a white mob in Memphis invaded a grocery store owned by three of Wells’s friends, angry that it competed with a nearby white-owned store. When the black store owners defended themselves, wounding several of their attackers, all three were lynched. Grieving their deaths, Wells left Memphis and urged other African Ameri- cans to join her in boycotting the city’s white businesses. As a journalist, she launched a one-woman campaign against lynching. Wells’s investigations demolished the myth that lynchers were reacting to the crime of interracial rape; she showed that the real cause was more oft en economic competition, a labor dispute, or a consensual relation- ship between a white woman and a black man. Settling in Chicago, Wells became a noted and accomplished reformer, but in an era of increasing racial injustice, few whites supported her cause.

Th e largest African American women’s organization arose within the National Baptist Church (NBC), which by 1906 represented 2.4 million black churchgoers. Founded in 1900, the Women’s Convention of the NBC funded night schools, health clinics, kindergartens, day care centers, and prison outreach programs. Adella Hunt Logan, born in Alabama, exemplifi ed how such work could lead women to demand political rights. Educated at Atlanta University, Logan became a women’s club leader, teacher, and suff rage advocate. “If white American women, with all their mutual and acquired advantage, need the ballot,” she declared, “how much more do Black Ameri- cans, male and female, need the strong defense of a vote to help secure them their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?”

540 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

Women’s Rights Th ough it had split into two rival organizations during Reconstruc- tion, the movement for women’s suff rage reunited in 1890 in the

National American Woman Suff rage Association (NAWSA). Soon aft erward, suff rag- ists built on earlier victories in the West, winning full ballots for women in Colorado (1893), Idaho (1896), and Utah (1896, reestablished as Utah gained statehood). Aft er- ward, movement leaders were discouraged by a decade of state-level defeats and Con- gress’s refusal to consider a constitutional amendment. But suff rage again picked up momentum aft er 1911 (Map 18.2). By 1913, most women living west of the Mississippi River had the ballot. In other localities, women could vote in municipal elections, school elections, or liquor referenda.

Th e rising prominence of the women’s suff rage movement had an ironic result: it prompted some women — and men — to organize against it, in groups such as the

This map uses colors to divide the states into four categories. Purple indicates where women had the right to vote before 1910. In blue states women had equal voting rights prior to 1919. Red shows where women enjoyed the right to vote in some elections, but not others. Green indicates the states where women could not vote at all in 1919.

Dates on the map indicate when individual states, on their own initiative, granted full suffrage to women.

Note how women won the right to vote in a roughly west-to-east movement. What reasons might be advanced to explain this pattern of diffusion?

By 1909

1910–1918

Partial suffrage by 1919

No women’s suffrage by 1919

Effective Date of Equal Suffrage

N

S

E W

0 250 500 kilometers

0 500 miles250

PACIFIC OCEAN

ATLANTIC OCEAN

ARIZONA 1912

CALIF. 1911

COLORADO 1893

IDAHO 1896

KANSAS 1912

MICH. 1918

MONTANA 1914

OKLAHOMA 1918

OREGON 1912

NEVADA 1914 UTAH

1896

WYOMING 1890

NEW YORK 1917

WASH. 1910

SOUTH DAKOTA

1918

C A N A D A

M E X I C O

(after Opdycke)

NEW MEXICO

NORTH DAKOTA

NEBRASKA

TEXAS LA.

ARK.

MO.

IOWA

MINN.

WIS.

ILL. IND. OHIO

KY.

TENNESSEE

MISS. ALA. GEORGIA

FLA.

S.C.

NORTH CAROLINA

VA. W. VA.

PA.

VT. N.H.

ME.

MASS.

CONN.

R.I.

DEL.MD. N.J.

MAP 18.2 Women’s Suff rage, 1890–1919 By 1909, after more than sixty years of agitation, only four lightly populated western states had granted women full voting rights. A number of other states off ered partial suff rage, limited to voting for school boards and such issues as taxes and local referenda on whether or not to permit the sale of liquor licenses (the so-called local option). Between 1910 and 1918, as the eff ort shifted to the struggle for a constitutional amendment, eleven states joined the list granting full suff rage. The West remained the most progressive region in granting women’s voting rights; the most stubborn resistance lay in the ex-Confederacy.

C H A P T E R 1 8 The Victorians Make the Modern, 1880–1917 541

National Association Opposed to Woman Suff rage (1911). Antisuff ragists argued that it was expensive to add so many voters to the rolls; wives’ ballots would just “double their husbands’ votes” or worse, cancel them out, subjecting men to “petticoat rule.” Some antisuff ragists also argued that voting would undermine women’s special roles as disinterested reformers: no longer above the fray, they would be plunged into the “cesspool of politics.” In short, women were “better citizens without the ballot.” Such arguments helped delay passage of national women’s suff rage until aft er World War I.

By the 1910s, some women moved beyond suff rage to take a public stance for what they called feminism — women’s full political, economic, and social equality. A famous site of sexual rebellion was New York’s Greenwich Village, where radical intel- lectuals, including many gays and lesbians, created a vibrant community. Among other political activities, women there founded the Heterodoxy Club (1912), open to any woman who pledged not to be “orthodox in her opinions.” Th e club brought together intellectuals, journalists, and labor organizers. Almost all supported suff rage, but they had a more ambitious view of what was needed for women’s liberation. “I wanted to belong to the human race, not to a ladies’ aid society,” wrote one divorced journalist who joined Hetero- doxy. Feminists argued that women should not simply fulfi ll expectations of feminine self- sacrifi ce; they should work on their own behalf.

Science and Faith Amid rapid change, the United States remained a deeply religious nation. But new discoveries enhanced another kind of belief: faith in science. In the early nineteenth century, most Americans had believed the world was about six thousand years old. No one knew what lay beyond the solar system. By the 1910s, paleontologists were clas- sifying the dinosaurs, astronomers had identifi ed distant galaxies, and physicists could measure the speed of light. Many scientists and ordinary Americans accepted the the- ory of evolution.

Scientifi c discoveries received widespread publicity through a series of great world’s fairs, most famously Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, held (a year late) to celebrate Columbus’s arrival of America in 1492. At the vast fair- grounds, visitors strolled through enormous buildings that displayed the latest inven- tions in industry, machinery, and transportation. Th ey marveled over a moving sidewalk and, at dusk, saw the fair buildings illuminated with strings of electric lights. One observer called the fair “a vast and wonderful university of the arts and sciences.”

It is hardly surprising, amid these achievements, that “fact worship” became a central feature of intellectual life. Researchers in many fi elds argued that one could rely only on hard facts to understand the “laws of life.” In their enthusiasm, some econo- mists and sociologists rejected all social reform as sentimental. Fiction writers and artists kept a more humane emphasis, but they made use of similar methods — close

How did educational opportuni- ties change after the Civil War, and for whom?

How did women use widespread beliefs about their “special role” to justify political activism, and for what goals?

542 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

observation and attention to real-life experience — to create works of realism. Other Americans struggled to reconcile scientifi c discoveries with their religious faith.

Darwinism and Its Critics Evolution — the idea that species are not fi xed, but ever changing — was not a simple idea on which all scientists agreed. In his immensely infl uential 1859 book, On the Ori- gin of Species, British naturalist Charles Darwin argued that all creatures struggle to survive. When individual members of a species are born with random genetic muta- tions that better suit them for their environment — for example, camoufl age coloring for a moth — these characteristics, since they are genetically transmissible, become dominant in future generations. Many scientists rejected this theory of natural selec- tion. Th ey followed a line of thinking laid out by French biologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who argued, unlike Darwin, that individual animals or plants could acquire transmit- table traits within a single lifetime. A rhinoceros that fought fi ercely, in Lamarck’s view, could build up a stronger horn; its off spring would then be born with that trait.

Darwin himself disapproved of the word evolution (which does not appear in his book) because it implied upward progress. In his view, natural selection was blind: environments and species changed randomly. Others were less scrupulous about drawing sweeping conclusions from Darwin’s work. In the 1870s, British philosopher Herbert Spencer spun out an elaborate theory of how human society advanced through “survival of the fi ttest.” Social Darwinism, as Spencer’s idea became (confusingly) known, found its American champion in William Graham Sumner, a sociology pro- fessor at Yale. Competition, said Sumner, was a law of nature, like gravity. Who were the fi ttest? “Millionaires,” Sumner declared. Th eir success showed they were “naturally selected.”

Even in the heyday of Social Darwinism, Sumner’s views were controversial (American Voices, p. 543). Some thinkers objected to the application of biological fi ndings to the realm of society and government. Th ey pointed out that Darwin’s theo- ries applied to fi nches and tortoises, not human institutions. Social Darwinism, they argued, was simply an excuse for the worst excesses of industrialization. By the early twentieth century, intellectuals revolted against Sumner and his allies.

Meanwhile, though, the most dubious applications of evolutionary ideas were codifi ed into new reproductive laws based on eugenics, a so-called science of human breeding. Eugenicists argued that mentally defi cient people should be prevented from reproducing. Th ey proposed sterilizing those deemed “unfi t,” especially residents of state asylums for the insane or mentally disabled. In early-twentieth-century America, almost half of the states enacted eugenics laws. By the time eugenics subsided in the 1930s, about twenty thousand people had been sterilized, with California and Virginia taking the lead. Women in Puerto Rico and other U.S. imperial possessions (Chap- ter 21) also suff ered from eugenics policies. Advocates of eugenics had a broad impact. Because they associated mental unfi tness with “lower races” — including people of African, Asian, and Native American descent — their arguments lent support to segre- gation and racial discrimination. By warning that immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe would dilute white Americans’ racial purity, eugenicists helped win passage of immigration restriction in the 1920s.

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S o c i a l D a r w i n i s m T H E O D O R E D R E I S E R Many nineteenth-century Americans came to believe that human society advanced through fi erce competition — an idea that refl ected the cutthroat world of American business. In Th e Financier (1912), novelist Th eodore Dreiser traces the rise of Frank Cowperwood, a character loosely based on that of real-life fi nancier and streetcar magnate Charles Yerkes. Here, Dreiser suggests how one future businessman came to replace his mother’s Christian faith with a belief in “survival of the fi ttest.”

[Frank] could not fi gure out how this thing he had come into — this life — was orga- nized. How did all these people get into the world? What were they doing here? Who started things, anyhow? His mother told him the story of Adam and Eve, but he didn’t believe it. . . .

One day he saw a squid and a lobster put in [a] tank, and in connection with them was witness to a tragedy which stayed with him all his life and cleared things up considerably intellectually. Th e lobster, it appeared from the talk of the idle bystand- ers, was off ered no food, as the squid was considered his rightful prey. He lay at the bottom of the clear glass tank . . . apparently seeing nothing — you could not tell in which way his beady, black buttons of eyes were looking — but apparently they were never off the body of the squid. Th e latter, pale and waxy in texture, looking very much like pork fat or jade, moved about in torpedo fashion; but his movements were apparently never out of the eyes of his enemy, for by degrees small portions of his body began to disappear, snapped off by the relentless claws of his pursuer. . . .

[One day] only a portion of the squid remained. . . . Th e boy stayed as long as he could, the bitter struggle fascinating him. Now, maybe, or in an hour or a day, the squid might die, slain by the lobster, and the

lobster would eat him. He looked again at the greenish-copperish engine of destruc- tion in the corner and wondered when this would be. . . . He returned that night, and lo! the expected had happened. Th ere was a little crowd around the tank. Th e lobster was in the corner. Before him was the squid cut in two and partially devoured. . . .

Th e incident made a great impression on him. It answered in a rough way that riddle which had been annoying him so much in the past: “How is life organized?” Th ings lived on each other — that was it. Lobsters lived on squids and other things. What lived on lobsters? Men, of course! . . . And what lived on men? he asked himself. Was it other men? Wild animals lived on men. And there were Indians and cannibals. And some men were killed by storms and accidents. He wasn’t so sure about men living on men; but men did kill each other. . . .

[Frank] was already pondering on what he should be in this world, and how he should get along. From seeing his father count money, he was sure that he would like banking; and Th ird Street, where his father’s offi ce was, seemed to him the cleanest, most fascinating street in the world.

SOURCE: Th eodore Dreiser, Th e Financier (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1912), 10–15.

544 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

Realism in the Arts Inspired by the quest for facts, American authors rejected nineteenth-century roman- ticism and what they saw as its unfortunate product, sentimentality. Instead, they took up literary realism. In the 1880s, editor and novelist William Dean Howells called for writers “to picture the daily life in the most exact terms possible.” By the 1890s, a younger generation of writers pursued this goal. Th eodore Dreiser dismissed unrealis- tic novels that always had “a happy ending.” In Main-Travelled Roads (1891), based on the struggles of his midwestern farm family, Hamlin Garland turned the same unspar- ing eye on the hardships of rural life. Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), privately printed because no publisher would touch it, described the seduc- tion, abandonment, and death of a slum girl.

Some authors believed realism did not go far enough to overturn sentimentalism. Jack London spent his teenage years as a factory worker, sailor, and tramp. In stories such as “Th e Law of Life” (1901), he dramatized what he saw as the harsh reality of an uncaring universe. American society, he said, was “a jungle wherein wild beasts eat and are eaten.” Similarly, Stephen Crane tried to capture “a world full of fi sts.” London and Crane helped create literary naturalism. Th ey suggested that human beings were not so much rational shapers of their own destinies as blind victims of forces beyond their control — including their own subconscious impulses.

America’s most famous writer, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who took the pen name of Mark Twain, came to an equally bleak view. Th ough he achieved enormous success with such lighthearted books as Th e Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Clemens courted controversy with Th e Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), notable for its indictment of slavery and racism. In his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), which ends with a bloody, technology-driven slaughter of Arthur’s knights, Mark Twain became one of the bitterest critics of America’s idea of progress. Soon aft erward, Clemens was devastated by the loss of his wife and two daughters, as well as by failed investments and bankruptcy. An outspoken critic of imperialism and foreign missions, Twain eventually denounced Christianity itself as a hypocriti- cal delusion. Like his friend the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, Clemens “got rid of theology.”

By the time Clemens died in 1910, realist and naturalist writers had laid the groundwork for modernism, which rejected traditional canons of literary taste. Ques- tioning the whole idea of progress and order, modernists focused on the subconscious and “primitive” mind. Above all, they sought to overturn convention and tradition. Poet Ezra Pound exhorted, “Make it new!” Modernism became the fi rst great literary and artistic movement of the twentieth century.

In the visual arts, new technologies infl uenced aesthetics. By 1900, some photog- raphers argued that their “true” representations made painting obsolete. But painters invented their own forms of realism. Nebraska-born artist Robert Henri became fasci- nated with life in the great cities. “Th e backs of tenement houses are living documents,” he declared, and he set out to put them on canvas. Henri and his followers, notably John Sloan and George Bellows, called themselves the New York Realists. Critics derided them as the Ash Can school because they chose subjects that were not conven- tionally beautiful.

C H A P T E R 1 8 The Victorians Make the Modern, 1880–1917 545

In 1913, Realists participated in one of the most controversial events in American art history, the Armory Show. Housed in an enormous National Guard building in New York, the exhibit introduced America to modern art. Some painters whose work appeared at the show were experimenting with cubism, characterized by abstract, geo- metric forms. Along with works by Henri, Sloan, and Bellows, organizers featured paintings by European rebels such as Pablo Picasso. America’s academic art world was shocked. One critic called cubism “the total destruction of the art of painting.” But as the exhibition went on to Boston and Chicago, more than 250,000 people crowded to see it.

A striking feature of both realism and modernism, as they developed, was that many leading writers and artists were men. In making their work strong and modern, they also strove to assert their masculinity. Paralleling Th eodore Roosevelt’s call for “manly sports,” they denounced nineteenth-century culture as hopelessly feminized. Stephen Crane called for “virility” in literature. Jack London described himself as a “man’s man, . . . lustfully roving and conquering.” Artist Robert Henri banned small brushes as “too feminine.” In their own ways, these writers and artists contributed to a broad movement to masculinize American culture.

Arthur B. Davies, Dancers, 1914–1915 Artist Arthur Davies (1862–1928) was one of the primary organizers of New York’s 1913 Armory Show, which introduced Americans to modernist art. An associate of John Sloan and other New York Realists, Davies experimented with an array of painting styles, as well as printmaking and tapestry making. This painting dates from a three-year period, just after the Armory Show, in which Davies experimented with Cubist techniques. Dancers, 1914–1915 (oil on canvas), Detroit Institute of Arts, USA/Gift of Ralph Harman Booth/ The Bridgeman Art Library.

546 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

Religion: Diversity and Innovation By the turn of the twentieth century, emerging scientifi c and cultural paradigms posed a signifi cant challenge to religious faith. Some Americans argued that science and modernity would sweep away religion altogether. Contrary to such predictions, Amer- ican religious practice remained vibrant. Protestants developed creative new responses to the challenges of industrialization, while millions of newcomers built institutions for worship and religious education.

Immigrant Faiths Arriving in the United States in large numbers, Catholics and Jews wrestled with similar questions. To what degree should they adapt

to Protestant-dominated American society? Should the education of clergy be changed? Should children attend religious or public schools? What happened if they married outside the faith? Among Catholic leaders, Bishop John Ireland of Minnesota argued that “the principles of the Church are in harmony with the interests of the Republic.” But traditionalists, led by Archbishop Michael A. Corrigan of New York, disagreed. Th ey sought to insulate Catholics from the pluralistic American environ- ment. Indeed, by 1920, almost two million children attended Catholic elementary schools nationwide, and Catholic dioceses operated fi ft een hundred high schools. Catholics as well as Jews feared some of the same threats that distressed Protestants: industrial poverty and overwork kept working-class people away from worship ser- vices, while new consumer pleasures enticed many of them to go elsewhere.

Faithful immigrant Catholics were anxious to preserve familiar traditions from Europe, and they generally supported the Church’s traditional wing. But they also wanted religious life to express their ethnic identities. Italians, Poles, and other new arrivals wanted separate parishes where they could celebrate their customs, speak their languages, and establish their own parochial schools. When they became numer- ous enough, they also demanded their own bishops. Th e Catholic hierarchy, domi- nated by Irishmen, felt the integrity of the Church was at stake. Th e demand for ethnic parishes implied local control of church property. With some strain, the Catholic Church managed to satisfy the diverse needs of the immigrant faithful. It met the demand for representation, for example, by appointing immigrant priests as auxiliary bishops within existing dioceses.

In the same decades, many prosperous native-born Jews embraced Reform Juda- ism, abandoning such religious practices as keeping a kosher kitchen and conduct- ing services in Hebrew. Th is was not the way of Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe, who arrived in large numbers aft er the 1880s. Generally much poorer and eager to preserve their own traditions, they founded Orthodox synagogues, oft en in vacant stores, and practiced Judaism as they had at home.

But in Eastern Europe, Judaism had been an entire way of life, one not easily repli- cated in a large American city. “Th e very clothes I wore and the very food I ate had a fatal eff ect on my religious habits,” confessed the hero of Abraham Cahan’s novel Th e Rise of David Levinsky (1917). “If you . . . attempt to bend your religion to the spirit of your sur- roundings, it breaks. It falls to pieces.” Levinsky shaved off his beard and plunged into the Manhattan clothing business. Orthodox Judaism survived the transition to America, but like other immigrant religions, it had to renounce its claims to some of the faithful.

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Protestant Innovations

One of the era’s dramatic religious developments — facilitated by global steamship and telegraph lines — was the rise of Protestant foreign mis- sions. From a modest start before the Civil War, this movement peaked

around 1915, a year when American religious organizations sponsored more than nine thousand overseas missionaries, supported at home by armies of volunteers, including more than three million women. A majority of Protestant missionaries served in Asia, with smaller numbers posted to Africa and the Middle East. Most saw American-style domesticity as a central part of evangelism, and missionary societies sent married couples into the fi eld. Many unmarried women also served overseas as missionary teachers, doctors, and nurses, though almost never as ministers. “American woman,” declared one Christian reformer, has “the exalted privilege of extending over the world those blessed infl uences, that are to renovate degraded man.”

Protestant missionaries won converts, in part, by providing such modern services as medical care and women’s education. Some missionaries developed deep bonds of respect with the people they served. Others showed considerable condescension toward the “poor heathen,” who in turn bristled at their assumptions (America Com- pared, p. 548). One Presbyterian, who found Syrians uninterested in his gospel mes- sage, angrily denounced all Muslims as “corrupt and immoral.” By imposing their views of “heathen races” and attacking those who refused to convert, Christian mis- sionaries sometimes ended up justifying Western imperialism.

Chauvinism abroad refl ected attitudes that also surfaced at home. Starting in Iowa in 1887, militant Protestants created a powerful political organization, the American Protective Association (APA), which for a brief period in the 1890s counted more than two million members. Th is virulently nativist group expressed outrage at the existence of separate Catholic schools while demanding, at the same time, that all public school teachers be Protestants. Th e APA called for a ban on Catholic offi ceholders, arguing that they were beholden to an “ecclesiastic power” that was “not created and controlled by American citizens.” In its virulent anti-Catholicism and calls for restrictions on immigrants, the APA prefi gured the revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s (Chapter 22).

Th e APA arose, in part, because Protestants found their dominance challenged. Millions of Americans, especially in the industrial working class, were now Catholics or Jews. Overall, in 1916, Protestants still constituted about 60 percent of Americans affi liated with a religious body. But they faced formidable rivals: the number of prac- ticing Catholics in 1916 — 15.7 million — was greater than the number of Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians combined.

Some Protestants responded to the urban, immigrant challenge by evangelizing among the unchurched. Th ey provided reading rooms, day nurseries, vocational classes, and other services. Th e goal of renewing religious faith through dedication to justice and social welfare became known as the Social Gospel. Its goals were epito- mized by Charles Sheldon’s novel In His Steps (1896), which told the story of a congre- gation who resolved to live by Christ’s precepts for one year. “If church members were all doing as Jesus would do,” Sheldon asked, “could it remain true that armies of men would walk the streets for jobs, and hundreds of them curse the church, and thousands of them fi nd in the saloon their best friend?”

Th e Salvation Army, which arrived from Great Britain in 1879, also spread a gos- pel message among the urban poor, off ering assistance that ranged from soup kitchens

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C h r i s t i a n i t y i n t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d J a p a n During the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exhibition, a Parliament of Religions brought together representatives of prominent faiths for discussion. English-speaking Protestants dominated the program, but several Asian representatives included Kinzo Hirai, a lay Buddhist from Japan. In his speech, Hirai reviewed Japan’s experiences with the United States since Commodore Matthew C. Perry “opened” the country in 1853.

I do not understand why the Christian lands have ignored the rights and advantages of forty million souls of Japan for forty years. . . . One of the excuses off ered by foreign nations is that our country is not yet civilized. Is it the principle of civilized law that the rights and profi ts of the so-called uncivilized, or the weaker, should be sac- rifi ced? As I understand it, the spirit and necessity of law is to protect the rights and profi ts of the weaker against the aggression of the stronger. . . .

From the religious source, the claim is made that the Japanese are idolaters and heathen. . . . [A]dmitting for the sake of argument that we are idolaters and heathen, is it Christian morality to trample upon the rights and advantages of a non-Christian nation, coloring all their natural happiness with the dark stain of injustice? . . .

You send your missionaries to Japan and they advise us to be moral and believe Christianity. We like to be moral, we know that Christianity is good; and we are very thankful for this kindness. But at the same time our people are rather perplexed. . . . For when we think that the treaty stipulated in the time of feudalism, when we were yet in our youth, is still clung to by the power- ful nations of Christendom; when we fi nd that every year a good many western vessels of seal fi shery are smuggled into our seas; when legal cases are always decided by the foreign authorities in Japan unfavorably to us; when some years ago a Japanese was not

allowed to enter a university on the Pacifi c coast of America because of his being of a diff erent race; when a few months ago the school board in San Francisco enacted a regulation that no Japanese should be allowed to enter the public school there; when last year the Japanese were driven out in wholesale from one of the territories of the United States; when our business men in San Francisco were compelled by some union not to employ Japanese assistants and laborers, but the Americans; when there are some in the same city who speak on the platform against those of us who are already here; when there are many who go in procession hoisting lanterns marked “Japs must go”; when the Japanese in the Hawai- ian Islands were deprived of their suff rage; when we see some western people in Japan who erect before the entrance to their houses a special post upon which is the notice, “No Japanese is allowed to enter here” — just like a board upon which is written, “No dogs allowed”; when we are in such a situation, notwithstanding the kindness of the western nations from one point of view, who send their missionaries to us, that we unintelligent heathens are embarrassed and hesitate to swallow the sweet and warm liquid of the heaven of Christianity, will not be unreasonable.

SOURCE: Th e World’s Parliament of Religions, ed. John Henry Barrows (Chicago: Parliament Publishing Co., 1893), 444–450.

C H A P T E R 1 8 The Victorians Make the Modern, 1880–1917 549

to shelters for former prostitutes. When all else failed, down-and-outers knew they could count on the Salvation Army, whose bell ringers became a familiar sight on city streets. Th e group borrowed up-to-date marketing techniques and used the latest busi- ness slang in urging its Christian soldiers to “hustle.”

Th e Salvation Army succeeded, in part, because it managed to bridge an emerging divide between Social Gospel reformers and Protestants who were taking a diff erent theological path. Disturbed by what they saw as rising secularism, conservative minis- ters and their allies held a series of Bible Conferences at Niagara Falls between 1876 and 1897. Th e resulting “Niagara Creed” reaffi rmed the literal truth of the Bible and the certain damnation of those not born again in Christ. By the 1910s, a network of churches and Bible institutes had emerged from these conferences. Th ey called their movement fundamentalism, based on their belief in the fundamental truth of the Bible.

Fundamentalists and their allies made particularly eff ective use of revival meet- ings. Unlike Social Gospel advocates, revivalists said little about poverty or earthly jus- tice, focusing not on the matters of the world, but on heavenly redemption. Th e pioneer modern evangelist was Dwight L. Moody, a former Chicago shoe salesman and YMCA offi cial who won fame in the 1870s. Eternal life could be had for the asking, Moody promised. His listeners needed only “to come forward and take, take!” Moody’s

The Salvation Army on the Streets This theater poster for the popular play On the Bowery (1894), written by theater agent Robert Neilson Stephens, shows how many Americans perceived the Salvation Army. Here, Salvation Army workers in New York City off er the organiza- tion’s newspaper, War Cry, to a man who brushes them off (rudely). The man is Steve Brodie, a celebrity who was recruited to portray himself onstage. A former East River lifesaving champion who became a saloon owner in New York’s Bowery district, Brodie had won fame in 1886 by claiming to have jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge and survived. (It was later claimed that he faked the stunt, but “doing a Brodie” became popular slang for taking a big risk.) While many Americans admired the Salvation Army, others — particularly men of working-class origins, like Brodie — rejected its appeals. Library of Congress.

550 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

successor, Billy Sunday, helped bring evangelism into the modern era. More oft en than his predecessors, Sunday took political stances based on his Protestant beliefs. Con- demning the “booze traffi c” was his greatest cause. Sunday also denounced unrestricted immigration and labor radicalism. “If I had my way with these ornery wild-eyed Social- ists,” he once threatened, “I would stand them up before a fi ring squad.” Sunday sup- ported some progressive reform causes; he opposed child labor, for example, and advocated voting rights for women. But in other ways, his views anticipated the nativ- ism and antiradicalism that would dominate American politics aft er World War I.

Billy Sunday, like other noted men of his era, broke free of Victorian practices and asserted his leadership in a masculinized American culture. Not only was he a com- manding presence on the stage, but before his conversion he had been a hard-drinking outfi elder for the Chicago White Stockings. To advertise his revivals, Sunday oft en organized local men into baseball teams, then put on his own uniform and played for both sides. Th rough such feats and the fi ery sermons that followed, Sunday off ered a model of spiritual inspiration, manly strength, and political engagement. His revivals

were thoroughly modern: marketed shrewdly, they provided mass entertainment and the chance to meet a pro baseball player. Like other cultural developments of the industrializing era, Billy Sunday’s popularity showed how Americans oft en adjusted to modernity: they adapted older beliefs and values, enabling them to endure in new forms.

S U M M A RY Industrialization and new consumer practices created foundations for modern Ameri- can culture. While middle-class families sought to preserve the Victorian domestic ideal, a variety of factors transformed family life. Families had fewer children, and a substantial majority of young people achieved more education than their parents had obtained. Across class and gender lines, Americans enjoyed athletics and the outdoors, fostering the rise of environmentalism.

Among an array of women’s reform movements, the Woman’s Christian Temper- ance Union sought prohibition of liquor, but it also addressed issues such as domestic violence, poverty, and education. Members of women’s clubs pursued a variety of social and economic reforms, while other women organized for race uplift and patri- otic work. Gradually, the Victorian ideal of female moral superiority gave way to mod- ern claims for women’s equal rights.

New intellectual currents, including Darwinism, challenged Victorian certainties. In the arts, realist and naturalist writers rejected both romanticism and Victorian domes- ticity. Many Americans were shocked by the results, including Th eodore Dreiser’s scandalous novel Sister Carrie, Mark Twain’s rejection of Christian faith, and the boldly modernist paintings displayed at New York’s Armory Show. Science and mod- ernism did not, however, displace religion. Newly arrived Catholics and Jews, as well as old-line Protestants, adapted their faith to the conditions of modern life. Foreign missions, in the meantime, spread the Christian gospel from around the world, with mixed results for those receiving the message.

What eff ect did technology and scientifi c ideas have on literature and the arts?

How did America’s religious life change in this era, and what prompted those changes?

C H A P T E R 1 8 The Victorians Make the Modern, 1880–1917 551

Fo r Fu r t h e r E x p l o rat i o n Patrick W. Carey, Th e Roman Catholics in America (1996). A major synthesis of American

Catholic history. Stephen Fox, Th e American Conservation Movement (1985). A history of the rise of

environmentalism. Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow (1996). An infl uential account of African American

women’s activism in reform and politics. Cliff ord Putney, Muscular Christianity (2001). A good introduction to the new ideas of mas-

culinity that emerged in this period, and their impact on religious faith. Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism (2004). Provides an excellent account of the negotiations

between Americanized Jews and new Eastern European immigrants in this era. David Shi, Facing Facts (1994). Explores the impact of realism and scientifi c thinking on the

arts and intellectual life.

T I M E L I N E

1861 Vassar College founded for women

1872 First national park established at Yellowstone

1873 Association for the Advance- ment of Women founded

Comstock Act 1874 Woman’s Christian Temperance

Union founded 1876 Baseball’s National League

founded Appalachian Mountain Club

founded 1879 Salvation Army established in

the United States 1881 Tuskegee Institute founded 1885 Mississippi State College for

Women founded 1890 National American Woman

Suff rage Association founded Daughters of the American

Revolution founded

1892 Elizabeth Cady Stanton delivers “solitude of self” speech to Congress

John Muir founds Sierra Club 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian

Exposition 1894 United Daughters of the

Confederacy founded 1895 Booker T. Washington delivers

Atlanta Compromise address 1896 National Association of Colored

Women founded Charles Sheldon publishes In

His Steps Plessy v. Ferguson legalizes

“separate but equal” doctrine 1900 Lacey Act 1903 First World Series First National Wildlife Refuge

established 1906 Antiquities Act 1913 Armory Show of modern art

held in New York City 1916 National Park Service created

M AK E IT S T I C K

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19 “Civilization’s Inferno”: The Rise and Reform of Industrial Cities 1880–1917

Clarence Darrow, a successful lawyer from Ashtabula, Ohio, felt isolated and overwhelmed when he moved to Chicago in the 1880s. “Th ere is no place so lonely to a young man as a great city,” Darrow later wrote. “When I walked along the street I scanned every face I met to see if I could not perchance discover someone from Ohio.” Instead, he saw a “sea of human units, each intent upon hurrying by.” At one point, Darrow felt near despair. “If it

had been possible I would have gone back to Ohio,” he wrote, “but I didn’t want to bor- row the money, and I dreaded to confess defeat.”

In the era of industrialization, more and more Americans had experiences like Darrow’s. In 1860, the United States was rural: less than 20 percent of Americans lived in an urban area, defi ned by census takers as a place with more than 2,500 inhabitants. By 1910, more Americans lived in cities (42.1 million) than had lived in the entire nation on the eve of the Civil War (31.4 million). Th e country now had three of the world’s ten largest cities (America Compared, p. 554). Th ough the Northeast remained by far the most urbanized region, the industrial Midwest was catching up. Seattle, San Francisco, and soon Los Angeles became hubs on the Pacifi c coast. Even the South boasted of thriving Atlanta and Birmingham. As journalist Frederic C. Howe declared in 1905, “Man has entered on an urban age.”

Th e scale of industrial cities encouraged experiments that ranged from the amuse- ment park to the art museum, the skyscraper to the subway. Yet the city’s complexity also posed problems, some of them far worse than Clarence Darrow’s loneliness. Brothels fl ourished, as did slums, pollution, disease, and corrupt political machines. Fast-talking hucksters enjoyed prime opportunities to fl eece newcomers; homeless men slept in the shadows of the mansions of the superrich. One African American observer called the city “Civilization’s Inferno.” Th e locus of urgent problems, indus- trial cities became important sites of political innovation and reform.

IDENTIFY THE BIG IDEA How did the rise of large cities shape American society and politics?

C H A P T E R 1 9 “Civilization’s Inferno”: The Rise and Reform of Industrial Cities, 1880–1917 553

The New Metropolis Mark Twain, arriving in New York in 1867, remarked, “You cannot accomplish any- thing in the way of business, you cannot even pay a friendly call without devoting a whole day to it. . . . [Th e] distances are too great.” But new technologies allowed engi- neers and planners to reorganize urban geographies. Specialized districts began to include not only areas for fi nance, manufacturing, wholesaling, and warehousing but also immigrant wards, shopping districts, and business-oriented downtowns. It was an exciting and bewildering world.

The Shape of the Industrial City Before the Civil War, cities served the needs of commerce and fi nance, not industry. Early manufacturing sprang up mostly in the countryside, where mill owners could draw water power from streams, fi nd plentiful fuel and raw materials, and recruit workers from farms and villages. Th e nation’s largest cities were seaports; urban mer- chants bought and sold goods for distribution into the interior or to global markets.

George Bellows, New York George Bellows, a member of the so-called Ash Can school of painters (Chapter 18), was fascinated by urban life. In this 1911 painting, he depicts Madison Square during a winter rush-hour, crowded with streetcars, horse-drawn wagons, and pedestrians. If you could enter the world of this painting, what might you hear, feel, and smell, as well as see? What does Bellows suggest about the excitement and challenges of life in the big city? Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

A M E R I C A C O M PA R E D

554

T h e Wo r l d ’s B i g g e s t C i t i e s , 18 0 0 –2 0 0 0 Th is table lists the ten largest cities in the world, by population in millions, at the start of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-fi rst centuries.

TABLE 19.1

1800 1900

City Population City Population

Beijing, China 1.10 million London, United Kingdom 6.48 million London, United Kingdom 0.86 New York, United States 4.24 Guangzhou, China 0.80 Paris, France 3.33 Istanbul, Turkey 0.57 Berlin, Germany 2.42 Paris, France 0.55 Chicago, United States 1.72 Hangzhou, China 0.50 Vienna, Austria 1.66 Edo (later Tokyo), Japan 0.49 Tokyo, Japan 1.50 Naples (later part of Italy) 0.43 St. Petersburg, Russia 1.44 Suzhou, China 0.39 Philadelphia, United States 1.42 Osaka, Japan 0.38 Manchester, United Kingdom 1.26

2000

City Population

Tokyo, Japan 34.45 million Mexico City, Mexico 18.02 New York City/Newark, United States 17.85 São Paulo, Brazil 17.10 Mumbai (Bombay), India 16.09 Delhi, India 15.73 Shanghai, China 13.22 Calcutta, India 13.06 Buenos Aires, Argentina 11.85 Los Angeles, United States 11.81

C H A P T E R 1 9 “Civilization’s Inferno”: The Rise and Reform of Industrial Cities, 1880–1917 555

As industrialization developed, though, cities became sites for manufacturing as well as fi nance and trade. Steam engines played a central role in this change. With them, mill operators no longer had to depend on less reliable water power. Steam power also vastly increased the scale of industry. A factory employing thousands of workers could instantly create a small city such as Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, which belonged body and soul to the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. Older commercial cities also industrialized. Warehouse districts converted to small-scale manufacturing. Port cities that served as immigrant gateways off ered abundant cheap labor, an essen- tial element in the industrial economy.

Mass Transit New technologies helped residents and visitors negotiate the industrial city. Steam-driven cable cars appeared in the 1870s. By 1887, engineer

Frank Sprague designed an electric trolley system for Richmond, Virginia. Electricity from a central generating plant was fed to trolleys through overhead power lines, which each trolley touched with a pole mounted on its roof. Trolleys soon became the primary mode of transportation in most American cities. Congestion and frequent accidents, however, led to demands that trolley lines be moved off streets. Th e “el” or elevated railroad, which began operation as early as 1871 in New York City, became a safer alternative. Other urban planners built down, not up. Boston opened a short underground line in 1897; by 1904, a subway running the length of Manhattan dem- onstrated the full potential of high-speed underground trains.

Even before the Civil War, the spread of railroads led to growth of outlying resi- dential districts for the well-to-do. Th e high cost of transportation eff ectively segre- gated these wealthy districts. In the late nineteenth century, the trend accelerated. Businessmen and professionals built homes on large, beautifully landscaped lots in outlying towns such as Riverside, Illinois, and Tuxedo Park, New York. In such places, affl uent wives and children enjoyed refuge from the pollution and perceived dangers of the city.

Los Angeles entrepreneur Henry Huntington, nephew of a wealthy Southern Pacifi c Railroad magnate, helped foster an emerging suburban ideal as he pitched the benefi ts of southern California sunshine. Huntington invested his family fortune in Los Angeles real estate and transportation. Along his trolley lines, he subdivided prop- erty into lots and built rows of bungalows, planting the tidy yards with lush trees and tropical fruits. Middle-class buyers fl ocked to purchase Huntington’s houses. One exclaimed, “I have apparently found a Paradise on Earth.” Anticipating twentieth- century Americans’ love for aff ordable single-family homes near large cities, Hunting- ton had begun to invent southern California sprawl.

Skyscrapers By the 1880s, invention of steel girders, durable plate glass, and passen- ger elevators began to revolutionize urban building methods. Architects

invented the skyscraper, a building supported by its steel skeleton. Its walls bore little weight, serving instead as curtains to enclose the structure. Although expensive to build, skyscrapers allowed downtown landowners to profi t from small plots of land. By investing in a skyscraper, a landlord could collect rent for ten or even twenty fl oors of space. Large corporations commissioned these striking designs as symbols of business prowess.

556 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

Th e fi rst skyscraper was William Le Baron Jenney’s ten-story Home Insurance Building (1885) in Chicago. Th ough unremarkable in appearance — it looked just like other downtown buildings — Jenney’s steel-girder construction inspired the creativity of American architects. A Chicago school sprang up, dedicated to the design of build- ings whose form expressed, rather than masked, their structure and function. Th e presiding genius of this school was architect Louis Sullivan, whose “vertical aesthetic” of set-back windows and strong columns gave skyscrapers a “proud and soaring” pres- ence and off ered plentiful natural light for workers inside. Chicago pioneered sky- scraper construction, but New York, with its unrelenting demand for prime downtown space, took the lead by the late 1890s. Th e fi fty-fi ve-story Woolworth Building, com- pleted in 1913, marked the beginning of Manhattan’s modern skyline.

The Electric City One of the most dramatic urban amenities was electric light. Gas- light, produced from coal gas, had been used for residential light

since the early nineteenth century, but gas lamps were too dim to brighten streets and public spaces. In the 1870s, as generating technology became commercially viable, electricity proved far better. Electric arc lamps, installed in Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia in 1878, astonished viewers with their brilliant illumination. Electric streetlights soon replaced gaslights on city streets.

Before it had a signifi cant eff ect on industry, electricity gave the city its modern tempo. It lift ed elevators, illuminated department store windows, and above all, turned night into day. Electric streetlights made residents feel safer; as one magazine put it in 1912, “A light is as good as a policeman.” Nightlife became less risky and more appeal- ing. One journalist described Broadway in 1894: “[A]ll the shop fronts are lighted, and the entrances to the theaters blaze out on the sidewalk.” At the end of a long working day, city dwellers fl ocked to this free entertainment. Nothing, declared an observer, matched the “festive panorama” of Broadway “when the lights are on.”

Newcomers and Neighborhoods Explosive population growth made cities a world of new arrivals, including many young women and men arriving from the countryside. Traditionally, rural daughters had provided essential labor for spinning and weaving cloth, but industrialization relocated those tasks from the household to the factory. Finding themselves without a useful household role, many farm daughters sought paid employment. In an age of declining rural prosperity, many sons also left the farm and — like immigrants arriving from other countries — set aside part of their pay to help the folks at home. Explaining why she moved to Chicago, an African American woman from Louisiana declared, “A child with any respect about herself or hisself wouldn’t like to see their mother and father work so hard and earn nothing. I feel it my duty to help.”

America’s cities also became homes for millions of overseas immigrants. Most numerous in Boston were the Irish; in Minneapolis, Swedes; in other northern cities, Germans. Arriving in a great metropolis, immigrants confronted many diffi culties. One Polish man, who had lost the address of his American cousins, felt utterly alone aft er disembarking at New York’s main immigration facility, Ellis Island, which opened in 1892. Th en he heard a kindly voice in Polish, off ering to help. “From sheer joy,” he

C H A P T E R 1 9 “Civilization’s Inferno”: The Rise and Reform of Industrial Cities, 1880–1917 557

recalled, “tears welled up in my eyes to hear my native tongue.” Such experiences sug- gest why immigrants stuck together, relying on relatives and friends to get oriented and fi nd jobs. A high degree of ethnic clustering resulted, even within a single factory. At the Jones and Laughlin steelworks in Pittsburgh, for example, the carpentry shop was German, the hammer shop Polish, and the blooming mill Serbian. “My people . . . stick together,” observed a son of Ukrainian immigrants. But he added, “We who are born in this country . . . feel this country is our home.”

Patterns of settlement varied by ethnic group. Many Italians, recruited by padroni, or labor bosses, found work in northeastern and Mid-Atlantic cities. Th eir urban con- centration was especially marked aft er the 1880s, as more and more laborers arrived from southern Italy. Th e attraction of America was obvious to one young man, who had grown up in a poor southern Italian farm family. “I had never gotten any wages of any kind before,” he reported aft er settling with his uncle in New Jersey. “Th e work here was just as hard as that on the farm; but I didn’t mind it much because I would receive what seemed to me like a lot.” Amadeo Peter Giannini, who started off as a produce merchant in San Francisco, soon turned to banking. Aft er the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, his Banca d’Italia was the fi rst fi nancial institution to reopen in the Bay area. Expanding steadily across the West, it eventually became Bank of America.

Like Giannini’s bank, institutions of many kinds sprang up to serve ethnic urban communities. Th roughout America, Italian speakers avidly read the newspaper Il Pro- gresso Italo-Americano; Jews, the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward, also pub- lished in New York. Bohemians gathered in singing societies, while New York Jews patronized a lively Yiddish theater. By 1903, Italians in Chicago had sixty-six mutual aid societies, most composed of people from a particular province or town. Th ese societies collected dues from members and paid support in case of death or disability on the job. Mutual benefi t societies also functioned as fraternal clubs. “We are strang- ers in a strange country,” explained one member of a Chinese tong, or mutual aid society, in Chicago. “We must have an organization (tong) to control our country fel- lows and develop our friendship.”

Sharply defi ned ethnic neighborhoods such as San Francisco’s Chinatown, Italian North Beach, and Jewish Hayes Valley grew up in every major city, driven by both discrimination and immigrants’ desire to stick together (Map 19.1). In addition to pat- terns of ethnic and racial segregation, residential districts in almost all industrial cities divided along lines of economic class. Around Los Angeles’s central plaza, Mexican neighborhoods diversifi ed, incorporating Italians and Jews. Later, as the plaza became a site for business and tourism, immigrants were pushed into working-class neighbor- hoods like Belvedere and Boyle Heights, which sprang up to the east. Th ough ethni- cally diverse, East Los Angeles was resolutely working class; middle-class white neighborhoods grew up predominantly in West Los Angeles.

African Americans also sought urban opportunities. In 1900, almost 90 percent of American blacks still lived in the South, but increasing numbers had moved to cities such as Baton Rouge, Jacksonville, Montgomery, and Charleston, all of whose popula- tions were more than 50 percent African American. Blacks also settled in northern cities, albeit not in the numbers that would arrive during the Great Migration of World War I. Th ough blacks constituted only 2 percent of New York City’s population in 1910, they already numbered more than 90,000. Th ese newcomers confronted conditions

558 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

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MAP 19.1 The Lower East Side, New York City, 1900 As this map shows, the Jewish immigrants dominating Manhattan’s Lower East Side preferred to live in neighborhoods populated by those from their home regions of Eastern Europe. Their sense of a common identity made for a remarkable fl owering of educational, cultural, and social institutions on the Jewish East Side. Ethnic neighborhoods became a feature of almost every American city.

C H A P T E R 1 9 “Civilization’s Inferno”: The Rise and Reform of Industrial Cities, 1880–1917 559

even worse than those for foreign-born immigrants. Relentlessly turned away from manufacturing jobs, most black men and women took up work in the service sector, becoming porters, laundrywomen, and domestic servants.

Blacks faced another urban danger: the so-called race riot, an attack by white mobs triggered by street altercations or rumors of crime. One of the most virulent episodes occurred in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1906. Th e violence was fueled by a nasty political campaign that generated sensational false charges of “negro crime.” Roaming bands of white men attacked black Atlantans, invading middle-class black neighbor- hoods and in one case lynching two barbers aft er seizing them in their shop. Th e riot- ers killed at least twenty-four blacks and wounded more than a hundred. Th e disease of hatred was not limited to the South. Race riots broke out in New York City’s Tender- loin district (1900); Evansville, Indiana (1903); and Springfi eld, Illinois (1908). By then, one journalist observed, “In every important Northern city, a distinct race-problem already exists which must, in a few years, assume serious proportions.”

Whether they arrived from the South or from Europe, Mexico, or Asia, working- class city residents needed cheap housing near their jobs (Map 19.2). Th ey faced grim

The Atlanta Race Riot — Seen from France The cover of this Paris newsmaga- zine depicts the Atlanta race riot of 1906. While the artist had almost certainly never visited Atlanta, his dramatic illustration shows that, from this early date, racial violence could be a source of embarrass- ment to the United States in its relations with other countries. Picture Research Consultants & Archives.

560 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

choices. As urban land values climbed, speculators tore down houses that were vacated by middle-class families moving away from the industrial core. In their place, they erected fi ve- or six-story tenements, buildings that housed twenty or more families in cramped, airless apartments. Tenements fostered rampant disease and horrifi c infant mortality. In New York’s Eleventh Ward, an average of 986 persons occupied each acre.

Note that the number of square miles within Chicago’s city limits increased more than 300 percent between 1865 and 1902.

Note that some areas of the old city were not used for either residence or industry. Most of these were large regional parks or undeveloped land.

The residential areas of the city tended to spread out along elevated (light- rail) railroad lines and streetcar tracks. These new forms of mass transit enabled people living in distant neighborhoods to reach the central business district and other places of employment.

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MAP 19.2 The Expansion of Chicago, 1865–1902 In 1865, Chicagoans depended on horsecar lines to get around town. By 1900, the city limits had expanded enormously and so had the streetcar service, which was by then electrifi ed. Elevated trains eased the congestion on downtown streets. Ongoing extension of the streetcar lines, some beyond the city limits, ensured that suburban development would continue as well.

C H A P T E R 1 9 “Civilization’s Inferno”: The Rise and Reform of Industrial Cities, 1880–1917 561

One investigator in Philadelphia described twenty-six people living in nine rooms of a tenement. “Th e bathroom at the rear of the house was used as a kitchen,” she reported. “One privy compartment in the yard was the sole toilet accommodation for the fi ve families living in the house.” African Americans oft en suff ered most. A study of Albany, Syracuse, and Troy, New York, noted, “Th e colored people are relegated to the least healthful buildings.”

Denouncing these conditions, reformers called for model tenements fi nanced by public-spirited citizens willing to accept a limited return on their investment. When private philanthropy failed to make a dent, cities turned to housing codes. Th e most advanced was New York’s Tenement House Law of 1901, which required interior courts, indoor toilets, and fi re safeguards for new structures. Th e law, however, had no eff ect on the 44,000 tenements that already existed in Manhattan and the Bronx. Reformers were thwarted by the economic facts of urban development. Industrial workers could not aff ord transportation and had to live near their jobs; commercial development pushed up land values. Only high-density, cheaply built housing earned landlords a signifi cant profi t.

City Cultures Despite their dangers and problems, industrial cities could be exciting places to live. In the nineteenth century, white middle-class Protestants had set the cultural standard; immigrants and the poor were expected to follow cues from their betters, seeking “uplift ” and respectability. But in the cities, new mass-based entertainments emerged among the working classes, especially youth. Th ese entertainments spread from the working class to the middle class — much to the distress of many middle-class parents. At the same time, cities became stimulating centers for intellectual life.

Urban Amusements

One enticing attraction was vaudeville theater, which arose in the 1880s and 1890s. Vaudeville customers could walk in anytime and watch a continuous sequence of musical acts, skits, magic shows, and

other entertainment. First popular among the working class, vaudeville quickly broad- ened its appeal to include middle-class audiences. By the early 1900s, vaudeville faced competition from early movie theaters, or nickelodeons, which off ered short fi lms for a nickel entry fee. With distaste, one reporter described a typical movie audience as “mothers of bawling infants” and “newsboys, bootblacks, and smudgy urchins.” By the 1910s, even working girls who refrained from less respectable amusements might indulge in a movie once or twice a week.

More spectacular were the great amusement parks that appeared around 1900, most famously at New York’s Coney Island. Th ese parks had their origins in world’s fairs, whose paid entertainment areas had off ered giant Ferris wheels and camel rides through “a street in Cairo.” Entrepreneurs found that such attractions were big busi- ness. Between 1895 and 1904, they installed them at several rival amusement parks near Coney Island’s popular beaches. Th e parks off ered New Yorkers a chance to come by ferry, escape the hot city, and enjoy roller coasters, lagoon plunges, and “hootchy- kootchy” dance shows. Among the amazed observers was Cuban revolutionary José Martí, working as a journalist in the United States. “What facilities for every pleasure!”

562 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

Martí wrote. “What absolute absence of any outward sadness or poverty! . . . Th e the- ater, the photographers’ booth, the bathhouses!” He concluded that Coney Island epit- omized America’s commercial society, driven not by “love or glory” but by “a desire for gain.” Similar parks grew up around the United States. By the summer of 1903, Phila- delphia’s Willow Grove counted three million visitors annually; so did two amusement parks outside Los Angeles.

Ragtime and City Blues

Music also became a booming urban entertainment. By the 1890s, Tin Pan Alley, the nickname for New York City’s song-publishing district, produced such national hit tunes as “A Bicycle Built for Two” and “My

Wild Irish Rose.” Th e most famous sold more than a million copies of sheet music, as well as audio recordings for the newly invented phonograph. To fi nd out what would sell, publishers had musicians play at New York’s working-class beer gardens and dance halls. One publishing agent, who visited “sixty joints a week” to test new songs, declared that “the best songs came from the gutter.”

African American musicians brought a syncopated beat that began, by the 1890s, to work its way into mainstream hits like “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Black performers became stars in their own right with the rise of ragtime. Th is music, appar- ently named for its ragged rhythm, combined a steady beat in the bass (played with the left hand on the piano) with syncopated, off -beat rhythms in the treble (played with the right). Ragtime became wildly popular among audiences of all classes and races who heard, in its infectious rhythms, something exciting — a decisive break with Vic- torian hymns and parlor songs.

For the master of the genre, composer Scott Joplin, ragtime was serious music. Joplin, the son of former slaves, grew up along the Texas-Arkansas border and took piano lessons as a boy from a German teacher. He and other traveling performers introduced ragtime to national audiences at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. Seeking to elevate African American music and secure a broad national audience, Joplin warned pianists, “It is never right to play ‘Ragtime’ fast.” But his instructions were widely ignored. Young Americans embraced ragtime.

Th ey also embraced each other, as ragtime ushered in an urban dance craze. By 1910, New York alone had more than fi ve hundred dance halls. In Kansas City, shocked guardians of morality counted 16,500 dancers on the fl oor on a Saturday night; Chi- cago had 86,000. Some young Polish and Slovak women chose restaurant jobs rather than domestic service so they would have free time to visit dance halls “several nights a week.” New dances like the Bunny Hug and Grizzly Bear were overtly sexual: they called for close body contact and plenty of hip movement. In fact, many of these dances originated in brothels. Despite widespread denunciation, dance mania quickly spread from the urban working classes to rural and middle-class youth.

By the 1910s, black music was achieving a central place in American popular cul- ture. African American trumpet player and bandleader W. C. Handy, born in Ala- bama, electrifi ed national audiences by performing music drawn from the cotton fi elds of the Mississippi Delta. Made famous when it reached the big city, this music became known as the blues. Blues music spoke of hard work and heartbreak, as in Handy’s popular hit “St. Louis Blues” (1914):

C H A P T E R 1 9 “Civilization’s Inferno”: The Rise and Reform of Industrial Cities, 1880–1917 563

Got de St. Louis Blues jes blue as I can be, Dat man got a heart lak a rock cast in the sea, Or else he wouldn’t gone so far from me.

Blues spoke to the emotional lives of young urbanites who were far from home, expe- riencing dislocation, loneliness, and bitter disappointment along with the thrills of city life. Like Coney Island and other leisure activities, ragtime and blues helped forge new collective experiences in a world of strangers.

Ragtime and blues spread quickly and had a profound infl uence on twentieth- century American culture. By the time Handy published “St. Louis Blues,” composer Irving Berlin, a Russian Jewish immigrant, was introducing altered ragtime pieces into musical theater — which eventually transferred to radio and fi lm. Lyrics oft en featured sexual innuendo, as in the title of Berlin’s hit song “If You Don’t Want My Peaches (You’d Better Stop Shaking My Tree).” Th e popularity of such music marked the arrival of modern youth culture. Its enduring features included “crossover” music that origi- nated in the black working class and a commercial music industry that brazenly appropriated African American musical styles.

Sex and the City In the city, many young people found parental oversight weaker than it had been before. Amusement parks and dance halls helped

foster the new custom of dating, which like other cultural innovations emerged fi rst among the working class. Gradually, it became acceptable for a young man to escort a young woman out on the town for commercial entertainments rather than spending time at home under a chaperone’s watchful eye. Dating opened a new world of plea- sure, sexual adventure, and danger. Young women headed to dance halls alone to meet men; the term gold digger came into use to describe a woman who wanted a man’s money more than the man himself.

But young women, not men, proved most vulnerable in the system of dating. Having less money to spend because they earned half or less of men’s wages, working-class girls relied on the “treat.” Some tried to maintain strict standards of respectability, keenly aware that their prospects for marriage depended on a virtuous reputation. Others became so- called charity girls, eager for a good time. Such young women, one investigator reported, “off er themselves to strangers, not for money, but for presents, attention and pleasure.” For some women, sexual favors were a matter of practical necessity. “If I did not have a man,” declared one waitress, “I could not get along on my wages.” In the anonymous city, there was not always a clear line between working-class treats and casual prostitution.

Dating and casual sex were hallmarks of an urban world in which large numbers of residents were young and single. Th e 1900 census found that more than 20 percent of women in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Boston lived as boarders and lodgers, not in family units; the percentage topped 30 percent in St. Paul and Minneapolis. Single men also found social opportunities in the city. One historian has called the late nine- teenth century the Age of the Bachelor, a time when being an unattached male lost its social stigma. With boardinghouses, restaurants, and abundant personal services, the city aff orded bachelors all the comforts of home and, on top of that, an array of men’s clubs, saloons, and sporting events.

564 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

Many industrial cities developed robust gay subcultures. New York’s gay under- ground, for example, included an array of drinking and meeting places, as well as clubs and drag balls. Middle-class men, both straight and gay, frequented such venues for entertainment or to fi nd companionship. One medical student remembered being taken to a ball at which he was startled to fi nd fi ve hundred gay and lesbian couples waltzing to “a good band.” By the 1910s, the word queer had come into use as slang for homosexual. Th ough harassment was frequent and moral reformers like Anthony Comstock issued regular denunciations of sexual “degeneracy,” arrests were few. Gay sex shows and saloons were lucrative for those who ran them (and for police, who took bribes to look the other way, just as they did for brothels). Th e exuberant gay urban subculture off ered a dramatic challenge to Victorian ideals.

High Culture For elites, the rise of great cities off ered an opportunity to build muse- ums, libraries, and other cultural institutions that could fl ourish only in

major metropolitan centers. Millionaires patronized the arts partly to advance them- selves socially but also out of a sense of civic duty and national pride. As early as the 1870s, symphony orchestras emerged in Boston and New York. Composers and con- ductors soon joined Europe in new experiments. Th e Metropolitan Opera, founded in 1883 by wealthy businessmen, drew enthusiastic crowds to hear the innovative work of Richard Wagner. In 1907, the Met shocked audiences by presenting Richard Strauss’s sexually scandalous opera Salome.

Art museums and natural history museums also became prominent new institu- tions in this era. Th e nation’s fi rst major art museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, opened in Washington, D.C., in 1869, while New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art settled into its permanent home in 1880. In the same decades, public libraries grew from modest collections into major urban institutions. Th e greatest library benefactor was steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who announced in 1881 that he would build a library in any town or city that was prepared to maintain it. By 1907, Carnegie had spent more than $32.7 million to establish over a thousand libraries throughout the United States.

Urban Journalism

Patrons of Carnegie’s libraries could read, in addition to books, an increasing array of mass-market newspapers. Joseph Pulitzer, owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and New York World, led the way in building

his sales base with sensational investigations, human-interest stories, and targeted sec- tions covering sports and high society. By the 1890s, Pulitzer faced a challenge from William Randolph Hearst. Th e arrival of Sunday color comics featuring the “Yellow Kid” gave such publications the name yellow journalism, a derogatory term for mass- market newspapers. Hearst’s and Pulitzer’s sensational coverage was oft en irrespon- sible. In the late 1890s, for example, their papers helped whip up frenzied pressure for the United States to declare war against Spain (Chapter 21). But Hearst and Pulitzer also exposed scandals and injustices. Th ey believed their papers should challenge the powerful by speaking to and for ordinary Americans.

Along with Hearst’s and Pulitzer’s stunt reporters, other urban journalists also worked to promote reform. New magazines such as McClure’s introduced national audiences to reporters such as Ida Tarbell, who exposed the machinations of John D.

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Rockefeller, and David Graham Phillips, whose “Treason of the Senate,” published in Cosmopolitan in 1906, documented the def- erence of U.S. senators — especially Republi- cans — to wealthy corporate interests. Th eodore Roosevelt dismissed such writers as muckrak- ers who focused too much on the negative side of American life. Th e term stuck, but muckrak- ers’ infl uence was profound. Th ey inspired thousands of readers to get involved in reform movements and tackle the problems caused by industrialization.

Governing the Great City One of the most famous muckrakers was Lincoln Steff ens, whose book Th e Shame of the Cities (1904), fi rst published serially in McClure’s magazine, denounced the corrup- tion affl icting America’s urban governments. Steff ens used dramatic language to expose “swindling” politicians. He claimed, for example, that the mayor of Minneapo- lis had turned his city over to “outlaws.” In St. Louis, “bribery was a joke,” while Pitts- burgh’s Democratic Party operated a private company that handled most of the city’s street-paving projects — at a heft y profi t. Historians now believe that Steff ens and other middle-class crusaders took a rather extreme view of urban politics; the reality was more complex. But charges of corruption could hardly be denied. As industrial cities grew with breathtaking speed, they posed a serious problem of governance.

Urban Machines In the United States, cities relied largely on private developers to build streetcar lines and provide urgently needed water, gas, and electricity. Th is preference for business solutions gave birth to what one urban historian calls the “private city” — an urban environment shaped by individuals and profi t-seeking businesses. Private enterprise, Americans believed, spurred great innovations — trolley cars, electric lighting, sky- scrapers — and drove urban real estate development. Investment opportunities looked so tempting, in fact, that new cities sprang up almost overnight from the ruins of a catastrophic Chicago fi re in 1871 and a major San Francisco earthquake in 1906. Real estate interests were oft en instrumental in encouraging streetcar lines to build outward from the central districts.

When contractors sought city business, or saloonkeepers needed licenses, they turned to political machines: local party bureaucracies that kept an unshakable grip on both elected and appointed public offi ces. A machine like New York’s infamous Tam- many Society — known by the name of its meeting place, Tammany Hall — consisted of layers of political functionaries. At the bottom were precinct captains who knew every city neighborhood and block; above them were ward bosses and, at the top, powerful citywide leaders, who had usually started at the bottom and worked their way up. Machines dispensed jobs and patronage, arranged for urban services, and

How were America’s industrial cit- ies diff erent from the typical city before 1860?

What opportunities did urban neighborhoods provide to immi- grants and African Americans, and what problems did these newcomers face?

566 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

devoted their energies to staying in offi ce, which they did, year aft er year, on the strength of their political clout and popularity among urban voters.

For constituents, political machines acted as a rough-and-ready social service agency, providing jobs for the jobless or a helping hand for a bereaved family. Tam- many ward boss George Washington Plunkitt, for example, reported that he arranged housing for families aft er their apartments burned, “fi x[ing] them up until they get things runnin’ again.” Plunkitt was an Irishman, and so were most Tammany Hall leaders. But by the 1890s, Plunkitt’s Fift eenth District was fi lling up with Italians and Russian Jews. On a given day (as recorded in his diary), he might attend an Italian funeral in the aft ernoon and a Jewish wedding in the evening. Wherever he went, he brought gift s, listened to his constituents’ troubles, and off ered a helping hand.

Th e favors dispensed by men like Plunkitt came via a system of boss control that was, as Lincoln Steff ens charged, corrupt. Th ough rural, state, and national politics were hardly immune to such problems, cities off ered fl agrant opportunities for bribes and kickbacks. Th e level of corruption, as Plunkitt observed, was greater in cities, “accordin’ to the opportunities.” When politicians made contracts for city services, some of the money ended up in their pockets. In the 1860s, William Marcy Tweed, known as Boss Tweed, had made Tammany Hall a byword for corruption, until he was brought down in 1871 by fl agrant overpricing of contracts for a lavish city courthouse. Th ereaft er, machine corruption became more surreptitious. Plunkitt declared that he had no need for outright bribes. He favored what he called “honest graft ” — the profi ts that came to savvy insiders who knew where and when to buy land. Plunkitt made most of his money building wharves on Manhattan’s waterfront.

Middle-class reformers condemned immigrants for supporting machines. But urban immigrants believed that few middle-class Americans cared about the plight of poor city folk like themselves. Machines were hardly perfect, but immigrants could rely on them for jobs, emergency aid, and the only public services they could hope to obtain. Astute commentators saw that bosses dominated city government because they provided what was needed, with no condescending moral judgments. As reformer Jane Addams put it, the ward boss was a “stalking survival of village kindness.” Voters knew he was corrupt, but on election day they might say, “Ah, well, he has a big Irish

heart. He is good to the widow and the fatherless,” or, “he knows the poor.” Addams concluded that middle- class reformers would only make headway if they set aside their prejudices, learned to “stand by and for and with the people,” and did a better job of it than the machine bosses did.

Machine-style governments achieved some notable successes. Th ey arranged (at a profi t) for companies to operate streetcars, bring clean water and gaslight, and remove garbage. Nowhere in the world were there more massive public projects — aqueducts, sewage systems, bridges, and spacious parks — than in the great cities of the United States. Th e nature of this achievement can be grasped by comparing Chicago, Illinois, with Berlin, the capital of Germany, in 1900. At that time, Chicago’s waterworks pumped 500 million gallons of water a day, providing 139 gallons per resident; Berlin- ers made do with 18 gallons each. Flush toilets, a rarity in Berlin, could be found in 60 percent of Chicago homes. Chicago lit its streets with electricity, while Berlin still relied mostly on gaslight. Chicago had twice as many parks as the German capital, and

To see a longer excerpt of the Jane Addams essay, along with other primary sources from this period, see Sources for America’s History.

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it had just completed an ambitious sanitation project that reversed the course of the Chicago River, carrying sewage into Lake Michigan, away from city residents.

Th ese achievements were remarkable, because American municipal governments labored under severe political constraints. Judges did grant cities some authority: in 1897, for example, New York’s state supreme court ruled that New York City was entirely within its rights to operate a municipally owned subway. Use of private land was also subject to whatever regulations a city might impose. But, starting with an 1868 ruling in Iowa, the American legal system largely classifi ed the city as a “corpo- rate entity” subject to state control. In contrast to state governments, cities had only a limited police power, which they could use, for example, to stop crime but not to pass more ambitious measures for public welfare. States, not cities, held most taxation power and received most public revenues. Machines and their private allies fl ourished, in part, because cities were starved for legitimate cash.

Th us money talked; powerful economic interests warped city government. Working- class residents — even those loyal to their local machines — knew that the newest elec- tric lights and best trolley lines served affl uent neighborhoods, where citizens had the most clout. Hilda Satt, a Polish immigrant who moved into a poor Chicago neighbor- hood in 1893, recalled garbage-strewn streets and fi lthy backyard privies. “Th e streets were paved with wooden blocks,” she later wrote, “and aft er a heavy rainfall the blocks would become loose and fl oat about in the street.” She remembered that on one such occasion, local pranksters posted a sign saying, “Th e Mayor and the Aldermen are Invited to Swim Here.” As cities expanded, the limitations of political machines became increasingly clear.

The Limits of Machine Government Th e scale of urban problems became dramatically evident in the depression of the 1890s, when unemployment reached a staggering 25 percent in some cities. Homeless- ness and hunger were rampant; newspapers nationwide reported on cases of starva- tion, desperation, and suicide. To make matters worse, most cities had abolished the early-nineteenth-century system of outdoor relief, which provided public support for the indigent. Fearing the system promoted laziness among the poor, middle-class reformers had insisted on private, not public, charity. Even cities that continued to provide outdoor relief in the 1890s were overwhelmed by the magnitude of the crisis. Flooded with “tramps,” police stations were forced to end the long-standing practice of allowing homeless individuals to sleep inside.

Faced with this crisis, many urban voters proved none too loyal to the machines when better alternatives arose. Cleveland, Ohio, for example, experienced eighty-three labor strikes between 1893 and 1898. Workers’ frustration centered on corrupt busi- nesses with close ties to municipal offi cials. Th e city’s Central Labor Union, dissatisfi ed with Democrats’ failure to address its concerns, worked with middle-class allies to build a thriving local branch of the People’s Party (Chapter 20). Th eir demands for stronger government measures, especially to curb corporate power, culminated in citywide protests in 1899 during a strike against the hated streetcar company. Th at year, more than eight thousand workers participated in the city’s annual Labor Day parade. As they passed the mayor’s reviewing stand, the bands fell silent and the unions furled their fl ags in a solemn protest against the mayor’s failure to support their cause.

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To recapture support from working-class Clevelanders, Democrats made a dra- matic change in 1901, nominating Tom Johnson for mayor. Johnson, a reform-minded businessman, advocated municipal ownership of utilities and a tax system in which “monopoly and privilege” bore the main burdens. (Johnson once thanked Cleveland’s city appraisers for raising taxes on his own mansion.) Johnson’s comfortable victory transformed Democrats into Cleveland’s leading reform party. While the new mayor did not fulfi ll the whole agenda of the Central Labor Union and its allies, he became an advocate of publicly owned utilities, and one of the nation’s most famous and inno- vative reformers.

Like Johnson, other mayors began to oust machines and launch ambitious pro- grams of reform. Some modeled their municipal governments on those of Glasgow, Scotland; Düsseldorf, Germany; and other European cities on the cutting edge of innovation. In Boston, Mayor Josiah Quincy built public baths, gyms, swimming pools, and playgrounds and provided free public concerts. Like other mayors, he bat- tled streetcar companies to bring down fares. Th e scope of such projects varied. In 1912, San Francisco managed to open one small municipally owned streetcar line to compete with private companies. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the other hand, elected socialists who experimented with a sweeping array of measures, including publicly subsidized medical care and housing.

Republican Hazen Pingree, mayor of Detroit from 1890 to 1897, was a particu- larly noted reformer who worked for better streets and public transportation. During the depression, Pingree opened a network of vacant city-owned lots as community vegetable gardens. Th ough some people ridiculed “Pingree’s Potato Patches,” the gar- dens helped feed thousands of Detroit’s working people during the harsh depression years. By 1901, a coalition of reformers who campaigned against New York’s Tammany Hall began to borrow ideas from Pingree and other mayors. In the wealthier wards of New York, they promised to reduce crime and save taxpayer dollars. In working-class neighborhoods, they vowed to provide aff ordable housing and municipal ownership of gas and electricity. Th ey defeated Tammany’s candidates, and though they did not fulfi ll all of their promises, they did provide more funding for overcrowded public schools.

Reformers also experimented with new ways of organizing municipal govern- ment itself. Aft er a devastating hurricane in 1900 killed an estimated six thousand people in Galveston, Texas, and destroyed much of the city, rebuilders adopted a com- mission system that became a nationwide model for effi cient government. Leaders of the National Municipal League advised cities to elect small councils and hire profes- sional city managers who would direct operations like a corporate executive. Th e league had diffi culty persuading politicians to adopt its business-oriented model; it

won its greatest victories in young, small cities like Phoenix, Arizona, where the professional classes held political power. Other cities chose, instead, to enhance democratic participation. As part of the Oregon System, which called for direct voting on key political questions, Port- land voters participated in 129 municipal refer- endum votes between 1905 and 1913.

Why, given that everyone agreed machines were corrupt, did urban voters support them?

How did reformers try to address the limits of machine government? To what extent did they succeed?

C H A P T E R 1 9 “Civilization’s Inferno”: The Rise and Reform of Industrial Cities, 1880–1917 569

Crucibles of Progressive Reform Th e challenges posed by urban life presented rich opportunities for experimentation and reform. As happened in Cleveland with Tom Johnson’s election as mayor, working- class radicals and middle-class reformers oft en mounted simultaneous challenges to political machines, and these combined pressures led to dramatic change. Many reform- ers pointed to the plight of the urban poor, especially children. Th us it is not surprising that progressivism, an overlapping set of movements to combat the ills of industrial- ization (Chapter 20), had important roots in the city. In the slums and tenements of the metropolis, reformers invented new forms of civic participation that shaped the course of national politics.

Fighting Dirt and Vice As early as the 1870s and 1880s, news reporters drew attention to corrupt city govern- ments, the abuse of power by large corporations, and threats to public health. Researcher Helen Campbell reported on tenement conditions in such exposés as Prisoners of Poverty (1887). Making innovative use of the invention of fl ash photogra- phy, Danish-born journalist Jacob Riis included photographs of tenement interiors in his famous 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives. Riis had a profound infl uence on Th eodore Roosevelt when the future president served as New York City’s police com- missioner. Roosevelt asked Riis to lead him on tours around the tenements, to help him better understand the problems of poverty, disease, and crime.

Cleaning Up Urban Environments

One of the most urgent problems of the big city was disease. In the late nineteenth century, scientists in Europe came to under- stand the role of germs and bacteria. Th ough researchers could

not yet cure epidemic diseases, they could recommend eff ective measures for preven- tion. Following up on New York City’s victory against cholera in 1866 — when govern- ment offi cials instituted an eff ective quarantine and prevented large numbers of deaths — city and state offi cials began to champion more public health projects. With a major clean-water initiative for its industrial cities in the late nineteenth century, Massachusetts demonstrated that it could largely eliminate typhoid fever. Aft er a hor- rifi c yellow fever epidemic in 1878 that killed perhaps 12 percent of its population, Memphis, Tennessee, invested in state-of-the-art sewage and drainage. Th ough the new system did not eliminate yellow fever, it unexpectedly cut death rates from typhoid and cholera, as well as infant deaths from water-borne disease. Other cities followed suit. By 1913, a nationwide survey of 198 cities found that they were spending an aver- age of $1.28 per resident for sanitation and other health measures.

Th e public health movement became one of the era’s most visible and infl uential reforms. In cities, the impact of pollution was obvious. Children played on piles of garbage, breathed toxic air, and consumed poisoned food, milk, and water. Infant mortality rates were shocking: in the early 1900s, a baby born to a Slavic woman in an American city had a 1 in 3 chance of dying in infancy. Outraged, reformers mobilized to demand safe water and better garbage collection. Hygiene reformers taught hand- washing and other techniques to fi ght the spread of tuberculosis.

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Americans worked in other ways to make industrial cities healthier and more beautiful to live in. Many munic- ipalities adopted smoke-abatement laws, though they had limited success with enforcement until the post– World War I adoption of natural gas, which burned cleaner than coal. Rec- reation also received attention. Even before the Civil War, urban planners had established sanctuaries like New York’s Central Park, where city people could stroll, rest, and contemplate nat-

ural landscapes. By the turn of the twentieth century, the “City Beautiful” movement arose to advocate more and better urban park spaces. Th ough most parks still featured fl ower gardens and tree-lined paths, they also made room for skating rinks, tennis courts, baseball fi elds, and swimming pools. Many included play areas with swing sets and seesaws, promoted by the National Playground Association as a way to keep urban children safe and healthy.

Closing Red Light Districts

Distressed by the commercialization of sex, reformers also launched a campaign against urban prostitution. Th ey warned, in dramatic lan- guage, of the threat of white slavery, alleging (in spite of considerable

evidence to the contrary) that large numbers of young white women were being kid- napped and forced into prostitution. In Th e City’s Perils (1910), author Leona Prall Groetzinger wrote that young women arrived from the countryside “burning with high hope and fi lled with great resolve, but the remorseless city takes them, grinds them, crushes them, and at last deposits them in unknown graves.”

Practical investigators found a more complex reality: women entered prostitution as a result of many factors, including low-wage jobs, economic desperation, abandon- ment, and oft en sexual and domestic abuse. Women who bore a child out of wedlock were oft en shunned by their families and forced into prostitution. Some working women and even housewives undertook casual prostitution to make ends meet. For decades, female reformers had tried to “rescue” such women and retrain them for

A Hint to Boards of Health In 1884, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper urged municipal and state boards of health to work harder to protect urban children. When this cartoon appeared, New Yorkers were reading shocking reports of milk dealers who diluted milk with borax and other chemicals. Note the range of health threats that the cartoonist identifi es. Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center.

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more respectable employments, such as sewing. Results were, at best, mixed. Eff orts to curb demand — that is, to focus on arresting and punishing men who employed pros- titutes — proved unpopular with voters.

Nonetheless, with public concern mounting over “white slavery” and the payoff s machine bosses exacted from brothel keepers, many cities appointed vice commis- sions in the early twentieth century. A wave of brothel closings crested between 1909 and 1912, as police shut down red light districts in cities nationwide. Meanwhile, Con- gress passed the Mann Act (1910) to prohibit the transportation of prostitutes across state lines.

Th e crusade against prostitution accomplished its main goal, closing brothels, but in the long term it worsened the conditions under which many prostitutes worked. Th ough conditions in some brothels were horrifi c, sex workers who catered to wealthy clients made high wages and were relatively protected by madams, many of whom set strict rules for clients and provided medical care for their workers. In the wake of brothel closings, such women lost control of the prostitution business. Instead, almost all sex workers became “streetwalkers” or “call girls,” more vulnerable to violence and oft en earning lower wages than they had before the antiprostitution crusade began.

The Movement for Social Settlements Some urban reformers focused their energies on building a creative new institution, the social settlement. Th ese community welfare centers investigated the plight of the urban poor, raised funds to address urgent needs, and helped neighborhood residents advocate on their own behalf. At the movement’s peak in the early twentieth century, dozens of social settlements operated across the United States. Th e most famous, and one of the fi rst, was Hull House on Chicago’s West Side, founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and her companion Ellen Gates Starr. Th eir dilapidated mansion, fl anked by saloons in a neighborhood of Italian and Eastern European immigrants, served as a spark plug for community improvement and political reform.

Th e idea for Hull House came partly from Toynbee Hall, a London settlement that Addams and Starr had visited while touring Europe. Social settlements also drew inspi- ration from U.S. urban missions of the 1870s and 1880s. Some of these, like the Hamp- ton Institute, had aided former slaves during Reconstruction; others, like Grace Baptist in Philadelphia, arose in northern cities. To meet the needs of urban residents, missions off ered employment counseling, medical clinics, day care centers, and sometimes ath- letic facilities in cooperation with the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA).

Jane Addams, a daughter of the middle class, fi rst expected Hull House to off er art classes and other cultural programs for the poor. But Addams’s views quickly changed as she got to know her new neighbors and struggled to keep Hull House open during the depression of the 1890s. Addams’s views were also infl uenced by conversations with fellow Hull House resident Florence Kelley, who had studied in Europe and returned a committed socialist. Dr. Alice Hamilton, who opened a pediatric clinic at Hull House, wrote that Addams came to see her settlement as “a bridge between the classes. . . . She always held that this bridge was as much of a help to the well-to-do as to the poor.” Settlements off ered idealistic young people “a place where they could live as neighbors and give as much as they could of what they had.”

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Addams and her colleagues believed that working-class Americans already knew what they needed. What they lacked were resources to fulfi ll those needs, as well as a political voice. Th ese, settlement workers tried to provide. Hull House was typical in off ering a bathhouse, playground, kindergarten, and day care center. Some settlements opened libraries and gymnasiums; others operated penny savings banks and coopera- tive kitchens where tired mothers could purchase a meal at the end of the day. (Addams humbly closed the Hull House kitchen when she found that her bland New England cooking had little appeal for Italians; her coworker, Dr. Alice Hamilton, soon investi- gated the health benefi ts of garlic.) At the Henry Street Settlement in New York, Lillian Wald organized visiting nurses to improve health in tenement wards. Addams, mean- while, encouraged local women to inspect the neighborhood and bring back a list of dangers to health and safety. Together, they prepared a complaint to city council. Th e women, Addams wrote, had shown “civic enterprise and moral conviction” in carrying out the project themselves.

Social settlements took many forms. Some attached themselves to preexisting missions and African American colleges. Others were founded by energetic college

Hull House Playground, Chicago, 1906 When this postcard was made, the City of Chicago’s Small Parks Commission had just taken over management of the playground from settlement workers at Hull House, who had created it. In a pattern repeated in many cities, social settlements introduced new institutions and ideas — such as safe places for urban children to play — and inspired municipal authorities to assume responsibility and control. Picture Research Consultants & Archives.

C H A P T E R 1 9 “Civilization’s Inferno”: The Rise and Reform of Industrial Cities, 1880–1917 573

graduates. Catholics ran St. Elizabeth Center in St. Louis; Jews, the Boston Hebrew Industrial School. Whatever their origins, social settlements were, in Addams’s words, “an experimental eff ort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern condition of life in a great city.”

Settlements served as a springboard for many other projects. Settlement workers oft en fought city hall to get better schools and lobbied state legislatures for new work- place safety laws. At Hull House, Hamilton investigated lead poisoning and other health threats at local factories. Her colleague Julia Lathrop investigated the plight of teenagers caught in the criminal justice system. She draft ed a proposal for separate juvenile courts and persuaded Chicago to adopt it. Pressuring the city to experiment with better rehabilitation strategies for juveniles convicted of crime, Lathrop created a model for juvenile court systems across the United States.

Another example of settlements’ long-term impact was the work of Margaret Sanger, a nurse who moved to New York City in 1911 and volunteered with a Lower East Side settlement. Horrifi ed by women’s suff ering from constant pregnancies — and remembering her devout Catholic mother, who had died young aft er bearing eleven children — Sanger launched a crusade for what she called birth control. Her news- paper column, “What Every Girl Should Know,” soon garnered an indictment for vio- lating obscenity laws. Th e publicity that resulted helped Sanger launch a national birth control movement.

Settlements were thus a crucial proving ground for many progressive experi- ments, as well as for the emerging profession of social work, which transformed the provision of public welfare. Social workers rejected the older model of private Chris- tian charity, dispensed by well-meaning middle-class volunteers to those in need. Instead, social workers defi ned themselves as professional caseworkers who served as advocates of social justice. Like many reformers of the era, they allied themselves with the new social sciences, such as sociology and economics, and undertook statistical surveys and other systematic methods for gathering facts. Social work proved to be an excellent opportunity for educated women who sought professional careers. By 1920, women made up 62 percent of U.S. social workers.

Cities and National Politics Despite reform eff orts, the problems wrought by industrialization continued to cause suff ering in urban workplaces and environments. In 1906, journalist Upton Sinclair exposed some of the most extreme forms of labor exploitation in his novel Th e Jungle, which described appalling conditions in Chicago meat-packing plants. What caught the nation’s attention was not Sinclair’s account of workers’ plight, but his descriptions of rotten meat and fi lthy packing conditions. With constituents up in arms, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) and created the federal Food and Drug Administration to oversee compliance with the new law.

Th e impact of Th e Jungle showed how urban reformers could aff ect national poli- tics. Even more signifi cant was the work of Josephine Shaw Lowell, a Civil War widow from a prominent family. Aft er years of struggling to aid poverty-stricken individuals in New York City, Lowell concluded that charity was not enough. In 1890, she helped found the New York Consumers’ League to improve wages and working conditions for

574 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

female store clerks. Th e league encouraged shoppers to patronize only stores where wages and working conditions were known to be fair. By 1899, the organization had become the National Consumers’ League (NCL). At its head stood the outspoken and skillful Florence Kelley, a Hull House worker and former chief factory inspector of Illinois. Kelley believed that only government oversight could protect exploited work- ers. Under her crusading leadership, the NCL became one of the most powerful pro- gressive organizations advocating worker protection laws.

Many labor organizations also began in a single city and then grew to national stature. One famous example was the Women’s Trade Union League, founded in New York in 1903. Financed by wealthy women who supported its work, the league trained working-class leaders like Rose Schneiderman, who organized unions among garment workers. Although oft en frustrated by the patronizing attitude of elite sponsors, trade- union women joined together in the broader struggle for women’s rights. When New York State held referenda on women’s suff rage in 1915 and 1917, strong support came from Jewish and Italian precincts where unionized garment workers lived. Working- class voters hoped, in turn, that enfranchised women would use their ballots to help industrial workers.

Residents of industrial cities, then, sought allies in state and national politics. Th e need for broader action was made clear in New York City by a shocking event on March 25, 1911. On that Saturday aft ernoon, just before quitting time, a fi re broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. It quickly spread through the three fl oors the

The Jungle This poster advertises a 1914 silent fi lm based on Sinclair’s reform novel, which tells the story of Lithuanian immigrants struggling to get by amid the dangerous work, starvation wages, and abysmal living conditions of Chicago’s meat- packing district. The fi lm launched the fi lm careers of actors George Nash and Gail Kane, who played the hero, Jurgis Rutkus, and his wife, Ona. Sinclair him- self appeared at the start of the fi lm, explaining how he conducted research for his story. Socialist clubs often screened the fi lm, which ended — like the book — with a ringing call for workers to organize and create a “cooperative commonwealth” to take control of their conditions of life and work. Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.

C H A P T E R 1 9 “Civilization’s Inferno”: The Rise and Reform of Industrial Cities, 1880–1917 575

company occupied at the top of a ten-story building. Panicked workers discovered that, despite fi re safety laws, employers had locked the emergency doors to prevent theft . Dozens of Triangle workers, mostly young immigrant women, were trapped in the fl ames. Many leaped to their deaths; the rest never reached the windows. Th e aver- age age of the 146 people who died was just nineteen (American Voices, p. 576).

Shocked by this horrifi c event, New Yorkers responded with an outpouring of anger and grief that crossed ethnic, class, and religious boundaries. Many remembered that, only a year earlier, shirtwaist workers had walked off the job to protest abysmal safety and working conditions — and that the owners of Triangle, among other employ- ers, had broken the strike. Facing demands for action, New York State appointed a fac- tory commission that developed a remarkable program of labor reform: fi ft y-six laws dealing with such issues as fi re hazards, unsafe machines, and wages and working hours for women and children. Th e chairman and vice chairman of the commission were Robert F. Wagner and Alfred E. Smith, both Tammany Hall politicians then serving in the state legislature. Th ey established the commission, participated fully in its work, and marshaled party regulars to pass the proposals into law — all with the approval of Tam- many. Th e labor code that resulted was the most advanced in the United States.

Tammany’s response to the Triangle fi re showed that it was acknowledging its need for help. Th e social and economic problems of the industrial city had outgrown the power of party machines; only stronger state and national laws could bar industrial fi retraps, alleviate sweatshop conditions, and improve slums. Politicians like Wagner and Smith saw that Tammany had to change or die. Th e fi re had unforeseen further consequences. Frances Perkins, a Columbia University student who witnessed the horror of Triangle workers leaping from the windows to their deaths, decided she would devote her eff orts to the cause of labor. Already active in women’s reform orga- nizations, Perkins went to Chicago, where she volunteered for several years at Hull House. In 1929, she became New York State’s fi rst commissioner of labor; four years later, during the New Deal (Chapter 23), Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her as U.S. secretary of labor — the fi rst woman to hold a cabinet post.

Th e political aft ermath of the Triangle fi re demonstrated how challenges posed by industrial cities pushed politics in new directions, transforming urban government and initiating broader movements for reform. Th e nation’s political and cultural stan- dards had long been set by native-born, Protestant, middle-class Americans. By 1900, the people who thronged to the great cities helped build America into a global indus- trial power — and in the process, created an electorate that was far more ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse.

In the era of industrialization, some rural and native-born commentators warned that immigrants were “inferior breeds” who would “mongrelize” American culture. But urban political leaders defended cultural pluralism, expressing appreciation — even admiration — for immigrants, including Catholics and Jews, who sought a better life in the United States. At the same time, urban reformers worked to improve conditions of life for the diverse residents of American cit- ies. Cities, then, and the innovative solutions proposed by urban leaders, held a central place in America’s consciousness as the nation took on the task of progressive reform.

What were the origins of social settlements, and how did they develop over time?

How did urban reform movements impact state and national politics?

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S

“ T h e s e D e a d B o d i e s We r e t h e A n s w e r ”: T h e Tr i a n g l e F i r e W I L L I A M G . S H E P H E R D A N D R O S E S C H N E I D E R M A N Th e following excerpts are from documents about the 1911 fi re at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City, written by two contemporaries who played a part in both the catastrophe and the reform initiatives that emerged during its aft ermath.

William G. Shepherd, Reporter

William G. Shepherd’s eyewitness account appeared in newspapers across the country. Working for the United Press, Shepherd phoned the story to his editor as he watched the unfolding tragedy.

I was walking through Washington Square when a puff of smoke issuing from a factory building caught my eye. . . .

I looked up — saw that there were scores of girls at the windows. Th e fl ames from the fl oor below were beating in their faces. Somehow I knew that they, too, must come down, and something within me — some- thing I didn’t know was there — steeled me.

I even watched one girl falling. Waving her arms, trying to keep her body upright until the very instant she struck the side- walk, she was trying to balance herself. Th en came the thud — then a silent, unmoving pile of clothing and twisted, broken limbs. . . .

On the sidewalk lay heaps of broken bodies. A policeman later went about with tags, which he fastened with wire to the wrists of the dead girls, numbering each with a lead pencil, and I saw him fasten tag no. 54 to the wrist of a girl who wore an engagement ring. . . .

Th e fl oods of water from the fi remen’s hose that ran into the gutter were actually stained red with blood. I looked upon the heap of dead bodies and I remembered these girls were the shirtwaist makers. I remem- bered their great strike of last year in which these same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. Th ese dead bodies were the answer.

Rose Schneiderman, Trade Unionist

At age thirteen, Rose Schneiderman had gone to work in a garment factory like Triangle Shirtwaist’s and, under the tutelage of the Women’s Trade Union League, had become a labor organizer. Th e strike she mentions in this speech at a memorial meeting held a week aft er the fi re launched the union movement in the women’s garment trades.

Th is is not the fi rst time girls have been burned alive in the city. . . . Every year thousands of us are maimed. Th e life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. Th ere are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death.

We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers, and sisters by way of a charity gift . But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us . . . [and] beats us back, when we rise, into the conditions that make life unbearable.

I can’t talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. Th e only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.

SOURCE: From Out of the Sweatshop: Th e Struggle of Industrial Democracy by Leon Stein, copyright © 1977 by Leon Stein. Used by permission of Quadrangle Books, an imprint of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House LLC for permission.

C H A P T E R 1 9 “Civilization’s Inferno”: The Rise and Reform of Industrial Cities, 1880–1917 577

S U M M A RY Aft er 1865, American cities grew at an unprecedented rate, and urban populations swelled with workers from rural areas and abroad. To move burgeoning populations around the city, cities pioneered innovative forms of mass transit. Skyscrapers came to mark urban skylines, and new electric lighting systems encouraged nightlife. Neigh- borhoods divided along class and ethnic lines, with the working class inhabiting crowded, shoddily built tenements. Immigrants developed new ethnic cultures in their neighborhoods, while racism followed African American migrants from the country to the city. At the same time, new forms of popular urban culture bridged class and ethnic lines, challenging traditional sexual norms and gender roles. Popular jour- nalism rose to prominence and helped build rising sympathy for reform.

Industrial cities confronted a variety of new political challenges. Despite notable achievements, established machine governments could not address urban problems through traditional means. Forward-looking politicians took the initiative and imple- mented a range of political, labor, and social reforms. Urban reformers also launched campaigns to address public health, morals, and welfare. Th ey did so through a variety of innovative institutions, most notably social settlements, which brought affl uent Americans into working-class neighborhoods to learn, cooperate, and advocate on behalf of their neighbors. Such projects began to increase Americans’ acceptance of urban diversity and their confi dence in government’s ability to solve the problems of industrialization.

Fo r Fu r t h e r E x p l o rat i o n Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910). An inspiring must-read by a great Ameri-

can reformer. George Chauncey, Gay New York (1994). A groundbreaking study of the rise of urban gay

subcultures. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements (1986). Explores urban working-class dating and the world

of young working-class women. Harold Platt, Th e Electric City (1991). A study of how electricity shaped the urban industrial

society and economy. Ruth Rosen, Th e Lost Sisterhood (1982). A poignant account of Progressive Era antiprostitu-

tion campaigns and their tragic impact on sex workers. David Von Drehle, Triangle: Th e Fire Th at Changed America (2003). Th e most recent account

of the fi re and its consequences.

578 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

T I M E L I N E

1866 New York City contains cholera epidemic

1869 Corcoran Gallery of Art opens in Washington, D.C.

1871 First elevated railroad begins operation in New York

1878 Yellow fever epidemic in Memphis, Tennessee

1883 Metropolitan Opera opens in New York

1885 First skyscraper completed in Chicago

1887 First electric trolley system built in Richmond, Virginia

1889 Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr found Hull House in Chicago

1890 Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives

1892 New York’s Ellis Island opens 1893 Ragtime introduced to national

audiences at Chicago World’s Fair

1897 First subway line opened in Boston

1899 Central Labor Union protests in Cleveland

National Consumers’ League founded

1901 New York passes Tenement House Law

“City Beautiful” plan developed for Washington, D.C.

1903 Women’s Trade Union League founded

1904 Subway running the length of Manhattan completed

1906 Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle published

Food and Drug Administration established

Atlanta race riot 1910 Mann Act prohibits transporta-

tion of prostitutes across state lines

1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fi re in New York

1913 Fifty-fi ve-story Woolworth Building completed in New York

M AK E IT S T I C K

Go online and use LearningCurve to retain what you’ve read.

579

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20 Whose Government? Politics, Populists, and Progressives1880–1917 We are living in a grand and wonderful time,” declared Kansas political organizer

Mary E. Lease in 1891. “Men, women and children are in commotion, discussing the mighty problems of the day.” Th is “move- ment among the masses,” she said, was based on the words of Jesus: “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.” Between the 1880s and the 1910s, thousands of reformers like

Lease confronted the problems of industrialization. Lease herself stumped not only for the People’s Party, which sought more government regulation of the economy, but also for the Knights of Labor and Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), as well as for women’s suff rage and public health.

Between the end of Reconstruction and the start of World War I, political reform- ers focused on four main goals: cleaning up politics, limiting the power of big business, reducing poverty, and promoting social justice. Historians call this period of agitation and innovation the Progressive Era. In the 1880s and 1890s, labor unions and farm groups took the lead in critiquing the industrial order and demanding change. But over time, more and more middle-class and elite Americans took up the call, earning the name progressives. On the whole, they proposed more limited measures than farmer-labor advocates did, but since they had more political clout, they oft en had greater success in winning new laws. Th us both radicals and progressives played important roles in advancing reform.

No single group defi ned the Progressive Era. On the contrary, reformers took opposite views on such questions as immigration, racial justice, women’s rights, and imperialism. Leaders such as Th eodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, initially hos- tile to the sweeping critiques of capitalism off ered by radicals, gradually adopted bolder ideas. Dramatic political changes infl uenced the direction of reform. Close party competition in the 1880s gave way to Republican control between 1894 and 1910, followed by a period of Democratic leadership during Wilson’s presidency (1913–1919). Progressives gave the era its name, not because they acted as a unifi ed force, but because they engaged in diverse, energetic movements to improve America.

IDENTIFY THE BIG IDEA In the Progressive Era, how and why did reformers seek to address the problems of industrial America? To what extent did they succeed?

“

580 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

Reform Visions, 1880–1892 In the 1880s, radical farmers’ groups and the Knights of Labor provided a powerful challenge to industrialization (Chapter 17). At the same time, groups such as the WCTU (Chapter 18) and urban settlements (Chapter 19) laid the groundwork for progressivism, especially among women. Th ough they had diff erent goals, these groups confronted similar dilemmas upon entering politics. Should they work through existing political parties? Create new ones? Or generate pressure from the outside? Reformers tried all these strategies.

Electoral Politics After Reconstruction Th e end of Reconstruction ushered in a period of fi erce partisan confl ict. Republicans and Democrats traded control of the Senate three times between 1880 and 1894, and the House majority fi ve times. Causes of this tight competition included northerners’ disillusionment with Republican policies and the resurgence of southern Democrats, who regained a strong base in Congress. Dizzying population growth also changed the size and shape of the House of Representatives. In 1875, it counted 243 seats; two decades later, that had risen to 356. Between 1889 and 1896, entry of seven new west- ern states — Montana, North and South Dakota, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah — contributed to political instability.

Heated competition and the legacies of the Civil War drew Americans into poli- tics. Union veterans donned their uniforms to march in Republican parades, while ex-Confederate Democrats did the same in the South. When politicians appealed to war loyalties, critics ridiculed them for “waving the bloody shirt”: whipping up old animosities that ought to be set aside. For those who had fought or lost beloved family members in the confl ict, however — as well as those struggling over African American rights in the South — war issues remained crucial. Many voters also had strong views on economic policies, especially Republicans’ high protective tariff s. Proportionately more voters turned out in presidential elections from 1876 to 1892 than at any other time in American history.

Th e presidents of this era had limited room to maneuver in a period of narrow victories, when the opposing party oft en held one or both houses of Congress. Repub- licans Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison both won the electoral college but lost the popular vote. In 1884, Democrat Grover Cleveland won only 29,214 more votes than his opponent, James Blaine, while almost half a million voters rejected both major candidates (Map 20.1). With key states decided by razor-thin margins, both Republicans and Democrats engaged in vote buying and other forms of fraud. Th e fi erce struggle for advantage also prompted innovations in political campaigning.

Some historians have characterized this period as a Gilded Age, when politics was corrupt and stagnant and elections centered on “meaningless hoopla.” Th e term Gilded Age, borrowed from the title of an 1873 novel cowritten by Mark Twain, suggested that America had achieved a glittery outer coating of prosperity and loft y rhetoric, but underneath suff ered from moral decay. Economically, the term Gilded Age seems apt: as we have seen in previous chapters, a handful of men made spectacular fortunes, and their “Gilded” triumphs belied a rising crisis of poverty, pollution, and erosion of

C H A P T E R 2 0 Whose Government? Politics, Populists, and Progressives, 1880–1917 581

workers’ rights. But political leaders were not blind to these problems, and the political scene was hardly idle or indiff erent. Rather, Americans bitterly disagreed about what to do. Nonetheless, as early as the 1880s, Congress passed important new federal mea- sures to clean up corruption and rein in corporate power. Th at decade deserves to be considered an early stage in the emerging Progressive Era.

New Initiatives One of the fi rst reforms resulted from tragedy. On July 2, 1881, only four months aft er entering the White House, James Garfi eld was shot

at a train station in Washington, D.C. (“Assassination,” he had told a friend, “can no more be guarded against than death by lightning, and it is best not to worry about either.”) Aft er lingering for several agonizing months, Garfi eld died. Most historians now believe the assassin, Charles Guiteau, suff ered from mental illness. But reformers

Candidate Popular

Vote Percent of

Popular Vote Electoral

Vote

James A. Garfield (Republican) 214

155

4,453,295

4,414,082

48.5

48.1Winfield Hancock(Democrat)

308,578 3.4James B. Weaver(Greenback-Labor)

18801880

12

21 15 22

29

7

3 9 6 4

135 5

15 8

35

11

10 11

3

5

1

5

3

5 5

3

3

8 8

6 12

8 10 11

4

7

10

11

Candidate Popular

Vote Percent of

Popular Vote Electoral

Vote Benjamin Harrison (Republican)

233

168

5,447,129

5,537,857

47.9

48.6Grover Cleveland(Democrat)

249,506 2.2Clinton P. Fisk(Prohibition)

146,935 1.3Anson J. Streeter(Union Labor)

13

22 15 23

30

6

3 9 6 4

144 4

16 8

36

13

11 13

3

8

7

3

9 6

3

5

13 8

7 12

9 10 12

4

9

11

12

1888

Candidate Popular

Vote Percent of

Popular Vote Electoral

Vote Grover Cleveland (Democrat)

219

182

4,879,507

4,850,293

48.5

48.2James G. Blaine (Republican)

175,370 1.8Benjamin F. Butler (Greenback-Labor)

150,369 1.5John P. St. John (Prohibition)

13

22 15 23

30

6

3 9 6 4

144 4

16 8

36

13

11 13

3

8

7

3

9 6

3

5

13 8

7 12

9 10 12

4

9

11

12

1884

MAP 20.1 The Presidential Elections of 1880, 1884, and 1888 The anatomy of hard-fought, narrowly won presidential campaigns is evident in this trio of electoral maps. First, note the equal division of the popular vote between Republicans and Democrats. Second, note the persistent pattern of electoral votes, as states overwhelmingly went to the same party in all three elections. Here, we can identify who determined the outcomes — “swing” states, such as New York and Indiana, whose vote shifted every four years and always in favor of the winning candidate.

582 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

then blamed the spoils system, arguing that Guiteau had murdered Garfi eld out of disappointment in the scramble for patronage, the granting of government jobs to party loyalists.

In the wake of Garfi eld’s death, Congress passed the Pendleton Act (1883), estab- lishing a nonpartisan Civil Service Commission to fi ll federal jobs by examination. Initially, civil service applied to only 10 percent of such jobs, but the act laid the groundwork for a sweeping transformation of public employment. By the 1910s, Con- gress extended the act to cover most federal positions; cities and states across the country enacted similar laws.

Civil service laws had their downside. In the race for government jobs, they tilted the balance toward middle-class applicants who could perform well on tests. “Firemen now must know equations,” complained a critic, “and be up on Euclid too.” But the laws put talented professionals in offi ce and discouraged politicians from appointing unqualifi ed party hacks. Th e civil service also brought stability and consistency to gov- ernment, since offi cials did not lose their jobs every time their party lost power. In the long run, civil service laws markedly reduced corruption.

Leaders of the civil service movement included many classical liberals (Chapter 15): former Republicans who became disillusioned with Reconstruction and advo- cated smaller, more professionalized government. Many had opposed President Ulysses S. Grant’s reelection in 1872. In 1884, they again left the Republican Party because they could not stomach its scandal-tainted candidate, James Blaine. Liberal Republicans — ridiculed by their enemies as Mugwumps (fence-sitters who had their “mugs” on one side and their “wumps” on the other) — helped elect Democrat Grover Cleveland. Th ey believed he shared their vision of smaller government.

As president, Cleveland showed that he largely did share their views. He vetoed, for example, thousands of bills providing pensions for individual Union veterans. But in 1887, responding to pressure from farmer-labor advocates in the Democratic Party who demanded action to limit corporate power, he signed the Interstate Commerce Act (Chapter 17). At the same time, municipal and state-level initiatives were showing how expanded government could help solve industrial problems. In the 1870s and early 1880s, many states created Bureaus of Labor Statistics to investigate workplace safety and unemployment. Some appointed commissions to oversee key industries, from banking to dairy farming. By later standards, such commissions were underfunded, but even when they lacked legal power, energetic commissioners could serve as public advocates, exposing unsafe practices and generating pressure for further laws.

Republican Activism

In 1888, aft er a decade of divided government, Republicans gained con- trol of both Congress and the White House. Th ey pursued an ambitious agenda they believed would meet the needs of a modernizing nation. In

1890, Congress extended pensions to all Union veterans and yielded to growing public outrage over trusts by passing a law to regulate interstate corporations. Th ough it proved diffi cult to enforce and was soon weakened by the Supreme Court, the Sher- man Antitrust Act (1890) was the fi rst federal attempt to forbid any “combination, in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade.”

President Benjamin Harrison also sought to protect black voting rights in the South. Warned during his campaign that the issue was politically risky, Harrison

C H A P T E R 2 0 Whose Government? Politics, Populists, and Progressives, 1880–1917 583

vowed that he would not “purchase the presidency by a compact of silence upon this question.” He found allies in Congress. Massachusetts representative Henry Cabot Lodge draft ed the Federal Elections Bill of 1890, or Lodge Bill, proposing that when- ever one hundred citizens in any district appealed for intervention, a bipartisan federal board could investigate and seat the rightful winner.

Despite cries of outrage from southern Democrats, who warned that it meant “Negro supremacy,” the House passed the measure. But it met resistance in the Senate. Northern classical liberals, who wanted the “best men” to govern through professional expertise, thought it provided too much democracy, while machine bosses feared the threat of federal interference in the cities. Unexpectedly, many western Republicans also opposed the bill — and with the entry of ten new states since 1863, the West had gained enormous clout. Senator William Stewart of Nevada, who had southern family ties, claimed that federal oversight of elections would bring “monarchy or revolution.” He and his allies killed the bill by a single vote.

Th e defeat was a devastating blow to those seeking to defend black voting rights. In the verdict of one furious Republican leader who supported Lodge’s proposal, the episode marked the demise of the party of emancipation. “Th ink of it,” he fumed. “Nevada, barely a respectable county, furnished two senators to betray the Republican Party and the rights of citizenship.”

Other Republican initiatives also proved unpopular — at the polls as well as in Congress. In the Midwest, swing voters reacted against local Republican campaigns to prohibit liquor sales and end state funding for Catholic schools. Blaming high con- sumer prices on protective tariff s, other voters rejected Republican economic policies. In a major shift in the 1890 election, Democrats captured the House of Representa- tives. Two years later, by the largest margin in twenty years, voters reelected Democrat Grover Cleveland to the presidency for a nonconsecutive second term. Republican congressmen abandoned any further attempt to enforce fair elections in the South.

The Populist Program As Democrats took power in Washington, they faced rising pressure from rural voters in the South and West who had organized the Farmers’ Alliance. Savvy politicians responded quickly. Iowa Democrats, for example, took up some of the farmers’ demands, forestalling creation of a separate farmer-labor party in that state. But other politicians listened to Alliance pleas and did nothing. It was a response they came to regret.

Republicans utterly dominated Kansas, a state chock-full of Union veterans and railroad boosters. But politicians there treated the Kansas Farmers’ Alliance with con- tempt. In 1890, the Kansas Alliance joined with the Knights of Labor to create a Peo- ple’s Party. Th ey then stunned the nation by capturing four-fi fths of the lower house of the Kansas legislature and most of the state’s congressional seats. Th e victory electri- fi ed labor and agrarian radicals nationwide. In July 1892, delegates from these groups met at Omaha, Nebraska, and formally created the national People’s Party. Nominat- ing former Union general and Greenback-Labor leader James B. Weaver for president, the Populists, as they became known, captured a million votes in November and car- ried four western states.

584 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

In recognizing an “irrepressible confl ict between capital and labor,” Populists split from the mainstream parties, calling for stronger government to protect ordinary Americans. “We believe,” declared their Omaha Platform (1892), “that the power of government — in other words, of the people — should be expanded as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an intelligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify, to the end that oppression, injustice and poverty should eventually cease.” Pop-

ulists called for public ownership of railroad and tele- graph systems, protection of land from monopoly and foreign ownership, a federal income tax on the rich, and a looser monetary policy to help borrowers. Some Populist allies went further to make their point: in New Mexico, the Gorras Blancas, a vigilante group

of small-scale Mexican American farmers, protested exploitative railroads and “land grabbers” by intimidating railroad workers and cutting fences on large Anglo farms.

Populist leaders represented a grassroots uprising of ordinary farmers, and some won colorful nicknames. Aft er a devastating debate triumph, James H. Davis of Texas became known as “Cyclone.” Mary E. Lease was derided as “Yellin’ Mary Ellen”; her fellow Kansan Jerry Simpson was called “Sockless Jerry” aft er he ridiculed a wealthy opponent for wearing “fi ne silk hosiery,” boasting that he himself wore no socks at all. Th e national press, based in northeastern cities, ridiculed such “hayseed politicians,” but farmers insisted on being taken seriously. In the run-up to one election, a Populist writer encouraged party members to sing these lyrics to the tune of an old gospel hymn:

I once was a tool of oppression, As green as a sucker could be And monopolies banded together To beat a poor hayseed like me. . . .

But now I’ve roused up a little, And their greed and corruption I see, And the ticket we vote next November Will be made up of hayseeds like me.

Driven by farmers’ votes, the People’s Party had mixed success in attracting other constituencies. Its labor planks won support among Alabama steelworkers and Rocky Mountain miners, but not among many other industrial workers, who stuck with the major parties. Prohibitionist and women’s suff rage leaders attended Populist conven- tions, hoping their issues would be taken up, but they were disappointed. Th e legacies

of the Civil War also hampered the party. Southern Democrats warned that Populists were really Radical Republicans in disguise, while northeastern Republicans claimed the southern “Pops” were ex-Confederates plotting another round of treason. Amid these heated debates, the political system suddenly con- fronted an economic crisis.

To see a longer excerpt of the Omaha Platform, along with other primary sources from this period, see Sources for America’s History.

What factors led to close party competition in the 1880s?

How did the political goals of Populists diff er in this period from those of Democrats and Republicans?

C H A P T E R 2 0 Whose Government? Politics, Populists, and Progressives, 1880–1917 585

The Political Earthquakes of the 1890s In 1893, a severe economic depression hit the United States. Th ough it was a global shock and the agriculture sector had already lagged for years, Republicans blamed Grover Cleveland, who had just reentered the White House. “On every hand can be seen evidences of Democratic times,” declared one Republican. “Th e deserted farm, the silent factory.”

Apparently receptive to such appeals, voters outside the South abandoned the Democrats in 1894 and 1896. Republicans, promising prosperity, gained control of the White House and both chambers of Congress for the next fi ft een years. Th is develop- ment created both opportunities and challenges for progressive reformers. A diff erent pattern emerged in the South: Democrats deployed fraud, violence, and race-based appeals for white solidarity to defeat the Populist revolt.

Depression and Reaction When Cleveland took the oath of offi ce in March 1893, hard times were prompting European investors to pull money out of the United States; farm foreclosures and rail- road bankruptcies signaled economic trouble. A few weeks later, a Pennsylvania rail- road went bankrupt, followed by several other companies. Investors panicked; the stock market crashed. By July, major banks had drained their reserves and “suspended,” unable to give depositors access to their money. By year’s end, fi ve hundred banks and thousands of other businesses had gone under. “Boston,” one man remembered, “grew suddenly old, haggard, and thin.” Th e unemployment rate in industrial cities soared above 20 percent.

For Americans who had lived through the terrible 1870s, conditions looked grimly familiar. Even fresher in the public mind were recent labor uprisings, including the 1886 Haymarket violence and the 1892 showdown at Homestead — followed, dur- ing the depression’s fi rst year, by a massive Pennsylvania coal strike and a Pullman railroad boycott that ended with bloody clashes between angry crowds and the U.S. Army. Prosperous Americans, fearful of Populism, were even more terrifi ed that work- ers would embrace socialism or Marxism. Reminding Americans of upheavals such as the Paris Commune of 1871 and its bloody aft ermath, conservative commentators of the 1890s launched America’s fi rst “Red Scare” — a precursor to similar episodes of hysteria in the 1920s (Chapter 22) and 1950s (Chapter 25).

In the summer of 1894, a further protest jolted affl uent Americans. Radical busi- nessman Jacob Coxey of Ohio proposed that the U.S. government hire the unemployed to fi x America’s roads. In 1894, he organized hundreds of jobless men — nicknamed Coxey’s Army — to march peacefully to Washington and appeal for the program. Th ough public employment of the kind Coxey proposed would become central to the New Deal in the 1930s, many Americans in the 1890s viewed Coxey as a dangerous extremist. Public alarm grew when more protesters, inspired by Coxey, started out from Los Angeles, Seattle, and other cities. As they marched east, these men found warm support and off ers of aid in Populist-leaning cities and towns. In other places, police and property owners drove marchers away at gunpoint. Coxey was stunned by what happened when he reached Capitol Hill: he was jailed for trespassing on the

586 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

grass. Some of his men, arrested for vagrancy, ended up in Maryland chain gangs. Th e rest went home hungry.

As this response suggested, President Grover Cleveland’s administration was increasingly out of step with rural and working-class demands. Any president would have been hard-pressed to cope with the depression, but Cleveland made a particu- larly bad hash of it. He steadfastly resisted pressure to loosen the money supply by expanding federal coinage to include silver as well as gold. Advocates of this free silver policy (“free” because, under this plan, the U.S. Mint would not charge a fee for mint- ing silver coins) believed the policy would encourage borrowing and stimulate indus- try. But Cleveland clung to the gold standard; however dire things became, he believed, the money supply must remain tied to the nation’s reserves of gold.

Even collapsing prices and a hemorrhage of gold to Europe did not budge the president. With gold reserves dwindling in 1895, he made a secret arrangement with a syndicate of bankers led by John Pierpont Morgan to arrange gold purchases to replen- ish the treasury. Morgan helped maintain America’s gold supply — preserving the gold standard — and turned a tidy profi t by earning interest on the bonds he provided. Cleveland’s deal, once discovered, enraged fellow Democrats. South Carolina gover-

Coxey’s Army on the March, 1894 During the severe depression of the 1890s, Ohio business- man Jacob Coxey organized unemployed men for a peaceful march to the U.S. Capitol to plead for an emergency jobs program. They called themselves the Commonweal of Christ but won the nickname “Coxey’s Army.” Though it failed to win sympathy from Congress, the army’s march on Washington — one of the nation’s fi rst — inspired similar groups to set out from many cities. Here, Coxey’s group nears Washington, D.C. The man on horseback is Carl Browne, one of the group’s leaders and a fl amboyant publicist. As the marchers entered Washington, Coxey’s seventeen-year-old daughter Mamie, dressed as the “Goddess of Peace,” led the procession on a white Arabian horse. Library of Congress.

C H A P T E R 2 0 Whose Government? Politics, Populists, and Progressives, 1880–1917 587

nor Ben Tillman vowed to go to Washington and “poke old Grover with a pitchfork,” earning the nickname “Pitchfork Ben.”

As the 1894 midterm elections loomed, Democratic candidates tried to distance themselves from the president. But on election day, large numbers of voters chose Republicans, who promised to support business, put down social unrest, and bring back prosperity. Western voters turned many Populists out of offi ce. In the next con- gressional session, Republicans controlled the House by a margin of 245 to 105. Th e election began sixteen years of Republican national dominance.

Democrats and the “Solid South” In the South, the only region where Democrats gained strength in the 1890s, the Peo- ple’s Party lost ground for distinctive reasons. Aft er the end of Reconstruction, African Americans in most states had continued to vote in signifi cant numbers. As long as Democrats competed for (and sometimes bought) black votes, the possibility remained that other parties could win them away. Populists proposed new measures to help farmers and wage earners — an appealing message for poverty-stricken people of both races. Some white Populists went out of their way to build cross-racial ties. “Th e acci- dent of color can make no diff erence in the interest of farmers, croppers, and laborers,” argued Georgia Populist Tom Watson. “You are kept apart that you may be separately fl eeced of your earnings.”

Such appeals threatened the foundations of southern politics. Democrats struck back, calling themselves the “white man’s party” and denouncing Populists for advo- cating “Negro rule.” From Georgia to Texas, many poor white farmers, tenants, and wage earners ignored such appeals and continued to support the Populists in large numbers. Democrats found they could put down the Populist threat only through fraud and violence. Aft erward, Pitchfork Ben Tillman of South Carolina openly bragged that he and other southern whites had “done our level best” to block “every last” black vote. “We stuff ed ballot boxes,” he said in 1900. “We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.” “We had to do it,” a Georgia Democrat later argued. “Th ose damned Populists would have ruined the country.”

Having suppressed the political revolt, Democrats looked for new ways to enforce white supremacy. In 1890, a constitutional convention in Mississippi had adopted a key innovation: an “understanding clause” that required would-be voters to interpret parts of the state constitution, with local Democratic offi cials deciding who met the standard. Aft er the Populist uprising, such measures spread to other southern states. Louisiana’s grandfather clause, which denied the ballot to any man whose grandfather had been unable to vote in slavery days, was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. But in Williams v. Mississippi (1898), the Court allowed poll taxes and literacy tests to stand. By 1908, every southern state had adopted such measures.

Th e impact of disenfranchisement can hardly be overstated (Map 20.2). Across the South, voter turnout plunged, from above 70 percent to 34 percent or even lower. Not only blacks but also many poor whites ceased to vote. Since Democrats faced vir- tually no opposition, action shift ed to the “white primaries,” where Democratic candi- dates competed for nominations. Some former Populists joined the Democrats in openly advocating white supremacy. Th e racial climate hardened. Segregation laws

588 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

proliferated. Lynchings of African Americans increasingly occurred in broad daylight, with crowds of thousands gathered to watch (American Voices, p. 589).

Th e convict lease system, which had begun to take hold during Reconstruction, also expanded. Blacks received harsh sentences for crimes such as “vagrancy,” oft en when they were traveling to fi nd work or if they could not produce a current employment contract. By the 1890s, Alabama depended on convict leasing for 6 percent of its total revenue. Prisoners were overwhelmingly black: a 1908 report showed that almost 90 percent of Georgia’s leased convicts were black; out of a white population of 1.4 million, only 322 were in prison. Calling attention to the torture and deaths of prisoners, as well as the damaging economic eff ect of their unpaid labor, reformers, labor unions, and Populists protested the situation strenuously. But “reforms” simply replaced convict leas- ing with the chain gang, in which prisoners worked directly for the state on roadbuilding and other projects, under equally cruel conditions. All these developments depended on a political Solid South in which Democrats exercised almost complete control.

Th e impact of the 1890s counterrevolution was dramatically illustrated in Grimes County, a cotton-growing area in east Texas where blacks comprised more than half of the population. African American voters kept the local Republican Party going aft er

Disenfranchisement by state constitutional amendment

Disenfranchisement by poll tax and other devices

Counties with black population above 50%

0 150 300 kilometers

0 300 miles150

N

S

E W

ATLANTIC OCEAN

Gulf of Mexico

M E X I C O

TEXAS

OKLAHOMA 1910 ARKANSAS

LA. 1898

MISS. 1890

ALA. 1901

TENNESSEE

GEORGIA 1908

FLA.

S.C. 1895

N.C. 1900

VA. 1901–1902

NEW MEXICO

COLORADO KANSAS

NEBRASKA IOWA

MISSOURI

ILLINOIS

KENTUCKY

IND. OHIO

W. VA.

PA. MD. DEL.

N.J.

MAP 20.2 Disenfranchisement in the New South In the midst of the Populist challenge to Democratic one-party rule in the South, a movement to deprive blacks of the right to vote spread from Mississippi across the South. By 1910, every state in the region except Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, and Florida had made constitutional changes designed to prevent blacks from voting, and these four states accomplished much the same result through poll taxes and other exclusionary methods. For the next half century, the political process in the South would be for whites only.

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S

589

T h e C a u s e o f Ly n c h i n g I D A B . W E L L S In the 1890s, African American journalist Ida B. Wells waged a lonely campaign against the extrajudicial murder of blacks. Wells was forced to fl ee Memphis aft er she publicly denounced the lynching of three friends. Th eir crime? Th ey had dared to open a grocery store that drew customers from a white competitor. Most Americans believed interracial rape led to lynching. In a series of devastating pamphlets, Wells destroyed that myth. As in this passage from Southern Horrors (1892), Wells conducted careful research and oft en quoted from white southern newspapers to make her case. Wells later helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Th ere are many white women in the South who would marry colored men if such an act would not place them at once beyond the pale of society and within the clutches of the law. Th e miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races; they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women. . . .

A few instances to substantiate the assertion that some white women love the company of the Afro-American will not be out of place. . . . Sarah Clark of Memphis loved a black man and lived openly with him. When she was indicted last spring for miscegenation, she swore in court that she was not a white woman. Th is she did to escape the penitentiary. . . . A young girl living on Poplar Street, who was discovered in intimate relations with a handsome mulatto young colored man, Will Morgan by name, stole her father’s money to send the young fellow away from that father’s wrath. She has since joined him in Chicago. . . .

Th ere is hardly a town in the South which has not an instance of the kind which is well-known. . . . Hence there is a growing demand among Afro-Americans that the

guilt or innocence of parties accused of rape be fully established. . . .

When the victim is a colored woman it is diff erent. Last winter in Baltimore, Md., three white ruffi ans assaulted a Miss Camphor, a young Afro-American girl, while out walking with a young man of her own race. Th ey held her escort and outraged the girl. It was a deed dastardly enough to arouse Southern blood, which gives its horror of rape as excuse for lawlessness, but she was an Afro-American. Th e case went to the courts, an Afro-American lawyer defended the men, and they were acquitted. . . .

Only one-third of the 728 victims to mobs have been charged with rape, to say nothing of those of that one-third who were innocent of the charge. . . . Th is cry [of rape] has had its eff ect. It has closed the heart, stifl ed the conscience, warped the judgment and hushed the voice of press and pulpit. . . . Even to the better class of Afro-Americans the crime of rape is so revolting they have too oft en taken the white man’s word and given lynch law neither the investigation nor condemnation it deserved.

SOURCE: Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors and Other Writings, ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 53–56, 58, 61.

590 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

Reconstruction and regularly sent black representatives to the Texas legislature. Many local white Populists dismissed Democrats’ taunts of “negro supremacy,” and a Populist-Republican coalition swept the county elections in 1896 and 1898. But aft er their 1898 defeat, Democrats in Grimes County organized a secret brotherhood and forcibly prevented blacks from voting in town elections, shooting two in cold blood. Th e Populist sheriff proved unable to bring the murderers to justice. Reconstituted in 1900 as the White Man’s Party, Democrats carried Grimes County by an overwhelm- ing margin. Gunmen then laid siege to the Populist sheriff ’s offi ce, killed his brother and a friend, and drove the wounded sheriff out of the county. Th e White Man’s Party ruled Grimes County for the next fi ft y years.

New National Realities While their southern racial policies were abhorrent, the national Democrats simulta- neously amazed the country in 1896 by embracing parts of the Populists’ radical farmer-labor program. Th ey nominated for president a young Nebraska congressman,

Lynching in Texas Lynchings peaked between 1890 and 1910; while most common in the South, they occurred in almost every state, from Oregon to Min- nesota to New York. After many lynchings — such as this one in the town of Center, Texas, in 1920 — crowds posed to have their pictures taken. Commercial photographers often, as in this case, produced photographic postcards to sell as souvenirs. What do we make of these gruesome rituals? Who is in the crowd, and who is not? What do we learn from the fact that this group of white men, some of whom may have been responsible for the lynching, felt comfortable having their photographs recorded with the body? The victim in this photograph, a young man named Lige Daniels, was seized from the local jail by a mob that broke down the prison door to kidnap and kill him. The inscription on the back of the postcard includes information about the killing, along with the instructions “Give this to Bud From Aunt Myrtle.” Private Collection.

C H A P T E R 2 0 Whose Government? Politics, Populists, and Progressives, 1880–1917 591

free-silver advocate William Jennings Bryan, who passionately defended farmers and attacked the gold standard. “Burn down your cities and leave our farms,” Bryan declared in his famous convention speech, “and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.” He ended with a vow: “You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold.” Cheering delegates endorsed a platform calling for free silver and a federal income tax on the wealthy that would replace tariff s as a source of revenue. Demo- crats, long defenders of limited government, were moving toward a more activist stance.

Populists, reeling from recent defeats, endorsed Bryan in the campaign, but their power was waning. Populist leader Tom Watson, who wanted a separate program, more radical than Bryan’s, observed that Democrats in 1896 had cast the Populists as “Jonah while they play whale.” Th e People’s Party never recovered from its electoral losses in 1894 and from Democrats’ ruthless opposition in the South. By 1900, rural voters pursued reform elsewhere, particularly through the new Bryan wing of the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, horrifi ed Republicans denounced Bryan’s platform as anarchistic. Th eir nominee, the Ohio congressman and tariff advocate William McKinley, chose a brilliant campaign manager, Ohio coal and shipping magnate Marcus Hanna, who orchestrated an unprecedented corporate fund-raising campaign. Under his guidance, the party backed away from moral issues such as prohibition of liquor and reached out to new immigrants. Th ough the popular vote was closer, McKinley won big: 271 elec- toral votes to Bryan’s 176 (Map 20.3).

Nationwide, as in the South, the realignment of the 1890s prompted new mea- sures to exclude voters. Infl uenced by classical liberals’ denunciations of “unfi t voters,” many northern states imposed literacy tests and restrictions on immigrant voting. Leaders of both major parties, determined to prevent future Populist-style threats, made it more diffi cult for new parties to get candidates listed on the ballot. In the wake of such laws, voter turnout declined, and the electorate narrowed in ways that favored the native-born and wealthy.

Antidemocratic restrictions on voting helped, paradoxically, to foster certain democratic innovations. Having excluded or reduced the number of poor, African American, and immigrant voters, elite and middle-class reformers felt more comfort- able increasing the power of the voters who remained. Both major parties increasingly turned to the direct primary, asking voters (in most states, registered party members) rather than party leaders to choose nominees. Another measure that enhanced demo- cratic participation was the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution (1913), requiring that U.S. senators be chosen not by state legislatures, but by popular vote. Th ough many states had adopted the practice well before 1913, southern states had resisted, since Democrats feared that it might give more power to their political opponents. Aft er disenfranchisement, such objections faded and the measure passed. Th us disenfranchisement enhanced the power of remaining voters in multiple, com- plicated ways.

At the same time, the Supreme Court proved hostile to many proposed reforms. In 1895, for example, it struck down a recently adopted federal income tax on the wealthy. Th e Court ruled that unless this tax was calculated on a per-state basis, rather

592 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

than by the wealth of individuals, it could not be levied without a constitutional amendment. It took progressives nineteen years to achieve that goal.

Labor organizations also suff ered in the new political regime, as federal courts invalidated many regulatory laws passed to protect workers. As early as 1882, in the case of In re Jacobs, the New York State Court of Appeals struck down a public-health law that prohibited cigar manufacturing in tenements, arguing that such regulation exceeded the state’s police powers. In Lochner v. New York (1905), the U.S. Supreme Court told New York State it could not limit bakers’ workday to ten hours because that violated bakers’ rights to make contracts. Judges found support for such rulings in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibited states from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Th ough the clause had been intended to protect former slaves, courts used it to shield contract rights, with judges arguing that they were protecting workers’ freedom from govern- ment regulation. Interpreted in this way, the Fourteenth Amendment was a major obstacle to regulation of private business.

Farmer and labor advocates, along with urban progressives who called for more government regulation, disagreed with such rulings. Th ey believed judges, not state legislators, were overreaching. While courts treated employers and employees as equal parties, critics dismissed this as a legal fi ction. “Modern industry has reduced ‘free- dom of contract’ to a paper privilege,” declared one labor advocate, “a mere fi gure of rhetoric.” Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., dissenting in the Lochner decision, agreed. If the choice was between working and starving, he observed, how

Candidate Popular

Vote Percent of

Popular Vote Electoral

Vote Grover Cleveland (Democrat)

277

145

5,555,426

5,182,690

46.1

43.0 Benjamin Harrison (Republican)

22 1,029,846 8.5

2.3

James B. Weaver (Populist)

285,297Minor parties

1892

13

24 15 22

32

6

3 10 6 4

154 4

17 8

36

13

12 9

53 1

4

8

9

3

10 6

4

8

15 8

8 12

9 11 13

4

9

11

12

3

3

3

11 1

4

1

1

Candidate Popular

Vote Percent of

Popular Vote Electoral

Vote William McKinley (Republican)

271

176

7,102,246

6,492,559

51.1

47.7William J. Bryan(Democrat)

1896

12

24 15 23

32

6

3 10 6 4

154 4

17 8

36

13

12 14

4

4

8

9

3

10 6

4

8

15 8

8 12

9 11 13

4

9

11

12

3

3

3

3

3

4

1

1

MAP 20.3 The Presidential Elections of 1892 and 1896 In the 1890s, the age of political stalemate came to an end. Students should compare the 1892 map with Map 20.1 (p. 581) and note especially Cleveland’s breakthrough in the normally Republican states of the Upper Midwest. In 1896, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction, with McKinley’s consolidation of Republican control over the Northeast and Midwest far overbalancing the Democratic advances in the thinly populated western states. The 1896 election marked the beginning of sixteen years of Republican dominance in national politics.

C H A P T E R 2 0 Whose Government? Politics, Populists, and Progressives, 1880–1917 593

could bakers “choose” their hours of work? Holmes’s view, known as legal realism, eventu- ally won judicial favor, but only aft er years of progressive and labor activism.

Reform Reshaped, 1901–1912 William McKinley, a powerful presence in the White House, was no reformer. His victory was widely understood as a triumph for business and especially for industrial titans who had contributed heavily to his campaign. But the depression of the 1890s, by subjecting millions to severe hardship, had dramati- cally illustrated the problems of industrialization. At the same time, the success of McKinley’s campaign managers — who spent more than $3.5 million, versus Bryan’s $300,000 — raised unsettling questions about corporate power. Once the crisis of the 1890s passed, many middle-class Americans proved ready to embrace progressive ideas. Th e rise of such ideas was aided by historical chance, when a shocking assassina- tion put a reformer in the White House.

Theodore Roosevelt as President On September 14, 1901, only six months aft er William McKinley won his second face- off against Democrat William Jennings Bryan, the president was shot as he attended the Pan-American Exposition in Buff alo, New York. He died eight days later. Th e mur- derer, Leon Czolgosz, was infl uenced by anarchists who had carried out recent assas- sinations in Europe. Th ough Czolgosz was American-born, many feared that McKinley’s violent death was another warning of the threat posed by radical immi- grants. As the nation mourned its third murdered president in less than four decades, Vice President Th eodore Roosevelt was sworn into offi ce.

Roosevelt, from a prominent family, had chosen an unconventional path. Aft er graduating from Harvard, he plunged into politics, winning a seat as a Republican New York assemblyman. Disillusioned by his party’s resistance to reform, he left poli- tics in the mid-1880s and moved to a North Dakota ranch. But his cattle herd was wiped out in the blizzards of 1887. He returned east, winning appointments as a U.S. Civil Service commissioner, head of the New York City Police Commission, and McKinley’s assistant secretary of the navy. An energetic presence in all these jobs, Roosevelt gained broad knowledge of the problems America faced at the municipal, state, and federal levels.

Aft er serving in the War of 1898 (Chapter 21), Roosevelt was elected as New York’s governor. In this job, he pushed through civil service reform and a tax on cor- porations. Seeking to neutralize this progressive and rather unpredictable political star, Republican bosses chose Roosevelt as McKinley’s running mate in 1900, hop- ing the vice-presidency would be a political dead end. Instead, they suddenly found Roosevelt in the White House. Th e new president, who called for vigorous reform, represented a major shift for the Republicans.

How did diff erent groups of Americans react to the economic depression of the 1890s, and what happened as a result?

What developments caused the percentage of Americans who voted to plunge after 1900, and what role did courts play in anti- democratic developments?

594 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

Antitrust Legislation

Roosevelt blended reform with the needs of private enterprise, but on occasion he challenged corporations in new ways. During a bitter 1902 coal strike, for example, he threatened to nationalize the big coal compa-

nies if their owners refused to negotiate with the miners’ union. Th e owners hastily came to the table. Roosevelt also sought better enforcement of the Interstate Com- merce Act and Sherman Antitrust Act. He pushed through the Elkins Act (1903), which prohibited discriminatory railway rates that favored powerful customers. Th at same year, he created the Bureau of Corporations, empowered to investigate business practices and bolster the Justice Department’s capacity to mount antitrust suits. Th e department had already fi led such a suit against the Northern Securities Company, arguing that this combination of northwestern railroads had created a monopoly in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. In a landmark decision in 1904, the Supreme Court ordered Northern Securities dissolved.

Th at year, calling for every American to get what he called a Square Deal, Roosevelt handily defeated Democratic candidate Alton B. Parker. Now president in his own right, Roosevelt stepped up his attack on trusts. He regarded large-scale enter-

prise as the natural tendency of modern industry, but he hoped to identify and punish “malefactors of great wealth” who abused their power. Aft er much wrangling in Congress, Roosevelt won a major vic- tory with the passage of the Hepburn Act (1906), which enabled the Interstate Com- merce Commission to set shipping rates.

Reining in Big Business This 1904 cartoon from Puck shows Theodore Roosevelt as a tiny fi gure with a sword marked “public service,” taking on railroad developer Jay Gould, fi nancier John Pierpont Morgan, and other Wall Street titans. The fi gure at the top right is oil magnate John D. Rockefeller. In its reference to the folktale “Jack the Giant Killer,” the cartoon suggests how diffi cult it will be for the president to limit the power of globally connected bankers and fi nanciers. Library of Congress.

C H A P T E R 2 0 Whose Government? Politics, Populists, and Progressives, 1880–1917 595

At the time Roosevelt acted, trusts had partially protected themselves with the help of two friendly states, New Jersey and Delaware, whose legislatures had loosened regulations and invited trusts to incorporate under their new state laws. With its Northern Securities ruling, however, the Supreme Court began to recognize federal authority to dissolve the most egregious monopolies. Roosevelt left a powerful legacy to his successor, William Howard Taft . In its Standard Oil decision (1911), the Supreme Court agreed with Taft ’s Justice Department that John D. Rockefeller’s massive oil monopoly should be broken up into several competing companies. Aft er this ruling, Taft ’s attorney general undertook antitrust actions against other giant companies.

Environmental Conservation

Roosevelt was an ardent outdoorsman and hunter. It was aft er the president went bear hunting in Mississippi in 1902, in fact, that a Russian Jewish immigrant couple in New York began to sell stuff ed

“Teddy’s bears,” which became an American childhood tradition. Aft er John Muir gave Roosevelt a tour of Yosemite Valley, the president described the transcendent experience of camping in the open air under the giant sequoias. “Th e majestic trunks, beautiful in color and in symmetry,” he wrote, “rose round us like the pillars of a mightier cathedral than ever was conceived.”

Roosevelt translated his love of nature into environmental action. By the end of his presidency, he had issued fi ft y-one executive orders creating wildlife refuges and signed a number of bills advocated by environmentalists. He also oversaw creation of three national parks, including Colorado’s Mesa Verde, the fi rst to “protect the works of man” — American Indian archaeological sites. Also notable was his vigorous use of the Antiquities Act, through which he set aside such beautiful sites as Arizona’s Grand Canyon and Washington’s Mt. Olympus.

Some of Roosevelt’s conservation policies, however, had a probusiness bent. He increased the amount of land held in federal forest reserves and turned their manage- ment over to the new, independent U.S. Forest Service, created in 1905. But his for- estry chief, Giff ord Pinchot, insisted on fi re suppression to maximize logging potential. In addition, Roosevelt lent support to the Newlands Reclamation Act (1902), which had much in common with earlier Republican policies to promote economic develop- ment in the West. Under the act, the federal government sold public lands to raise money for irrigation projects that expanded agriculture on arid lands. Th e law, inter- estingly, fulfi lled one of the demands of the unemployed men who had marched with Coxey’s Army.

Roosevelt’s Legacies

Like the environmental laws enacted during his presidency, Th eodore Roosevelt was full of contradictions. An unabashed believer in what he called “Anglo-Saxon” superiority, Roosevelt nonetheless incurred the

wrath of white supremacists by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House. Roosevelt called for elite “best men” to enter politics, but he also defended the dignity of labor.

In 1908, Roosevelt chose to retire, bequeathing the Republican nomination to talented administrator William Howard Taft . Taft portrayed himself as Roosevelt’s man, though he maintained a closer relationship than his predecessor with probusi- ness Republicans in Congress. In 1908, Taft faced off against Democrat William

596 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

Jennings Bryan, who, eloquent as ever, attacked Republicans as the party of “pluto- crats”: men who used their wealth to buy political infl uence. Bryan outdid Taft in urg- ing tougher antitrust and prolabor legislation, but Taft won comfortably.

In the wake of Taft ’s victory, however, rising pressure for reform began to divide Republicans. Conservatives dug in, while militant progressives within the party thought Roosevelt and his successor had not gone far enough. Reconciling these con- fl icting forces was a daunting task. For Taft , it spelled disaster. Th rough various inci- dents, he found himself on the opposite side of progressive Republicans, who began to call themselves “Insurgents” and to plot their own path.

Diverse Progressive Goals Th e revolt of Republican Insurgents signaled the strength of grassroots demands for change. No one described these emerging goals more eloquently than Jane Addams, who famously declared in Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), “Th e cure for the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.” It was a poignant statement, given the sharply anti- democratic direction American politics had taken since the 1890s. What, now, should more democracy look like? Various groups of progressives — women, antipoverty reformers, African American advocates — oft en disagreed about priorities and goals. Some, frustrated by events in the United States, traveled abroad to study inspiring experiments in other nations, hoping to bring ideas home (America Compared, p. 597).

States also served as seedbeds of change. Th eodore Roosevelt dubbed Wisconsin a “laboratory of democracy” under energetic Republican governor Robert La Follette (1901–1905). La Follette promoted what he called the Wisconsin Idea — greater gov- ernment intervention in the economy, with reliance on experts, particularly progres- sive economists, for policy recommendations. Like Addams, La Follette combined respect for expertise with commitment to “more Democracy.” He won battles to restrict lobbying and to give Wisconsin citizens the right of recall — voting to remove unpopular politicians from offi ce — and referendum — voting directly on a proposed law, rather than leaving it in the hands of legislators. Continuing his career in the U.S. Senate, La Follette, like Roosevelt, advocated increasingly aggressive measures to pro- tect workers and rein in corporate power.

Protecting the Poor

Th e urban settlement movement called attention to poverty in America’s industrial cities. In the emerging social sciences, experts argued that unemployment and crowded slums were not caused by laziness and

ignorance, as elite Americans had long believed. Instead, as journalist Robert Hunter wrote in his landmark study, Poverty (1904), such problems resulted from “miserable and unjust social conditions.” Charity work was at best a limited solution. “How vain to waste our energies on single cases of relief,” declared one reformer, “when society should aim at removing the prolifi c sources of all the woe.”

By the early twentieth century, reformers placed particular emphasis on labor conditions for women and children. Th e National Child Labor Committee, created in 1907, hired photographer Lewis Hine to record brutal conditions in mines and mills where children worked. Impressed by the committee’s investigations, Th eodore Roosevelt sponsored the fi rst White House Conference on Dependent Children in

A M E R I C A C O M PA R E D

597

A P r o g r e s s i v e R e p o r t s f r o m N e w Z e a l a n d Henry Demarest Lloyd, a reform journalist discouraged by populism’s defeat in the United States, toured New Zealand in 1899. Lloyd wanted to study New Zealand’s sudden burst of reform legislation stemming from a great industrial strike in 1890 and, in its wake, a Labor Party election victory that precipitated dramatic change.

Lloyd was one of many reformers who looked overseas for progressive ideas. Th e urban settlement movement in the United States was inspired by British examples. Municipal, state, and federal offi cials borrowed innovative policies from other parts of the industrial- izing world — from scientifi c forest management to workmen’s compensation laws.

New Zealand democracy is the talk of the world to-day. It has made itself the police- man and partner of industry to an extent unknown elsewhere. It is the “experiment station” of advanced legislation. . . .

Instead of escaping from the evils of the social order by going to a new country, the Englishmen who settled New Zealand found that they had brought all its problems with them. . . . Th e best acres were in the hands of monopolists. . . . Th e little farmer, forced by unjust and deliberately contrived laws to pay his own and his rich neighbor’s taxes, had to sell out his little homestead to that neighbor for what he could get. Th e workingman, able to get neither land nor work, had to become a tramp. . . . Th e blood of the people was the vintage of the rich.

Here is the record of ten years [of progressive legislation]: . . . Th e rich man, because rich, is made to pay more. . . .

By compulsory arbitration the public gets for the guidance of public opinion all the facts as to disputes between labor and capital, [and] puts an end to strikes and lock-outs. . . . For the unemployed the nation makes itself a labor bureau. It brings them and the employers together. It reorganizes its public works and land system so as to give land to the landless

and work to the workless. . . . Th e state itself insures the working people against accident.

. . . Th e nation’s railroads are used to redistribute unemployed labour, to rebuild industry shattered by calamity, to stimulate production by special rates to and from farms and factories, to give health and education to the school and factory population and the people generally by cheap excursions.

. . . Women are enfranchised. . . . On election day one can see the baby-carriage standing in front of the polls while the father and mother go in and vote — against each other if they choose.

Last of all, pensions are given to the aged poor.

. . . We are exhorted to take “one step at a time” [but] this theory does not fi t the New Zealand evolution. . . . It was not merely a change in parties; it was a change in principles and institutions that amounted to nothing less than a social right-about- face. It was a New Zealand revolution, one which without destruction passed at once to the tasks of construction.

SOURCE: Henry Demarest Lloyd, Newest England (New York: Doubleday, 1901), 1, 364–374.

598 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

1909, bringing national attention to child welfare issues. In 1912, momentum from the conference resulted in creation of the Children’s Bureau in the U.S. Labor Department.

Th ose seeking to protect working-class women scored a major triumph in 1908 with the Supreme Court’s decision in Muller v. Oregon, which upheld an Oregon law limiting women’s workday to ten hours. Given the Court’s ruling three years earlier in Lochner v. New York, it was a stunning victory. To win the case, the National Consum- ers’ League (NCL) recruited Louis Brandeis, a son of Jewish immigrants who was widely known as “the people’s lawyer” for his eagerness to take on vested interests. Brandeis’s legal brief in the Muller case devoted only two pages to the constitutional issue of state police powers. Instead, Brandeis rested his arguments on data gathered by the NCL describing the toll that long work hours took on women’s health. Th e “Brandeis brief ” cleared the way for use of social science research in court decisions. Sanctioning a more expansive role for state governments, the Muller decision encour- aged women’s organizations to lobby for further reforms. Th eir achievements included the fi rst law providing public assistance for single mothers with dependent children (Illinois, 1911) and the fi rst minimum wage law for women (Massachusetts, 1912).

Muller had drawbacks, however. Th ough men as well as women suff ered from long work hours, the Muller case did not protect men. Brandeis’s brief treated all women as potential mothers, focusing on the state’s interest in protecting future chil- dren. Brandeis and his allies hoped this would open the door to broader regulation of working hours. Th e Supreme Court, however, seized on motherhood as the key issue, asserting that the female worker, because of her maternal function, was “in a class by herself, and legislation for her protection may be sustained, even when like legislation is not necessary for men.” Th is conclusion dismayed labor advocates and divided female reformers for decades aft erward.

Male workers did benefi t, however, from new workmen’s compensation measures. Between 1910 and 1917, all the industrial states enacted insurance laws covering on- the-job accidents, so workers’ families would not starve if a breadwinner was injured or killed. Some states also experimented with so-called mothers’ pensions, providing state assistance aft er a breadwinner’s desertion or death. Mothers, however, were sub- jected to home visits to determine whether they “deserved” government aid; injured workmen were not judged on this basis, a pattern of gender discrimination that refl ected the broader impulse to protect women, while also treating them diff erently from men. Mothers’ pensions reached relatively small numbers of women, but they laid foundations for the national program Aid to Families with Dependent Children, an important component of the Social Security Act of 1935.

While federalism gave the states considerable freedom to innovate, it hampered national reforms. In some states, for example, opponents of child labor won laws bar- ring young children from factory work and strictly regulating hours and conditions for older children’s labor. In the South, however, and in coal-mining states like Penn- sylvania, companies fi ercely resisted such laws — as did many working-class parents who relied on children’s income to keep the family fed. A proposed U.S. constitutional amendment to abolish child labor never won ratifi cation; only four states passed it. Tens of thousands of children continued to work in low-wage jobs, especially in the South. Th e same decentralized power that permitted innovation in Wisconsin ham- pered the creation of national minimum standards for pay and job safety.

C H A P T E R 2 0 Whose Government? Politics, Populists, and Progressives, 1880–1917 599

The Birth of Modern Civil Rights

Reeling from disenfranchisement and the sanction of racial seg- regation in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), African American leaders faced distinctive challenges. Given the obvious deterioration of

African American rights, a new generation of black leaders proposed bolder approaches than those popularized earlier by Booker T. Washington. Harvard-educated sociolo- gist W. E. B. Du Bois called for a talented tenth of educated blacks to develop new strategies. “Th e policy of compromise has failed,” declared William Monroe Trotter, pugnacious editor of the Boston Guardian. “Th e policy of resistance and aggression deserves a trial.”

In 1905, Du Bois and Trotter called a meeting at Niagara Falls — on the Canadian side, because no hotel on the U.S. side would admit blacks. Th e resulting Niagara Prin- ciples called for full voting rights; an end to segregation; equal treatment in the justice system; and equal opportunity in education, jobs, health care, and military service. Th ese principles, based on African American pride and an uncompromising demand for full equality, guided the civil rights movement throughout the twentieth century.

In 1908, a bloody race riot broke out in Springfi eld, Illinois. Appalled by the white mob’s violence in the hometown of Abraham Lincoln, New York settlement worker Mary White Ovington called together a group of sympathetic progressives to formu- late a response. Th eir meeting led in 1909 to creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Most leaders of the Niagara Movement soon joined; W. E. B. Du Bois became editor of the NAACP journal, Th e Crisis. Th e fl edgling group found allies in many African American women’s clubs

W. E. B. Du Bois W. E. B. Du Bois was born in western Massachusetts in 1868, the son of a barber and a domestic worker. He received an excellent local education and went on to earn his BA and PhD at Harvard, as well as to study with cutting-edge social scientists in Germany. By 1900, Du Bois had become a national civil rights leader and America’s leading black intellectual. Famous for his sociological and historical studies, including The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and edited the organization’s journal, The Crisis. Between 1900 and 1945, he helped organize Pan-African conferences in locations around the world. Toward the end of his life, Du Bois pursued this Pan-African ideal by moving to Ghana, the fi rst modern African nation formed after the end of European colonialism. He died there in 1963. Special Collections and Archives, W. E. B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

600 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

and churches. It also cooperated with the National Urban League (1911), a union of agencies that assisted black migrants in the North. Over the coming decades, these groups grew into a powerful force for racial justice.

The Problem of Labor

Leaders of the nation’s dominant union, the American Federation of Labor, were slow to ally with progressives. Th ey had long believed work- ers should improve their situation through strikes and direct negotia-

tion with employers, not through politics. But by the 1910s, as progressive reformers came forward with solutions, labor leaders in state aft er state began to join the cause.

Th e nation also confronted a daring wave of radical labor militancy. In 1905, the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), led by fi ery leaders such as William “Big Bill” Haywood, helped create a new movement, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Th e Wobblies, as they were called, fervently supported the Marxist class struggle. As syndicalists, they believed that by resisting in the workplace and ultimately launching a general strike, workers could overthrow capitalism. A new society would emerge, run directly by workers. At its height, around 1916, the IWW had about 100,000 members. Th ough divided by internal confl icts, the group helped spark a number of local protests during the 1910s, including strikes of rail car builders in Pennsylvania, textile opera- tives in Massachusetts, rubber workers in Ohio, and miners in Minnesota.

Meanwhile, aft er midnight on October 1, 1910, an explosion ripped through the Los Angeles Times headquarters, killing twenty employees and wrecking the building. It

turned out that John J. McNamara, a high offi cial of the American Federation of Labor’s Bridge and Structural Iron Workers Union, had planned the bombing against the fi ercely antiunion Times. McNamara’s brother and another union member had carried out the attack. Th e bombing created a sen- sation, as did the terrible Triangle

The Ludlow Massacre, 1914 Like his drawings of Triangle Shirtwaist fi re victims in New York, this cover illustra- tion for the popular socialist magazine The Masses demonstrates John Sloan’s outrage at social injustice in progressive America. The drawing memorializes a tragic episode during a coal miners’ strike at Ludlow, Colorado — the asphyxiation of women and children when vigilantes torched the tent city of evicted miners — and the aftermath, an armed revolt by enraged miners. The Masses, June 1914.

C H A P T E R 2 0 Whose Government? Politics, Populists, and Progressives, 1880–1917 601

Shirtwaist fi re (Chapter 19) and the IWW’s high-profi le strikes. What should be done? As the election of 1912 approached, labor issues moved high on the nation’s agenda.

The Election of 1912 Retirement did not sit comfortably with Th eodore Roosevelt. Returning from a year- long safari in Africa in 1910 and fi nding Taft wrangling with the Insurgents, Roosevelt itched to jump in. In a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, in August 1910, he called for a New Nationalism. In modern America, he argued, private property had to be con- trolled “to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.” He proposed a federal child labor law, more recognition of labor rights, and a national minimum wage for women. Pressed by friends like Jane Addams, Roosevelt also endorsed women’s suf- frage. Most radical was his attack on the legal system. Insisting that courts blocked reform, Roosevelt proposed sharp curbs on their powers.

Early in 1912, Roosevelt announced himself as a Republican candidate for presi- dent. A battle within the party ensued. Roosevelt won most states that held primary elections, but Taft controlled party caucuses elsewhere. Dominated by regulars, the Republican convention chose Taft . Roosevelt then led his followers into what became known as the Progressive Party, off ering his New Nationalism directly to the people. Th ough Jane Addams harbored private doubts (especially about Roosevelt’s mania for battleships), she seconded his nomination, calling the Progressive Party “the Ameri- can exponent of a world-wide movement for juster social conditions.” In a nod to Roosevelt’s combative stance, party followers called themselves “Bull Mooses.”

Roosevelt was not the only rebel on the ballot: the major parties also faced a chal- lenge from charismatic socialist Eugene V. Debs. In the 1890s, Debs had founded the American Railway Union (ARU), a broad-based group that included both skilled and unskilled workers. In 1894, amid the upheavals of depression and popular protest, the ARU had boycotted luxury Pullman sleeping cars, in support of a strike by workers at the Pullman Company. Railroad managers, claiming the strike obstructed the U.S. mail, persuaded Grover Cleveland’s administration to intervene against the union. Th e strike failed, and Debs served time in prison along with other ARU leaders. Th e expe- rience radicalized him, and in 1901 he launched the Socialist Party of America. Debs translated socialism into an American idiom, emphasizing the democratic process as a means to defeat capitalism. By the early 1910s, his party had secured a minor but persistent role in politics. Both the Progressive and Socialist parties drew strength from the West, a region with vigorous urban reform movements and a legacy of farmer-labor activism.

Watching the rise of the Progressives and Socialists, Democrats were keen to build on dramatic gains they had made in the 1910 midterm election. Among their younger leaders was Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson, who as New Jersey’s governor had com- piled an impressive reform record, including passage of a direct primary, workers’ compensation, and utility regulation. In 1912, he won the Democrats’ nomination. Wilson possessed, to a fault, the moral certainty that characterized many elite progres- sives. He had much in common with Roosevelt. “Th e old time of individual competi- tion is probably gone by,” he admitted, agreeing for more federal measures to restrict big business. But his goals were less sweeping than Roosevelt’s, and only gradually did he hammer out a reform program, calling it the New Freedom. “If America is not to

602 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

have free enterprise,” Wilson warned, “then she can have freedom of no sort whatever.” He claimed Roosevelt’s program represented collectivism, whereas the New Freedom would preserve political and economic liberty.

With four candidates in the fi eld — Taft , Roosevelt, Wilson, and Debs — the 1912 campaign generated intense excitement. Democrats continued to have an enormous blind spot: their opposition to African American rights. But Republicans, despite plentiful opportunities, had also conspicuously failed to end segregation or pass anti- lynching laws. Th ough African American leaders had high hopes for the Progressive Party, they were crushed when the new party refused to seat southern black delegates or take a stand for racial equality. W. E. B. Du Bois considered voting for Debs, calling the Socialists the only party “which openly recognized Negro manhood.” But he ulti- mately endorsed Wilson. Across the North, in a startling shift , thousands of African American men and women worked and voted for Wilson, hoping Democrats’ reform energy would benefi t Americans across racial lines. Th e change helped lay the founda- tions for Democrats’ New Deal coalition of the 1930s.

Despite the intense campaign, Republicans’ division between Taft and Roosevelt made the result fairly easy to predict. Wilson won, though he received only 42 percent of the popular vote and almost certainly would have lost if Roosevelt had not been in the race (Map 20.4). In compari- son with Roosevelt and Debs, Wilson appeared to be a rather old-fashioned choice. But with labor protests cresting and progressives gaining support, Wilson faced intense pressure to act.

How did various grassroots reformers defi ne “progressivism,” and how did their views diff er from Theodore Roosevelt’s version of “progressivism”?

Why did the election of 1912 feature four candidates, and how did their platforms diff er?

Candidate Popular

Vote Percent of

Popular Vote Electoral

Vote

Woodrow Wilson (Democrat)

435

88

8

0

6,296,547

4,118,571

3,486,720

900,672

41.9

27.4

23.2

6.0

Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive)

William H. Taft (Republican)

Eugene V. Debs (Socialist)

1.5Other minor parties

13

29 15 24 38

6

3 14 7 5

184 4

18 8

45

13

13 15

5

7

11

12

3

10 8

6

8

20 10

9 12

10 12 14

6

9

12

12

4

4

4

3

5

5

2 3 3 10

MAP 20.4 The Presidential Election of 1912 The 1912 election reveals why the two-party system is so strongly rooted in American politics — especially in presidential elections. The Democrats, though a minority party, won an elec- toral landslide because the Republicans divided their vote between Roosevelt and Taft. This result indicates what is at stake when major parties splinter. The Socialist Party candidate, Eugene V. Debs, despite a record vote of 900,000, received no electoral votes.

C H A P T E R 2 0 Whose Government? Politics, Populists, and Progressives, 1880–1917 603

Wilson and the New Freedom, 1913–1917 In his inaugural address, Wilson acknowledged that industrialization had precipitated a crisis. “Th ere can be no equality of opportunity,” he said, “if men and women and children be not shielded . . . from the consequences of great industrial and social pro- cesses which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with.” Wilson was a Democrat, and labor interests and farmers — some previously radicalized in the People’s Party — were important components of his base. In the South, many of those voters also upheld strong support for white supremacy. Despite many northern African Americans’ sup- port for Wilson, his administration did little for those constituents. But he undertook bold economic reforms.

Economic Reforms In an era of rising corporate power, many Democrats believed workers needed stron- ger government to intervene on their behalf, and they began to transform themselves into a modern, state-building party. Th e Wilson administration achieved a series of landmark measures — at least as signifi cant as those enacted during earlier adminis- trations, and perhaps more so (Table 20.1). Th e most enduring was the federal pro- gressive income tax. “Progressive,” by this defi nition, referred to the fact that it was not a fl at tax but rose progressively toward the top of the income scale. Th e tax, passed in the 1890s but rejected by the Supreme Court, was reenacted as the Sixteenth Amend- ment to the Constitution, ratifi ed by the states in February 1913. Th e next year, Con- gress used the new power to enact an income tax of 1 to 7 percent on Americans with annual incomes of $4,000 or more. At a time when white male wageworkers might expect to make $800 per year, the tax aff ected less than 5 percent of households.

Th ree years later, Congress followed this with an inheritance tax. Th ese measures created an entirely new way to fund the federal government, replacing Republicans’ high tariff as the chief source of revenue. Over subsequent decades, especially between the 1930s and the 1970s, the income tax system markedly reduced America’s extremes of wealth and poverty.

Wilson also reorganized the fi nancial system to address the absence of a central bank. At the time, the main function of national central banks was to back up com- mercial banks in case they could not meet their obligations. In the United States, the great private banks of New York (such as J. P. Morgan’s) assumed this role; if they weakened, the entire system could collapse. Th is had nearly happened in 1907, when the Knickerbocker Trust Company failed, precipitating a panic. Th e Federal Reserve Act (1913) gave the nation a banking system more resistant to such crises. It created twelve district reserve banks funded and controlled by their member banks, with a central Federal Reserve Board to impose regulation. Th e Federal Reserve could issue currency — paper money based on assets held in the system — and set the interest rate that district reserve banks charged to their members. It thereby regulated the fl ow of credit to the general public. Th e act strengthened the banking system and, to a modest degree, discouraged risky speculation on Wall Street.

Wilson and the Democratic Congress turned next to the trusts. In doing so, Wilson relied heavily on Louis D. Brandeis, the celebrated people’s lawyer. Brandeis denied that

604 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

monopolies were effi cient. On the contrary, he believed the best source of effi ciency was vigorous competition in a free market. Th e trick was to prevent trusts from unfairly using their power to curb such competition. In the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914), which amended the Sherman Act, the defi nition of illegal practices was left fl exible, subject to the test of whether an action “substantially lessen[ed] competition.” Th e new Federal Trade Commission received broad powers to decide what was fair, investigating com- panies and issuing “cease and desist” orders against anticompetitive practices.

Labor issues, meanwhile, received attention from a blue-ribbon U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, appointed near the end of Taft ’s presidency and charged with investigating the conditions of labor. In its 1913 report, the commission summed up

TABLE 20.1 Major Federal Progressive Measures, 1883–1921

Before 1900

Pendleton Civil Service Act (1883) Hatch Act (1887; Chapter 17) Interstate Commerce Act (1887; Chapter 17) Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) Federal income tax (1894; struck down by Supreme Court, 1895)

In Theodore Roosevelt’s Presidency, 1901–1909

Newlands Reclamation Act for federal irrigation (1902) Elkins Act (1903) First National Wildlife Refuge (1903; Chapter 18) Bureau of Corporations created to aid Justice Department antitrust work (1903) National Forest Service created (1905) Antiquities Act (1906; Chapter 18) Pure Food and Drug Act (1906; Chapter 19) Hepburn Act (1906) First White House Conference on Dependent Children (1909)

During William Howard Taft’s Presidency, 1909–1913

Mann Act preventing interstate prostitution (1910; Chapter 19) Children’s Bureau created in the U.S. Labor Department (1912) U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations appointed (1912)

During Woodrow Wilson’s Presidency, 1913–1920

Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution; federal income tax (1913) Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution; direct election of U.S. senators (1913) Federal Reserve Act (1913) Clayton Antitrust Act (1914) Seamen’s Act (1915) Workmen’s Compensation Act (1916) Adamson Eight-Hour Act (1916) National Park Service created (1916; Chapter 18) Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution; prohibition of liquor (1919; Chapter 22) Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution; women’s suff rage (1920; Chapter 21)

C H A P T E R 2 0 Whose Government? Politics, Populists, and Progressives, 1880–1917 605

the impact of industrialization on low-skilled workers. Many earned $10 or less a week and endured regular episodes of unemployment; some faced long-term poverty and hardship. Workers held “an almost universal conviction” that they were “denied jus- tice.” Th e commission concluded that a major cause of industrial violence was the ruthless antiunionism of American employers. In its key recommendation, the report called for federal laws protecting workers’ right to organize and engage in collective bargaining. Th ough such laws were, in 1915, too radical to win passage, the commis- sion helped set a new national agenda that would come to fruition in the 1930s.

Guided by the commission’s revelations, President Wilson warmed up to labor. In 1915 and 1916, he championed a host of bills to benefi t American workers. Th ey included the Adamson Act, which established an eight-hour day for railroad workers; the Seamen’s Act, which eliminated age-old abuses of merchant sailors; and a work- men’s compensation law for federal employees. Wilson, despite initial modest goals, presided over a major expansion of federal authority, perhaps the most signifi cant since Reconstruction. Th e continued growth of U.S. government offi ces during Wilson’s term refl ected a reality that transcended party lines: corporations had grown in size and power, and Americans increasingly wanted federal authority to grow, too.

Wilson’s reforms did not extend to the African Americans who had supported him in 1912. In fact, the president rolled back certain Republican policies, such as selected appointments of black postmasters. “I tried to help elect Wilson,” W. E. B. Du Bois refl ected gloomily, but “under Wilson came the worst attempt at Jim Crow legislation and discrimination in civil service that we had experienced since the Civil War.” Wilson famously praised the fi lm Birth of a Nation (1915), which depicted the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan in heroic terms. In this way, Democratic control of the White House helped set the tone for the Klan’s return in the 1920s.

Progressive Legacies In the industrial era, millions of Americans decided that their political system needed to adjust to new conditions. Whatever their specifi c goals — and whether they were rural, working-class, or middle-class — reformers faced fi erce opposition from power- ful business interests. When they managed to win key regulatory laws, they oft en found these struck down by hostile courts and were forced to try again by diff erent means. Th us the Progressive Era in the United States should be understood partly by its limitations. Elitism and racial prejudice, embodied in new voting restrictions, limited working-class power at the polls; African Americans, their plight ignored by most white reformers, faced segregation and violence. Divided power in a federalist system blocked passage of uniform national policies on such key issues as child labor. Key social welfare programs that became popular in Europe during these decades, including national health insurance and old-age pensions, scarcely made it onto the American agenda until the 1930s.

An international perspective suggests several reasons for American resistance to such programs. Business interests in the United States were exceptionally successful and powerful, fl ush with recent expansion. At the time, also, voters in countries with older, more native-born populations tended to support government regulation and welfare spending to a greater extent than their counterparts in countries with younger populations

606 PA R T S I X Industrializing America: Upheavals and Experiments, 1877–1917

and large numbers of immigrants. Younger voters, understandably, seem to have been less concerned than older voters about health insurance and old-age security. Divisions in the American working class also played a role. Black, immigrant, and native-born white laborers oft en viewed one another as enemies or strangers rather than as members of a single class with common interests. Th is helps explain why the Socialist Party drew, at peak, less than 6 percent of the U.S. vote at a time when its counterparts in Finland, Ger- many, and France drew 40 percent or more. Lack of pressure from a strong, self-conscious workingmen’s party contributed to more limited results in the United States.

But it would be wrong to underestimate progressive achievements. Over several decades, in this period, more and more prosperous Americans began to support stron- ger economic regulations. Even the most cautious, elite progressives recognized that the United States had entered a new era. Multinational corporations overshadowed small businesses; in vast cities, old support systems based on village and kinship melted away. Outdated political institutions — from the spoils system to urban machines —

would no longer do. Walter Lippmann, found- ing editor of the progressive magazine New Republic, observed in 1914 that Americans had “no precedents to guide us, no wisdom that wasn’t made for a simpler age.” Progressives created new wisdom. By 1917, they had drawn blueprints for a modern American state, one whose powers more suited the needs of an industrial era.

S U M M A RY Th e Progressive Era emerged from the political turmoil of the 1880s and 1890s. In the 1880s, despite the limits imposed by close elections, federal and state governments managed to achieve important administrative and economic reforms. Aft er 1888, Republican leaders undertook more sweeping eff orts, including the Sherman Anti- trust Act, but failed in a quest to protect black voting rights. In the South and West, the People’s Party called for much stronger government intervention in the economy, but its radical program drew bitter Republican and Democratic resistance.

Th e depression of the 1890s brought a wave of reaction. Labor unrest threw the nation into crisis, and Cleveland’s intransigence over the gold standard cost the Demo- crats dearly in the 1894 and 1896 elections. While Republicans took over the federal government, southern Democrats restricted voting rights in the Solid South. Federal courts struck down regulatory laws and supported southern racial discrimination.

Aft er McKinley’s assassination, Roosevelt launched a program that balanced reform and private enterprise. At both the federal and state levels, progressive reform- ers made extensive use of elite expertise. At the grassroots, black reformers battled racial discrimination; women reformers worked on issues ranging from public health to women’s working conditions; and labor activists tried to address the problems that fueled persistent labor unrest. Th e election of 1912 split the Republicans, giving vic- tory to Woodrow Wilson, who launched a Democratic program of economic and labor reform. Despite the limits of the Progressive Era, the reforms of this period laid the foundation for a modern American state.

To what degree did reforms of the Wilson era fulfi ll goals that various agrarian-labor advocates and progressives had sought?

What factors explain the limits of progressive reform in the United States?

C H A P T E R 2 0 Whose Government? Politics, Populists, and Progressives, 1880–1917 607

Fo r Fu r t h e r E x p l o rat i o n Charles Calhoun, Conceiving a New Republic (2006). An excellent account of post-

Reconstruction politics, emphasizing issues of race and Republicans’ dilemma in the South. John Milton Cooper, Th e Warrior and the Priest (1983). A provocative dual biography of

Th eodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Maureen Flanagan, America Reformed (2007). A readable introduction and guide to further

sources on progressive movements. Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero (2006). Th is biography of William Jennings Bryan is a good

starting point on the era’s Democrats and their charismatic leader. Robert C. McMath, American Populism (1993). A lively history of the Farmers’ Alliance and

People’s Party. Nancy Woloch, ed., Muller v. Oregon (1996). An excellent analysis and collection of primary

documents on this critical legal decision.

T I M E L I N E

1881 President James Garfi eld assassinated

1883 Pendleton Act establishes the Civil Service Commission

1890 Sherman Antitrust Act People’s Party created in

Kansas 1893 Economic depression begins 1894 Coxey’s Army marches on

Washington, D.C. 1895 John Pierpont Morgan

arranges gold purchases to rescue U.S. Treasury

1896 William McKinley wins presidency

Plessy v. Ferguson establishes “separate but equal” doctrine

1898 Williams v. Mississippi allows poll taxes and literacy tests for voters

1899 National Consumers’ League founded

1901 Eugene Debs founds the Socialist Party of America

McKinley assassinated; Theodore Roosevelt assumes presidency

1902 Newlands Reclamation Act 1903 Elkins Act 1904 Robert Hunter publishes

Poverty 1905 Industrial Workers of the World

founded Niagara Principles articulated 1906 Hepburn Act 1908 Muller v. Oregon limits women’s

work hours 1909 NAACP created 1912 Four-way election gives

presidency to Woodrow Wilson 1913 Sixteenth Amendment Seventeenth Amendment Federal Reserve Act 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act

M AK E IT S T I C K

Go online and use LearningCurve to retain what you’ve read.

PART 7 In a famous speech he made in 1918, amid the horrors of World War I, Presi-dent Woodrow Wilson outlined his Fourteen Points for international peace. Americans, he argued, must help make the world “fi t and safe to live in.” “We cannot be separated in interest or divided in purpose,” Wilson declared. Fift een years later, Presi- dent Franklin Delano Roosevelt made a similar call for solidarity during the Great Depression. “We face the arduous days that lie before us,” he said, “in the warm courage of national unity.” Soon, even more grit and determination were needed, as Americans faced another looming world war.

In these years, America’s political leaders met major challenges at home and abroad with bold responses. Th e exception to this pattern was the 1920s, a decade of limited government under Republican presidents who deferred to business interests and to Americans’ isolationist, consumer-oriented mood. During the crises of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II, how- ever, American voters called for — and got — what Roosevelt called “action and action now.”

Wilson’s proposals met with failure at the end of World War I, but Roosevelt won immense popularity for his measures to combat the depression, which helped mil- lions of Americans survive unemployment and hardship. FDR, however, had limited success in ending the depression until World War II reignited the American economy. Th e United States emerged from the war with unprecedented global power, and the federal government with a broad mandate for sustaining the new welfare state. Part 7 addresses these transformations.

Domestic and Global Challenges 1890–1945

America’s Rise to World Power

The United States became a major international power after the 1890s, fi rst in the Western Hemisphere and by the 1940s across the world, renewing debates at home about America’s global role. After defeating Spain in the War of 1898, the United States claimed overseas colonies and asserted control over the Caribbean basin. Though President Wilson attempted to maintain neutrality at the start of World War I, trade ties and old alliances drew America into the confl ict on the Allied side. Wilson sought to infl uence the peace, but Allied leaders ignored his proposals and the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles. By war’s end, the United States’s position on the world stage remained uncertain.

The 1920s was an era of dollar diplomacy and U.S. business expansion abroad. In the 1930s, faced with isolation- ist sentiment at home and the rise of fascist powers in Europe and Japan, the Roosevelt administration steered a middle course. In the late 1930s, it began to send aid to its traditional ally Great Britain without committing U.S. forces, keeping the nation out of the brewing wars in Europe and the Pacifi c. When the United States entered World War II in 1941, it did so as part of an alliance with both England and the Soviet Union against Germany and Japan (and their ally Italy). The United States emerged from the war as the dominant global power. These events are covered in Chapters 21, 22, and 24.

609

Modernity and Its Discontents

World War I had a powerful domestic impact in the United States. The Great Migration brought African Americans northward, and Mexicans across the U.S. border, to take up wartime jobs. A full- blown modern consumer culture had also emerged by the 1920s as radio, cars, and Hollywood movies transformed leisure pastimes. While many Americans embraced consumer culture, others expressed deep fear and antagonism toward a new modern sensibility, espe- cially secularism and sexual freedoms. Repressive impulses also came from above; during World War I, the federal government introduced new laws to police dissent, and the country took a sharp right turn. A Red Scare, rollback of labor and immigrant rights, and rising nativism marked the political scene. A resurgent nationwide Klan arose to target Catholics and Jews as well as African Americans. Many cultural confl icts emerged: the teaching of evo- lution in the schools angered religious fundamentalists, while “wets” and “drys” debated the prohibition of liquor.

Later events showed that racism took many forms: the U.S. government deported hundreds of thousands of people of Mexican descent during the Great Depression, including American citizens, and temporarily imprisoned Japanese Americans in a mass relocation policy during World War II. These, too, represented battles over what a diverse, modern nation would look like. We explore these confl icts in Chapters 21, 22, and 24.

Creation of the Welfare State

In comparison with their progressive predecessors (Chapters 19 and 20), Republican policymakers of the 1920s believed in hands-off government. Their policies likely helped trigger the Great Depression and deepened its impact after it arrived. Starting in 1932, Americans voted for change: President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, 1933–1937, expanded federal responsibility for the welfare of ordinary citizens, sweeping away the laissez faire individualism of the previous decade. Though the New Deal faced considerable challenges on the political right — especially from business and corporate leaders and a hostile Supreme Court — the popularity of its programs, such as Social Security, established a broad consensus that the United States needed a modern welfare state to regulate the economy and provide a basic safety net for the nation’s citizens. For an exploration of the New Deal, see Chapter 23.

Wartime measures went even further, as the government mobilized the entire economy and tens of millions of citizens to fi ght the Axis powers. The welfare state became a “warfare state,” and Congress gave the president broad powers to fi ght the war abroad and reorganize the economy at home. Under the government- directed wartime economy, business boomed and productivity grew, but other policies, such as the internment of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans, violated fragile civil liberties, leaving a mixed legacy (Chapter 24).

610

Thematic Understanding:

This timeline arranges some of the important events of this period into themes. Consider the entries under “America in the World,” “Politics and Power,” “Identity,” and “Ideas, Beliefs, and Culture.” What connec- tions do you see between events on the world stage and developments within the United States? What impact did World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II appear to have on American politics, society, and culture?

AMERICA IN THE WORLD

POLITICS & POWER 18

90 • Congress funds construction of modern battleships

• U.S.-backed planters overthrow Hawaii’s queen (1892)

• U.S. wins War of 1898 against Spain; claims Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Philippines

• Republicans sweep congressional elections as Americans respond to severe depression (1894)

• Republican William McKinley elected president (1896)

19 00 • U.S. war against Philippine

revolutionaries • Roosevelt Corollary to Monroe

Doctrine (1904)

• William McKinley reelected on pro-imperialist platform (1900)

• William McKinley assassinated; Theodore Roosevelt becomes president (1901)

19 10 • Wilson intervenes in Mexico

(1914) • Panama Canal opened (1914) • United States enters WWI (1917) • War ends; Wilson seeks to

infl uence peace treaty negotiations (1918)

• Woodrow Wilson elected president (1912)

• Red Scare (1919) • Woodrow Wilson issues Fourteen

Points (1919) • U.S. Senate rejects Treaty of

Versailles (1919, 1920)

19 20 • Heyday of “dollar diplomacy”

• U.S. occupation of Haiti and other Caribbean and Central American nations

• Nineteenth Amendment grants women’s suff rage (1920)

• Prohibition (1920–1933) • Teapot Dome scandal (1923) • Republican “associated state,”

probusiness policies (1920–1932)

19 30 • Rise of European fascist powers

• Japan invades China (1937) • Franklin Roosevelt elected

president (1932) • First New Deal (1933) • Second New Deal (1935) • Roosevelt attempts to reform

Supreme Court (1937)

19 40 • United States enters WWII (1941)

• Atomic bombing of Japan and end of WWII (1945)

• United Nations founded (1945)

• Roosevelt elected to a fourth term (1944)

• Roosevelt dies (1945) • Harry Truman becomes president

(1945)

611

IDENTITY IDEAS, BELIEFS, & CULTURE

WORK, EXCHANGE, & TECHNOLOGY

18 90 • “American exceptionalism” and

rise of imperialism • Alfred Mahan, The Infl uence of

Sea Power upon History (1890) • “Remember the Maine”

campaign fuels surge in nationalism

• Depression of 1890s increases pressure for U.S. to secure foreign markets

19 00 • Insular Cases establish

noncitizenship status for new territories (1901)

• California, Washington, and Hawaii limit rights for Asian immigrants

• Rise of modernism • Root-Takahira Agreement affi rms free oceanic commerce (1908)

19 10 • New Ku Klux Klan founded

(1915) • Post-WWI race riots • Wartime pressure for “100%

loyalty”; dissent suppressed

• Moviemaking industry moves to southern California

• Birth of a Nation glorifi es the Reconstruction-era Klan (1915)

• Radio Corporation of America created (1919)

• Great Migration brings African Americans to northern cities, Mexicans north to United States

• Assembly-line production begins

19 20 • National Origins Act limits

immigration (1924) • Rise of Hollywood • Harlem Renaissance • Popularity of jazz music • Scopes “monkey trial” (1925)

• Economic prosperity (1922–1929)

• Labor gains rolled back • Era of welfare capitalism • Rise of automobile loans and

consumer credit

19 30 • Bonus Army (1932)

• Indian Reorganization Act (1934)

• Social Security created (1935)

• Documentary impulse in arts • WPA assists artists • Federal Writers’ Project

• Great Depression (1929–1941) • Rise of CIO and organized labor

19 40 • Internment of Japanese

Americans • Segregation in armed services

until 1948

• Film industry aids war eff ort • War spending ends depression • Rationing curbs consumer

spending • Married women take war jobs

612

C H

A P

T E

R

21 An Emerging World Power 1890–1918 Accepting the Democratic presiden-tial nomination in 1900, William Jennings Bryan delivered a famous speech denouncing U.S. military occu- pations overseas. “God Himself,” Bryan declared, “placed in every human heart the love of liberty. . . . He never made a race of people so low in the scale of civilization or intelligence that it would welcome a foreign master.” At the time, Republican president William McKinley was leading an ambitious

and popular plan of overseas expansion. Th e United States had asserted control over the Caribbean, claimed Hawaii, and sought to annex the Philippines. Bryan failed to convince a majority of voters that imperialism — the exercise of military, political, and economic power overseas — was the wrong direction. He lost the election by a landslide.

By the 1910s, however, American enthusiasm for overseas involvement cooled. Despite eff orts to stay neutral, the United States got caught up in the global catastrophe of World War I, which killed 8 million combatants, including over 50,000 U.S. soldiers. By the war’s end, European powers’ grip on their colonial empires was weakening. Th e United States also ceased acquiring overseas territories and pursued a diff erent path. It did so in part because the war brought dramatic changes at home, leaving Americans a postwar legacy of economic upheaval and political disillusionment.

President Woodrow Wilson, who in 1913 appointed Bryan as his secretary of state, tried to steer a middle course between revolutionary socialism and European-style imperialism. In Wilson’s phrase, America would “make the world safe for democracy” while unapologetically working to advance U.S. economic interests. Th e U.S. Senate, however, rejected the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and with it Wilson’s vision, leaving the nation’s foreign policy in doubt. Should the United States try to promote democracy abroad? If so, how? To what degree should the federal government seek to promote American business interests? Under what conditions was overseas military action jus- tifi ed? When, on the contrary, did it impinge on others’ sovereignty, endanger U.S. soldiers, and invite disaster? Today’s debates over foreign policy still center to a large degree on questions that Americans debated in the era of McKinley, Bryan, and Wilson, when the nation fi rst asserted itself as a major world power.

IDENTIFY THE BIG IDEA As the United States became a major power on the world stage, what ideas and interests did policymakers seek to promote in international aff airs?

C H A P T E R 2 1 An Emerging World Power, 1890–1918 613

From Expansion to Imperialism Historians used to describe turn-of-the-twentieth-century U.S. imperialism as some- thing new and unprecedented. Now they stress continuities between foreign policy in this era and the nation’s earlier, relentless expansion across North America. Wars against native peoples had occurred almost continuously since the country’s founding; in the 1840s, the United States had annexed a third of Mexico. Th e United States never administered a large colonial empire, as did European powers like Spain, England, and Germany, partly because it had a plentiful supply of natural resources in the American West. But policymakers undertook a determined quest for global markets. Events in the 1890s opened opportunities to pursue this goal in new ways.

Foundations of Empire American empire builders around 1900 fulfi lled a vision laid out earlier by William Seward, secretary of state under presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, who saw access to global markets as the key to power (Chapter 16). Seward’s ideas had won only limited support at the time, but the severe economic depression of the 1890s brought Republicans into power and Seward’s ideas back into vogue. Confronting high unemployment and mass protests, policymakers feared American workers would embrace socialism or Marxism. Th e alternative, they believed, was to create jobs and prosperity at home by selling U.S. products in overseas markets.

Intellectual trends also favored imperialism. As early as 1885, in his popular book Our Country, Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong urged Protestants to prosely- tize overseas. He predicted that the American “Anglo-Saxon race,” which represented “the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization,” would “spread itself over the earth.” Such arguments were grounded in American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States had a unique destiny to foster democracy and civilization.

As Strong’s exhortation suggested, imperialists also drew on popular racial theo- ries, which claimed that people of “Anglo-Saxon” descent — English and oft en Ger- man — were superior to all others. “Anglo-Saxon” rule over foreign people of color made sense in an era when, at home, most American Indians and Asian immigrants were denied citizenship and most southern blacks were disenfranchised. Imperialists argued that “free land” on the western frontier was dwindling, and thus new outlets needed to be found for American energy and enterprise. Responding to critics of U.S. occupation of the Philippines, Th eodore Roosevelt scoff ed: if Filipinos should control their own islands, he declared, then America was “morally bound to return Arizona to the Apaches.”

Imperialists also justifi ed their views through racialized Social Darwinism (Chap- ter 18). Josiah Strong, for example, predicted that with the globe fully occupied, a “competition of races” would ensue, with victory based on “survival of the fi ttest.” Fear of ruthless competition drove the United States, like European nations, to invest in the latest weapons. Policymakers saw that European powers were amassing steel-plated battleships and carving up Africa and Asia among themselves. In his book Th e Infl u- ence of Sea Power upon History (1890), U.S. naval offi cer Alfred Mahan urged the United States to enter the fray, observing that naval power had been essential to past

614 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

empires. As early as 1886, Congress ordered construction of two steel-hulled battle- ships, the USS Texas and USS Maine; in 1890, it appropriated funds for three more, a program that expanded over the next two decades.

During Grover Cleveland’s second term (1893–1897), his secretary of state, Richard Olney, turned to direct confrontation. He warned Europe to stay away from Latin America, which he saw as the United States’s rightful sphere of infl uence. With- out consulting the nation of Venezuela, Olney suddenly demanded in 1895 that Brit- ain resolve a long-standing border dispute between Venezuela and Britain’s neighboring colony, British Guiana. Invoking the Monroe Doctrine, which stated that the Western Hemisphere was off -limits to further European colonization, Olney warned that the United States would brook no challenge to its interests. Startled, Britain agreed to arbi- trate. U.S. power was on the rise.

The War of 1898 Events in the Caribbean presented the United States with far greater opportunities. In 1895, Cuban patriots mounted a major guerrilla war against Spain, which had lost most of its other New World territories. Th e Spanish commander responded by round- ing up Cuban civilians into concentration camps, where as many as 200,000 died of starvation, exposure, or dysentery. In the United States, “yellow journalists” such as William Randolph Hearst turned their plight into a cause célèbre. Hearst’s coverage of Spanish atrocities fed a surge of nationalism, especially among those who feared that industrialization was causing American men to lose physical strength and valor. Th e government should not pass up this opportunity, said Indiana senator Albert Beveridge, to “manufacture manhood.” Congress called for Cuban independence.

President Cleveland had no interest in supporting the Cuban rebellion but wor- ried over Spain’s failure to end it. Th e war disrupted trade and damaged American- owned sugar plantations on the island. Moreover, an unstable Cuba was incompatible with U.S. strategic interests, including a proposed canal whose Caribbean approaches had to be safeguarded. Taking offi ce in 1897, President William McKinley took a tough stance. In September, a U.S. diplomat informed Spain that it must ensure an “early and certain peace” or the United States would step in. At fi rst, this hard line seemed to work: Spain’s conservative regime fell, and a liberal government, taking offi ce in Octo- ber 1897, off ered Cuba limited self-rule. But Spanish loyalists in Havana rioted against this proposal, while Cuban rebels held out for full independence.

In February 1898, Hearst’s New York Journal published a private letter in which a Spanish minister to the United States belittled McKinley. Th e minister, Dupuy de Lôme, resigned, but exposure of the de Lôme letter intensifi ed Americans’ indignation toward Spain. Th e next week brought shocking news: the U.S. battle cruiser Maine had exploded and sunk in Havana harbor, with 260 seamen lost. “Whole Country Th rills with the War Fever,” proclaimed the New York Journal. “Remember the Maine” became a national chant. Popular passions were now a major factor in the march toward war.

McKinley assumed the sinking of the Maine had been accidental. Improbably, though, a naval board of inquiry blamed an underwater mine, fueling public outrage. (Later investigators disagreed: the more likely cause was a faulty ship design that placed explosive munitions too close to coal bunkers, which were prone to fi re.) No

C H A P T E R 2 1 An Emerging World Power, 1890–1918 615

evidence linked Spain to the purported mine, but if a mine sank the Maine, then Spain was responsible for not protecting the ship.

Business leaders became impatient, believing war was preferable to an unending Cuban crisis. On March 27, McKinley cabled an ultimatum to Madrid: an immediate ceasefi re in Cuba for six months and, with the United States mediating, peace negotia- tions with the rebels. Spain, while desperate to avoid war, balked at the added demand that mediation must result in Cuban independence. On April 11, McKinley asked Congress for authority to intervene in Cuba “in the name of civilization, [and] in behalf of endangered American interests.”

Historians long referred to the ensuing fi ght as the Spanish-American War, but because that name ignores the central role of Cuban revolutionaries, many historians now call the three-way confl ict the War of 1898. Th ough Americans widely admired Cubans’ aspirations for freedom, the McKinley administration defeated a congressio- nal attempt to recognize the rebel government. In response, Senator Henry M. Teller of Colorado added an amendment to the war bill, disclaiming any intention by the United States to occupy Cuba. Th e Teller Amendment reassured Americans that their country would uphold democracy abroad as well as at home. McKinley’s expectations diff ered. He wrote privately, “We must keep all we get; when the war is over we must keep what we want.”

On April 24, 1898, Spain declared war on the United States. Th e news provoked full-blown war fever. Across the country, young men enlisted for the fi ght. Th eodore Roosevelt, serving in the War Department, resigned to become lieutenant colonel of a cavalry regiment. Recruits poured into makeshift bases around Tampa, Florida, where confusion reigned. Rifl es failed to arrive; food was bad, sanitation worse. No provision had been made for getting troops to Cuba, so the government hastily collected a fl eet of yachts and commercial boats. Fortunately, the regular army was a disciplined, pro- fessional force; its 28,000 seasoned troops provided a nucleus for 200,000 volunteers. Th e navy was in better shape: Spain had nothing to match America’s seven battleships and armored cruisers. Th e Spanish admiral bitterly predicted that his fl eet would “like Don Quixote go out to fi ght windmills and come back with a broken head.”

Th e fi rst, decisive military engagement took place in the Pacifi c. Th is was the handiwork of Th eodore Roosevelt, who, in his government post, had gotten intrepid Commodore George Dewey appointed commander of the Pacifi c fl eet. In the event of war, Dewey had instructions to sail immediately for the Spanish-owned Philippines. When war was declared, Roosevelt confronted his surprised superior and pressured him into validating Dewey’s instructions. On May 1, 1898, American ships cornered the Spanish fl eet in Manila Bay and destroyed it. Manila, the Philippine capital, fell on August 13. “We must on no account let the [Philippines] go,” declared Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. McKinley agreed. Th e United States now had a major foothold in the western Pacifi c.

Dewey’s victory directed policymakers’ attention to Hawaii. Nominally indepen- dent, these islands had long been subject to U.S. infl uence, including a horde of resi- dent American sugarcane planters. An 1876 treaty between the United States and the island’s monarch gave Hawaiian sugar free access to the American market, without tariff payments, and Hawaii pledged to sign no such agreement with any other power. When this treaty was renewed in 1887, Hawaii also granted a long-coveted lease for a

616 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. Four years later, succeeding her brother as Hawaii’s monarch, Queen Liliuokalani made known her frustration with these treaties. In response, an Annexation Club of U.S.-backed planters organized secretly and in 1892, with the help of U.S. Marines, overthrew the queen and then negotiated a treaty of annexation. Grover Cleveland, however, rejected it when he entered offi ce, declar- ing that it would violate America’s “unbroken tradition” against acquiring territory overseas.

Dewey’s victory in Manila delivered what the planters wanted: Hawaii acquired strategic value as a halfway station to the Philippines. In July 1898, Congress voted for

annexation, over the protests of Hawaii’s deposed queen. “Oh, honest Americans,” she pleaded, “as Christians hear me for my down-trodden people! Th eir form of government is as dear to them as yours is precious to you. Quite as warmly as you love your country, so they love theirs.” But to the great powers,

Hawaii was not a country. One congressman dismissed Hawaii’s monarchy as “absurd, grotesque, tottering”; the “Aryan race,” he declared, would “rescue” the islands from it.

Further U.S. annexations took on their own logic. Th e navy pressed for another coaling base in the central Pacifi c; that meant Guam, a Spanish island in the Marianas. A strategic base was needed in the Caribbean; that meant Puerto Rico. By early sum- mer, before U.S. troops had fi red a shot in Cuba, McKinley’s broader war aims were crystallizing.

In Cuba, Spanish forces were depleted by the long guerrilla war. Th ough poorly trained and equipped, American forces had the advantages of a demoralized foe and knowledgeable Cuban allies. Th e main battle occurred on July 1 at San Juan Hill, near Santiago, where the Spanish fl eet was anchored. Roosevelt’s Rough Riders took the lead, but four African American regiments bore the brunt of the fi ghting. Observers credited much of the victory to the “superb gallantry” of these soldiers. Spanish troops retreated to a well-fortifi ed second line, but U.S. forces were spared the test of a second assault. On July 3, the Spanish fl eet in Santiago harbor tried a desperate run through the American blockade and was destroyed. Days later, Spanish forces surrendered. American combat casualties had been few; most U.S. soldiers’ deaths had resulted from malaria and yellow fever.

Spoils of War Th e United States and Spain quickly signed a preliminary peace agreement in which Spain agreed to liberate Cuba and cede Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States. But what would happen to the Philippines, an immense archipelago that lay more than 5,000 miles from California? Initially, the United States aimed to keep only Manila, because of its fi ne harbor. Manila was not defensible, however, without the whole island of Luzon, on which it sat. Aft er deliberating, McKinley found a justifi cation for annexing all of the Philippines. He decided that “we could not leave [the Filipinos] to themselves — they were unfi t for self-rule.”

Th is declaration provoked heated debate. Under the Constitution, as Republican senator George F. Hoar argued, “no power is given to the Federal Government to

To see a longer excerpt from Queen Liliuokalani’s appeal, along with other primary sources from this period, see Sources for America’s History.

C H A P T E R 2 1 An Emerging World Power, 1890–1918 617

acquire territory to be held and governed permanently as colonies” or “to conquer alien people and hold them in subjugation.” Leading citizens and peace advocates, including Jane Addams and Mark Twain, enlisted in the anti-imperialist cause. Steel king Andrew Carnegie off ered $20 million to purchase Philippine independence. Labor leader Samuel Gompers warned union members about the threat of competi- tion from low-wage Filipino immigrants. Anti-imperialists, however, were a diverse lot. Some argued that Filipinos were perfectly capable of self-rule; others warned about the dangers of annexing eight million Filipinos of an “inferior race.” “No matter whether they are fi t to govern themselves or not,” declared a Missouri congressman, “they are not fi t to govern us.”

Beginning in late 1898, anti-imperialist leagues sprang up around the country, but they never sparked a mass movement. On the contrary, McKinley’s “splendid little war” proved immensely popular. Confronted with that reality, Democrats waffl ed. Th eir standard-bearer, William Jennings Bryan, decided not to stake Democrats’ future on opposition to a policy that he believed to be irreversible. He threw his party into turmoil by declaring last-minute support for McKinley’s proposed treaty. Having

The Battle of San Juan Hill On July 1, 1898, the key battle for Cuba took place on heights overlooking Santiago. African American troops bore the brunt of the fi ghting. Although generally overlooked, black soldiers’ role in the San Juan battle is done justice in this contemporary lithograph, without the demeaning stereotypes by which blacks were normally depicted in an age of intensifying racism. Note, however, that as in the Civil War, blacks enlisted as foot soldiers; their offi cers were white. Library of Congress.

618 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

met military defeat, Spanish representatives had little choice. In the Treaty of Paris, Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States for $20 million.

Annexation was not as simple as U.S. policymakers had expected. On February 4, 1899, two days before the Senate ratifi ed the treaty, fi ghting broke out between Ameri- can and Filipino patrols on the edge of Manila. Confronted by annexation, rebel leader Emilio Aguinaldo asserted his nation’s independence and turned his guns on occupy- ing American forces. Th ough Aguinaldo found it diffi cult to organize a mass-based resistance movement, the ensuing confl ict between Filipino nationalists and U.S. troops far exceeded in length and ferocity the war just concluded with Spain. Fighting tenacious guerrillas, the U.S. Army resorted to the same tactics Spain had employed in Cuba: burning crops and villages and rounding up civilians. Atrocities became com- monplace on both sides. In three years of warfare, 4,200 Americans and an estimated 200,000 Filipinos died; many of the latter were dislocated civilians, particularly chil- dren, who succumbed to malnutrition and disease.

McKinley’s convincing victory over William Jennings Bryan in 1900 suggested popular satisfaction with America’s overseas adventures, even in the face of dogged Filipino resistance to U.S. rule. Th e fi ghting ended in 1902, and William Howard Taft , appointed as governor-general of the Philippines, sought to make the territory a model of roadbuilding and sanitary engineering. Yet misgivings lingered as Americans con- fronted the brutality of the war. Philosopher William James noted that the United States had destroyed “these islanders by the thousands, their villages and cities. . . . Could there be any more damning indictment of that whole bloated ideal termed ‘modern civilization’ ” (American Voices, p. 619).

Constitutional issues also remained unresolved. Th e treaty, while guaranteeing freedom of religion to inhabitants of ceded Spanish territories, withheld any promise of citizenship. It was up to Congress to decide Filipinos’ “civil rights and political sta- tus.” In 1901, the Supreme Court upheld this provision in a set of decisions known as the Insular Cases. Th e Constitution, declared the Court, did not automatically extend citizenship to people in acquired territories; Congress could decide. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were thus marked as colonies, not future states.

Th e next year, as a condition for withdrawing from Cuba, the United States forced the newly independent island to accept a proviso in its constitution called the Platt Amendment (1902). Th is blocked Cuba from making a treaty with any country except the United States and gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuban aff airs if it saw fi t. Cuba also granted the United States a lease on Guantánamo Bay (still in eff ect),

where the U.S. Navy built a large base. Cubans’ hard-fought independence was limited; so was that of Filipinos. Eventually, the Jones Act of 1916 committed the United States to Philippine independence but set no date. (Th e Philippines at last achieved independence in 1946.) Th ough the war’s carnage had rubbed off some of the moralizing gloss, America’s global aspirations remained intact.

How did imperialism in the 1890s refl ect both continuities and changes from earlier eras?

What were the long-term results of the U.S. victory over Spain, in Hawaii and in former Spanish possessions?

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S

619

M a k i n g t h e P h i l i p p i n e s S a f e f o r D e m o c r a c y G E N E R A L A R T H U R M A C A R T H U R

General Arthur MacArthur was in on the action in the Philippines almost from the start. He led one of the fi rst units to arrive there in 1898 and in 1900 was reassigned back as commander of the troops. Aft er the insurrection had been put down, he appeared before a Senate committee to defend America’s mission in the Philippines.

At the time I returned to Manila [May 1900] to assume the supreme command it seemed to me that . . . to doubt the wisdom of our [occupation] of the island was simply to doubt the stability of our own institutions. . . . It seemed to me that our conception of right, justice, freedom, and personal liberty was the precious fruit of centuries of strife [and that] we must regard ourselves simply as the custodians of imperishable ideas held in trust for the general benefi t of mankind. In other words, I felt that we had attained a moral and intellectual height from which we were bound to proclaim to all as the occasion arose the true message of human- ity as embodied in the principles of our own institutions. . . .

To my mind the archipelago is a fertile soil upon which to plant republicanism. . . . We are planting the best traditions, the best characteristics of Americanism in such a way that they can never be removed from that soil. Th at in itself seems to me a most inspiring thought. . . .

Sen. Th omas Patterson: Do you mean that imperishable idea of which you speak is the right of self-government?

Gen. MacArthur: Precisely so; self- government regulated by law as I understand it in this Republic.

Sen. Patterson: Of course you do not mean self-government regulated by some foreign and superior power?

Gen. MacArthur: Well, that is a matter of evolution, Senator. We are putting these institutions there so they will evolve themselves just as here and everywhere else where freedom has fl ourished. . . .

Sen. Patterson: Do I understand your claim of right and duty to retain the Philippine Islands is based upon the proposition that they have come to us upon the basis of our morals, honorable dealing, and unassailable international integrity?

Gen. MacArthur: Th at proposition is not questioned by anybody in the world, excepting a few people in the United States. . . . We will be benefi ted, and the Filipino people will be benefi ted, and that is what I meant by the original proposition —

Sen. Patterson: Do you mean the Filipino people that are left alive?

Gen. MacArthur: I do not admit that there has been any unusual destruction of life in the Philippine Islands. . . . I doubt if any war — either international or civil, any war on earth — has been conducted with as much humanity, with as much careful consideration, with as much self-restraint, as have been the American operations in the Philippine Archipelago. . . .

SOURCE: From American Imperialism and the Philippine Insurrection, edited by Henry F. Graff , (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969). Reprinted by permission of Henry F. Graff , the author.

620 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

A Power Among Powers No one appreciated America’s emerging infl uence more than the man who, aft er Wil- liam McKinley’s assassination, became president in 1901. Th eodore Roosevelt was an avid student of world aff airs who called on “the civilized and orderly powers to insist on the proper policing of the world.” He meant, in part, directing the aff airs of “back- ward peoples.” For Roosevelt, imperialism went hand in hand with domestic progres- sivism (Chapter 20). He argued that a strong federal government, asserting itself both at home and abroad, would enhance economic stability and political order. Overseas, Roosevelt sought to arbitrate disputes and maintain a global balance of power, but he also asserted U.S. interests.

The Open Door in Asia U.S. offi cials and business leaders had a burning interest in East Asian markets, but they were entering a crowded fi eld. In the late 1890s, following Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, Japan, Russia, Germany, France, and Britain divided coastal China into spheres of infl uence. Fearful of being shut out, U.S. Secretary of State John Hay sent these powers a note in 1899, claiming the right of equal trade access — an “open door” — for all nations seeking to do business in China. Th e United States lacked leverage in Asia, and Hay’s note elicited only noncommittal responses. But he chose to interpret this as acceptance of his position.

When a secret society of Chinese nationalists, known outside China as “Boxers” because of their pugnacious political stance, rebelled against foreign occupation in 1900, the United States sent 5,000 troops to join a multinational campaign to break the nationalists’ siege of European offi ces in Beijing. Hay took this opportunity to assert a second open door principle: China must be preserved as a “territorial and administra- tive entity.” As long as the legal fi ction of an independent China survived, Americans could claim equal access to its market.

European and American plans were, however, unsettled by Japan’s emergence as East Asia’s dominant power. A decade aft er its victory over China, Japan responded to Russian bids for control of both Korea and Manchuria, in northern China, by attack- ing the tsar’s fl eet at Russia’s leased Chinese port. In a series of brilliant victories, the Japanese smashed the Russian forces. Westerners were shocked: for the fi rst time, a European power had been defeated by a non-Western nation. Conveying both admi- ration and alarm, American cartoonists sketched Japan as a martial artist knocking down the Russian giant. Roosevelt mediated a settlement to the war in 1905, receiving for his eff orts the fi rst Nobel Peace Prize awarded to an American.

Th ough he was contemptuous of other Asians, Roosevelt respected the Japanese, whom he called “a wonderful and civilized people.” More important, he understood Japan’s rising military might and aligned himself with the mighty. Th e United States approved Japan’s “protectorate” over Korea in 1905 and, six years later, its seizure of full control. With Japan asserting harsh authority over Manchuria, energetic Chinese diplomat Yüan Shih-k’ai tried to encourage the United States to intervene. But Roosevelt reviewed America’s weak position in the Pacifi c and declined. He conceded that Japan had “a paramount interest in what surrounds the Yellow Sea.” In 1908, the United

C H A P T E R 2 1 An Emerging World Power, 1890–1918 621

States and Japan signed the Root-Takahira Agreement, confi rming principles of free oceanic commerce and recognizing Japan’s authority over Manchuria.

William Howard Taft entered the White House in 1909 convinced that the United States had been shortchanged in Asia. He pressed for a larger role for American inves- tors, especially in Chinese railroad construction. Eager to promote U.S. business inter- ests abroad, he hoped that infusions of American capital would off set Japanese power. When the Chinese Revolution of 1911 toppled the Manchu dynasty, Taft supported the victorious Nationalists, who wanted to modernize their country and liberate it from Japanese domination. Th e United States had entangled itself in China and entered a long-term rivalry with Japan for power in the Pacifi c, a competition that would cul- minate thirty years later in World War II.

The United States and Latin America Roosevelt famously argued that the United States should “speak soft ly and carry a big stick.” By “big stick,” he meant naval power, and rapid access to two oceans required a canal. European powers conceded the United States’s “paramount interest” in the Caribbean. Freed by Britain’s surrender of canal-building rights in the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty (1901), Roosevelt persuaded Congress to authorize $10 million, plus future payments of $250,000 per year, to purchase from Colombia a six-mile strip of land across Panama, a Colombian province.

Furious when Colombia rejected this proposal, Roosevelt contemplated outright seizure of Panama but settled on a more roundabout solution. Panamanians, long separated from Colombia by remote jungle, chafed under Colombian rule. Th e United States lent covert assistance to an independence movement, triggering a bloodless revolution. On November 6, 1903, the United States recognized the new nation of Panama; two weeks later, it obtained a perpetually renewable lease on a canal zone. Roosevelt never regretted the venture, though in 1922 the United States paid Colom- bia $25 million as a kind of conscience money.

To build the canal, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hired 60,000 laborers, who came from many countries to clear vast swamps, excavate 240 million cubic yards of earth, and construct a series of immense locks. Th e project, a major engineering feat, took eight years and cost thousands of lives among the workers who built it. Opened in 1914, the Panama Canal gave the United States a commanding position in the West- ern Hemisphere.

Meanwhile, arguing that instability invited European intervention, Roosevelt announced in 1904 that the United States would police all of the Caribbean (Map 21.1). Th is so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine actually turned that doc- trine upside down: instead of guaranteeing that the United States would protect its neighbors from Europe and help preserve their independence, it asserted the United States’s unrestricted right to regulate Caribbean aff airs. Th e Roosevelt Corollary was not a treaty but a unilateral declaration sanctioned only by America’s military and economic might. Citing it, the United States intervened regularly in Caribbean and Central American nations over the next three decades.

Entering offi ce in 1913, Democratic president Woodrow Wilson criticized his pre- decessors’ foreign policy. He pledged that the United States would “never again seek

622 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

one additional foot of territory by conquest.” Th is stance appealed to anti-imperialists in the Democratic base, including longtime supporters of William Jennings Bryan. But the new president soon showed that, when American interests called for it, his actions were not so diff erent from those of Roosevelt and Taft .

Since the 1870s, Mexican dictator Porfi rio Díaz had created a friendly climate for American companies that purchased Mexican plantations, mines, and oil fi elds. By the early 1900s, however, Díaz feared the extraordinary power of these foreign interests and began to nationalize — reclaim — key resources. American investors who faced the loss of Mexican holdings began to back Francisco Madero, an advocate of consti- tutional government who was friendly to U.S. interests. In 1911, Madero forced Díaz to resign and proclaimed himself president. Th ousands of poor Mexicans took this opportunity to mobilize rural armies and demand more radical change. Madero’s posi-

Panama Canal Workers, 1910 The 51-mile-long Panama Canal includes seven sets of locks that can raise and lower fi fty large ships in a twenty-four-hour period. Building the canal took eight years and required over 50,000 workers, including immigrants from Spain and Italy and many West Indians such as these men, who accomplished some of the worst-paid, most dangerous labor. Workers endured the horrors of rockslides, explosions, and a yellow fever epidemic that almost halted the project. But American observers hailed the canal as a triumph of modern science and engineering — especially in medical eff orts to eradicate the yellow fever and malaria that had stymied earlier canal-building eff orts. Theodore Roosevelt insisted on making a personal visit in November 1906. “He made the men that were building there feel like they were special people,” recalled the descendant of one canal worker. “Give them pride of what they were doing for the United States.” Library of Congress.

C H A P T E R 2 1 An Emerging World Power, 1890–1918 623

tion was weak, and several strongmen sought to overthrow him; in 1913, he was deposed and murdered by a leading general. Immediately, several other military men vied for control.

Wilson, fearing that the unrest threatened U.S. interests, decided to intervene in the emerging Mexican Revolution. On the pretext of a minor insult to the navy, he ordered U.S. occupation of the port of Veracruz on April 21, 1914, at the cost of 19 American and 126 Mexican lives. Th ough the intervention helped Venustiano Car- ranza, the revolutionary leader whom Wilson most favored, Carranza protested it as illegitimate meddling in Mexican aff airs. Carranza’s forces, aft er nearly engaging the Americans themselves, entered Mexico City in triumph a few months later. Th ough Wilson had supported this outcome, his interference caused lasting mistrust.

Carranza’s victory did not subdue revolutionary activity in Mexico. In 1916, Gen- eral Francisco “Pancho” Villa — a thug to his enemies, but a heroic Robin Hood to many poor Mexicans — crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, killing sixteen American civilians and raiding the town of Columbus, New Mexico. Wilson sent 11,000 troops to pursue Villa, a force that soon resembled an army of occupation in northern Mex- ico. Mexican public opinion demanded withdrawal as armed clashes broke out between U.S. and Mexican troops. At the brink of war, both governments backed off and U.S. forces departed. But policymakers in Washington had shown their intention to police not only the Caribbean and Central America but also Mexico when they deemed it necessary.

U.S. possessions

U.S. interventions

N

S

E W

0 250 500 kilometers

0 500 miles250

1 Settled border dispute, 1895–1896

2 U.S. troops, 1898–1902, 1906–1909, 1917–1922

3 Support of revolt, 1903

4 U.S. lease beginning in 1903

5 U.S. control beginning in 1903

6 U.S. troops, 1909–1910, 1912–1925

7 Seized by U.S. Navy, 1914

8 U.S. troops, 1915–1934

9 U.S. troops, 1916–1924

Gulf of Mexico

C a r i b b e a n S e a

A T L A N T I C O C E A N

PACIFIC OCEAN

MEXICO

GUATEMALA

EL SALVADOR

BRITISH HONDURAS

HONDURAS

NICARAGUA

COSTA RICA

PANAMA

UNITED STATES

CUBA

JAMAICA (British)

HAITI

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

PUERTO RICO Acquired in 1898

VIRGIN IS. Acquired in 1917

VENEZUELA

CANAL ZONE

BAHAMAS (British)

BR. GUIANA

COLOMBIA

6

3

5

7

2

8 94

1

Guantánamo Bay

Veracruz �

�

MAP 21.1 Policeman of the Caribbean After the War of 1898, the United States vigorously asserted its interest in the aff airs of its neighbors to the south. As the record of interventions shows, the United States truly became the “policeman” of the Caribbean and Central America.

What factors constrained and guided U.S. actions in Asia and in Latin America?

624 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

The United States in World War I While the United States staked claims around the globe, a war of unprecedented scale was brewing in Europe. Th e military buildup of Germany, a rising power, terrifi ed its neighbors. To the east, the disintegrating Ottoman Empire was losing its grip on the Balkans. Out of these confl icts, two rival power blocs emerged: the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy) and Triple Entente (Britain, France, and Rus- sia). Within each alliance, national governments pursued their own interests but were bound to one another by both public and secret treaties.

Americans had no obvious stake in these developments. In 1905, when Germany suddenly challenged French control of Morocco, Th eodore Roosevelt arranged an international conference to defuse the crisis. Germany got a few concessions, but France — with British backing — retained Morocco. Accomplished in the same year that Roosevelt brokered peace between Russia and Japan, the conference seemed another diplomatic triumph. One U.S. offi cial boasted that America had kept peace by “the power of our detachment.” It was not to last.

From Neutrality to War Th e spark that ignited World War I came in the Balkans, where Austria-Hungary and Russia competed for control. Austria’s 1908 seizure of Ottoman provinces, including Bosnia, angered the nearby Slavic nation of Serbia and its ally, Russia. Serbian revolu- tionaries recruited Bosnian Slavs to resist Austrian rule. In June 1914, in the city of Sarajevo, university student Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne.

Like dominos falling, the system of European alliances pushed all the powers into war. Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia for the assassination and declared war on July 28. Russia, tied by secret treaty to Serbia, mobilized against Austria-Hungary. Th is prompted Germany to declare war on Russia and its ally France. As a preparation for attacking France, Germany launched a brutal invasion of the neutral country of Belgium, which caused Great Britain to declare war on Germany. Within a week, most of Europe was at war, with the major Allies — Great Britain, France, and Russia — confronting the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Two military zones emerged. On the Western Front, Germany battled the British and French; on the East- ern Front, Germany and Austria-Hungary fought Russia. Because most of the warring nations held colonial empires, the confl ict soon spread to the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

Th e so-called Great War wreaked terrible devastation. New technology, some of it devised in the United States, made warfare deadlier than ever before. Every soldier carried a long-range, high-velocity rifl e that could hit a target at 1,000 yards — a vast technical advancement over the 300-yard range of rifl es used in the U.S. Civil War. Th e machine gun was even more deadly. Its American-born inventor, Hiram Maxim, had moved to Britain in the 1880s to follow a friend’s advice: “If you want to make your fortune, invent something which will allow those fool Europeans to kill each other more quickly.” New technologies helped soldiers in defensive positions; once advanc- ing Germans ran into French fortifi cations, they stalled. Across a swath of Belgium

C H A P T E R 2 1 An Emerging World Power, 1890–1918 625

and northeastern France, millions of soldiers on both sides hunkered down in fortifi ed trenches. During 1916, repeatedly trying to break through French lines at Verdun, Germans suff ered 450,000 casualties. Th e French fared even worse, with 550,000 dead or wounded. It was all to no avail. From 1914 to 1918, the Western Front barely moved.

At the war’s outbreak, President Wilson called on Americans to be “neutral in fact as well as in name.” If the United States remained out of the confl ict, Wilson reasoned, he could infl uence the postwar settlement, much as Th eodore Roosevelt had done aft er previous confl icts. Even if Wilson had wished to, it would have been nearly impossible in 1914 to unite Americans behind the Allies. Many Irish immigrants viewed Britain as an enemy — based on its continued occupation of Ireland — while millions of German Americans maintained ties to their homeland. Progressive- minded Republicans, such as Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, vehemently opposed taking sides in a European fi ght, as did socialists, who condemned the war as a confl ict among greedy capitalist empires. Two giants of American industry, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford, opposed the war. In December 1915, Ford sent a hundred men and women to Europe on a “peace ship” to urge an end to the war. “It would be folly,” declared the New York Sun, “for the country to sacrifi ce itself to . . . the clash of ancient hatreds which is urging the Old World to destruction.”

The Struggle to Remain Neutral

Th e United States, wishing to trade with all the warring nations, might have remained neutral if Britain had not held commanding power at sea. In September 1914, the British imposed a naval block-

ade on the Central Powers to cut off vital supplies of food and military equipment. Th ough the Wilson administration protested this infringement of the rights of neutral carriers, commerce with the Allies more than made up for the economic loss. Trade with Britain and France grew fourfold over the next two years, to $3.2 billion in 1916; by 1917, U.S. banks had lent the Allies $2.5 billion. In contrast, American trade and loans to Germany stood then at a mere $56 million. Th is imbalance undercut U.S. neutrality. If Germany won and Britain and France defaulted on their debts, American companies would suff er catastrophic losses.

To challenge the British navy, Germany launched a devastating new weapon, the U-boat (short for Unterseeboot, “undersea boat,” or submarine). In April 1915, Ger- many issued a warning that all ships fl ying fl ags of Britain or its allies were liable to destruction. A few weeks later, a U-boat torpedoed the British luxury liner Lusitania off the coast of Ireland, killing 1,198 people, including 128 Americans. Th e attack on the passenger ship (which was later revealed to have been carrying munitions) incensed Americans. Th e following year, in an agreement known as the Sussex pledge, Germany agreed not to target passenger liners or merchant ships unless an inspection showed the latter carried weapons. But the Lusitania sinking prompted Wilson to reconsider his options. Aft er quietly trying to mediate in Europe but fi nding neither side inter- ested in peace, he endorsed a $1 billion U.S. military buildup.

American public opinion still ran strongly against entering the war, a fact that shaped the election of 1916. Republicans rejected the belligerently prowar Th eodore Roosevelt in favor of Supreme Court justice Charles Evans Hughes, a progressive for- mer governor of New York. Democrats renominated Wilson, who campaigned on his domestic record and as the president who “kept us out of war.” Wilson eked out a

626 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

narrow victory; winning California by a mere 4,000 votes, he secured a slim majority in the electoral college.

America Enters the War

Despite Wilson’s campaign slogan, events pushed him toward war. In February 1917, Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, a decision dictated by the impasse on the Western Front. In response,

Wilson broke off diplomatic relations with Germany. A few weeks later, newspapers published an intercepted dispatch from German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann to his minister in Mexico. Th e Zimmermann telegram urged Mexico to join the Cen- tral Powers, promising that if the United States entered the war, Germany would help Mexico recover “the lost territory of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.” With Pancho Villa’s border raids still fresh in Americans’ minds, this threat jolted public opinion. Meanwhile, German U-boats attacked U.S. ships without warning, sinking three on March 18 alone.

On April 2, 1917, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war. He argued that Germany had trampled on American rights and imperiled U.S. trade and citizens’ lives. “We desire no conquest,” Wilson declared, “no material compensation for the sacri- fi ces we shall freely make.” Refl ecting his progressive idealism, Wilson promised that American involvement would make the world “safe for democracy.” On April 6, the United States declared war on Germany. Refl ecting the nation’s divided views, the vote was far from unanimous. Six senators and fi ft y members of the House voted against entry, including Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the fi rst woman elected to Congress. “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake,” Rankin said. “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war.”

“Over There” To Americans, Europe seemed a great distance away. Many assumed the United States would simply provide munitions and economic aid. “Good Lord,” exclaimed one U.S. senator to a Wilson administration offi cial, “you’re not going to send soldiers over there, are you?” But when General John J. Pershing asked how the United States could best support the Allies, the French commander put it bluntly: “Men, men, and more men.” Amid war fever, thousands of young men prepared to go “over there,” in the words of George M. Cohan’s popular song: “Make your Daddy glad to have had such a lad. / Tell your sweetheart not to pine, / To be proud her boy’s in line.”

Americans Join the War

In 1917, the U.S. Army numbered fewer than 200,000 soldiers; need- ing more men, Congress instituted a military draft in May 1917. In contrast to the Civil War, when resistance was common, conscrip-

tion went smoothly, partly because local, civilian-run draft boards played a central role in the new system. Still, draft registration demonstrated government’s increasing power over ordinary citizens. On a single day — June 5, 1917 — more than 9.5 million men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty registered at local voting precincts for possible military service.

President Wilson chose General Pershing to head the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), which had to be trained, outfi tted, and carried across the submarine-

C H A P T E R 2 1 An Emerging World Power, 1890–1918 627

plagued Atlantic. Th is required safer shipping. When the United States entered the war, German U-boats were sinking 900,000 tons of Allied ships each month. By send- ing merchant and troop ships in armed convoys, the U.S. Navy cut that monthly rate to 400,000 tons by the end of 1917. With trench warfare grinding on, Allied com- manders pleaded for American soldiers to fi ll their depleted units, but Pershing waited until the AEF reached full strength. As late as May 1918, the brunt of the fi ghting fell to the French and British.

Th e Allies’ burden increased when the Eastern Front collapsed following the Bol- shevik (Communist) Revolution in Russia in November 1917. To consolidate power at home, the new Bolshevik government, led by Vladimir Lenin, sought peace with the Central Powers. In a 1918 treaty, Russia surrendered its claims over vast parts of its territories in exchange for peace. Released from war against Germany, the Bolsheviks turned their attention to a civil war at home. Terrifi ed by communism, Japan and sev- eral Allied countries, including the United States, later sent troops to fi ght the Bolshe- viks and aid forces loyal to the deposed tsar. But aft er a four-year civil war, Lenin’s forces established full control over Russia and reclaimed Ukraine and other former possessions.

Peace with Russia freed Germany to launch a major off ensive on the Western Front. By May 1918, German troops had advanced to within 50 miles of Paris. Pershing at last committed about 60,000 U.S. soldiers to support the French defense. With American soldiers engaged in massive numbers, Allied forces brought the Germans to a halt in July; by September, they forced a retreat. Pershing then pitted more than one million American soldiers against an outnumbered and exhausted German army in the Argonne forest. By early November, this attack broke German defenses at a cru- cial rail hub, Sedan. Th e cost was high: 26,000 Americans killed and 95,000 wounded (Map 21.2). But the fl ood of U.S. troops and supplies determined the outcome. Recog- nizing inevitable defeat and facing popular uprisings at home, Germany signed an armistice on November 11, 1918. Th e Great War was over.

The American Fighting Force

By the end of World War I, almost 4 million American men — popu- larly known as “doughboys” — wore U.S. uniforms, as did several thousand female nurses. Th e recruits refl ected America’s heterogene-

ity: one-fi ft h had been born outside the United States, and soldiers spoke forty-nine diff erent languages. Th ough ethnic diversity worried some observers, most predicted that military service would promote Americanization.

Over 400,000 African American men enlisted, accounting for 13 percent of the armed forces. Th eir wartime experiences were oft en grim: serving in segregated units, they were given the most menial tasks. Racial discrimination hampered military effi - ciency and provoked violence at several camps. Th e worst incident occurred in August 1917, when, aft er suff ering a string of racial attacks, black members of the 24th Infan- try’s Th ird Battalion rioted in Houston, killing 15 white civilians and police offi cers. Th e army tried 118 of the soldiers in military courts for mutiny and riot, hanged 19, and sentenced 63 to life in prison.

Unlike African Americans, American Indians served in integrated combat units. Racial stereotypes about Native Americans’ prowess as warriors enhanced their mili- tary reputations, but it also prompted offi cers to assign them hazardous duties as

628 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

scouts and snipers. About 13,000, or 25 percent, of the adult male American Indian population served during the war; roughly 5 percent died, compared to 2 percent for the military as a whole.

Most American soldiers escaped the horrors of sustained trench warfare. Still, during the brief period of U.S. participation, over 50,000 servicemen died in action; another 63,000 died from disease, mainly the devastating infl uenza pandemic that began early in 1918 and, over the next two years, killed 50 million people worldwide. Th e nation’s military deaths, though substantial, were only a tenth as many as the 500,000 American civilians who died of this terrible epidemic — not to mention the staggering losses of Europeans in the war (America Compared, p. 629).

Major battles involving U.S. forces

Allied offensive

Territory under German control by July 1918

Line of trench warfare, 1915–1917

Armistice line, November 11, 1918

�

N

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EW

0 50 100 kilometers

0 100 miles50

E N GLA N D

FRANCE

BEL GI UM

NETHERLANDS

LUX.

GERMANY

SWITZERLAND

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.

Saar R.

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London

Amiens

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Belleau Wood June 1918

St. Mihiel Sept. 1918

Château- Thierry May 1918

Meuse-Argonne Sept.–Nov. 1918

Versailles

Calais Dunkirk

Ypres Brussels

Cologne

Frankfurt

Strasbourg Nancy

Sedan

Verdun

MAP 21.2 U.S. Participation on the Western Front, 1918 When American troops reached the European front in signifi cant numbers in 1918, the Allies and Central Powers had been fi ghting a deadly war of attrition for almost four years. The infl ux of American troops and supplies helped break the stalemate. Successful off ensive maneuvers by the American Expeditionary Force included those at Belleau Wood and Château-Thierry and the Meuse-Argonne campaign.

A M E R I C A C O M PA R E D

629

T h e H u m a n C o s t o f Wo r l d Wa r I Th e United States played a crucial role in fi nancing World War I. In its war-related expendi- tures, totaling $22.6 billion, the United States ranked fourth among all nations that participated, ranking behind only Germany ($37.7 billion), Britain ($35.3 billion), and France ($24.3 billion). In human terms, however, the U.S. role was diff erent. Note that the fi gures below for military casualties are rough estimates. Civilian casualties are even more uncertain: the exact number of Russians, Italians, Romanians, Serbians, and others who died will never be known.

TABLE 21.1 World War I Casualties

Country Total Population Military Killed or Missing Total Civilian Deaths

Germany 67,000,000 2,037,000 700,000 Russia 167,000,000 1,800,000 2,000,000 France 39,000,000 1,385,300 40,000 Austria-Hungary 49,900,000 1,016,200 unknown United Kingdom 46,400,000 702,410 1,386 Italy 35,000,000 462,400 unknown Turkey 21,300,000 236,000 2,000,000* Romania 7,510,000 219,800 265,000–500,000 Serbia 5,000,000 127,500 600,000 Bulgaria 5,500,000 77,450 275,000 India 316,000,000 62,060 negligible Canada 7,400,000 58,990 negligible Australia 4,872,000 53,560 negligible United States 92,000,000 51,822 negligible

* Mostly Armenians

War on the Home Front In the United States, opponents of the war were a minority. Helping the Allies trig- gered an economic boom that benefi tted farmers and working people. Many progres- sives also supported the war, hoping Wilson’s ideals and wartime patriotism would renew Americans’ attention to reform. But the war bitterly disappointed them. Rather than enhancing democracy, it chilled the political climate as government agencies tried to enforce “100 percent loyalty.”

Mobilizing the Economy

American businesses made big bucks from World War I. As grain, weapons, and manufactured goods fl owed to Britain and France, the United States became a creditor nation. Moreover, as the war drained

British fi nancial reserves, U.S. banks provided capital for investments around the globe. Government powers expanded during wartime, with new federal agencies over-

seeing almost every part of the economy. Th e War Industries Board (WIB), established

630 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

in July 1917, directed military production. Aft er a fumbling start that showed the lim- its of voluntarism, the Wilson administration reorganized the board and placed Ber- nard Baruch, a Wall Street fi nancier and superb administrator, at its head. Under his direction, the WIB allocated scarce resources among industries, ordered factories to convert to war production, set prices, and standardized procedures. Th ough he could compel compliance, Baruch preferred to win voluntary cooperation. A man of immense charm, he usually succeeded — helped by the lucrative military contracts at his disposal. Despite higher taxes, corporate profi ts soared, as military production sus- tained a boom that continued until 1920.

Some federal agencies took dramatic measures. Th e National War Labor Board (NWLB), formed in April 1918, established an eight-hour day for war workers with time- and-a-half pay for overtime, and it endorsed equal pay for women. In return for a no- strike pledge, the NWLB also supported workers’ right to organize — a major achievement for the labor movement. Th e Fuel Administration, meanwhile, introduced daylight saving time to conserve coal and oil. In December 1917, the Railroad Administration seized

Selling Liberty Bonds: Two Appeals Once the United States entered the Great War, government offi cials sought to enlist all Americans in the battle against the Central Powers. They carefully crafted patriotic advertising campaigns that urged Americans to buy bonds, conserve food, enlist in the military, and support the war eff ort in many other ways. One of these posters appeals to recent immigrants, reminding them of their debt to American Liberty. The other shows the overtly anti-German prejudices of many war appeals: it depicts the “Hun,” a slur for a German soldier, with bloody hands and bayonet. Library of Congress.

C H A P T E R 2 1 An Emerging World Power, 1890–1918 631

control of the nation’s hodgepodge of private railroads, seeking to facilitate rapid move- ment of troops and equipment — an experiment that had, at best, mixed results.

Perhaps the most successful wartime agency was the Food Administration, cre- ated in August 1917 and led by engineer Herbert Hoover. With the slogan “Food will win the war,” Hoover convinced farmers to nearly double their acreage of grain. Th is increase allowed a threefold rise in food exports to Europe. Among citizens, the Food Administration mobilized a “spirit of self-denial” rather than mandatory rationing. Female volunteers went from door to door to persuade housekeepers to observe “Wheatless” Mondays and “Porkless” Th ursdays. Hoover, a Republican, emerged from the war as one of the nation’s most admired public fi gures.

Promoting National Unity

Suppressing wartime dissent became a near obsession for President Wilson. In April 1917, Wilson formed the Committee on Public Information (CPI), a government propaganda agency headed by

journalist George Creel. Professing loft y goals — educating citizens about democracy, assimilating immigrants, and ending the isolation of rural life — the committee set out to mold Americans into “one white-hot mass” of war patriotism. Th e CPI touched the lives of nearly all civilians. It distributed seventy-fi ve million pieces of literature and enlisted thousands of volunteers — Four-Minute Men — to deliver short prowar speeches at movie theaters.

Th e CPI also pressured immigrant groups to become “One Hundred Percent Americans.” German Americans bore the brunt of this campaign. With posters exhort- ing citizens to root out German spies, a spirit of conformity pervaded the home front. A quasi-vigilante group, the American Protective League, mobilized about 250,000 “agents,” furnished them with badges issued by the Justice Department, and trained them to spy on neighbors and coworkers. In 1918, members of the league led violent raids against draft evaders and peace activists. Government propaganda helped rouse a nativist hysteria that lingered into the 1920s.

Congress also passed new laws to curb dissent. Among them was the Sedition Act of 1918, which prohibited any words or behavior that might “incite, provoke, or encourage resistance to the United States, or promote the cause of its enemies.” Because this and an earlier Espionage Act (1917) defi ned treason loosely, they led to the con- viction of more than a thousand people. Th e Justice Department prosecuted members of the Industrial Workers of the World, whose opposition to militarism threatened to disrupt war production of lumber and copper. When a Quaker pacifi st teacher in New York City refused to teach a prowar curriculum, she was fi red. Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to ten years in jail for the crime of arguing that wealthy capitalists had started the confl ict and were forcing workers to fi ght.

Federal courts mostly supported the acts. In Schenck v. United States (1919), the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a socialist who was jailed for circulating pam- phlets that urged army draft ees to resist induction. Th e justices followed this with a similar decision in Abrams v. United States (1919), ruling that authorities could pros- ecute speech they believed to pose “a clear and present danger to the safety of the country.” In an important dissent, however, Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Louis Brandeis objected to the Abrams decision. Holmes’s probing questions about the defi nition of “clear and present danger” helped launch twentieth-century legal battles over free speech and civil liberties.

632 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

Great Migrations World War I created tremendous economic opportunities at home. Jobs in war industries drew thousands of people to the cities. With

so many men in uniform, jobs in heavy industry opened for the fi rst time to African Americans, accelerating the pace of black migration from South to North. During World War I, more than 400,000 African Americans moved to such cities as St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Detroit, in what became known as the Great Migration. Th e rewards were great, and taking war jobs could be a source of patriotic pride. “If it hadn’t been for the negro,” a Carnegie Steel manager later recalled, “we could hardly have carried on our operations.”

Blacks in the North encountered discrimination in jobs, housing, and education. But in the fi rst fl ush of opportunity, most celebrated their escape from the repressive racism and poverty of the South. “It is a matter of a dollar with me and I feel that God made the path and I am walking therein,” one woman reported to her sister back home. “Tell your husband work is plentiful here.” “I just begin to feel like a man,” wrote another migrant to a friend in Mississippi. “My children are going to the same school with the whites. . . . Will vote the next election and there isn’t any ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’ — it’s all yes and no and Sam and Bill.”

The Labor Agent in the South This evocative painting from 1940 is part of the famous Great Migration series by African American painter Jacob Lawrence. It shows how many African American workers found a route to opportunity: northern manufacturers, facing severe wartime labor shortages, sent agents to the South to recruit workers. Agents often arranged loans to pay for train fare and other travel expenses; once laborers were settled and employed in the North, they repaid the loans from their wages. Here, a line of men waits for the agent to record their names in his open ledger. The bare tree in the background suggests the barrenness of economic prospects for impover- ished rural blacks in the South; it also hints at the threat of lynching and racial violence. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

C H A P T E R 2 1 An Emerging World Power, 1890–1918 633

Wartime labor shortages prompted Mexican Americans in the Southwest to leave farmwork for urban industrial jobs. Continued political instability in Mexico, combined with increased demand for farmworkers in the United States, also encouraged more Mexicans to move across the border. Between 1917 and 1920, at least 100,000 Mexicans entered the United States; despite discrimination, large numbers stayed. If asked why, many might have echoed the words of an African American man who left New Orleans for Chicago: they were going “north for a better chance.” Th e same was true for Puerto Ricans such as Jésus Colón, who also confronted racism. “I came to New York to poor pay, long hours, terrible working conditions, discrimination even in the slums and in the poor paying factories,” Colón recalled, “where the bosses very dexterously pitted Italians against Puerto Ricans and Puerto Ricans against American Negroes and Jews.”

Women were the largest group to take advantage of wartime job opportunities. About 1 million women joined the paid labor force for the fi rst time, while another 8 million gave up low-wage service jobs for higher-paying industrial work. Americans soon got used to the sight of female streetcar conductors, train engineers, and defense workers. Th ough most people expected these jobs to return to men in peacetime, the war created a new comfort level with women’s employment outside the home — and with women’s suff rage.

Women’s Voting Rights

Th e National American Woman Suff rage Association (NAWSA) threw the support of its 2 million members wholeheartedly into the war eff ort. Its president, Carrie Chapman Catt, declared that women had

to prove their patriotism to win the ballot. NAWSA members in thousands of com- munities promoted food conservation and distributed emergency relief through orga- nizations such as the Red Cross.

Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party (NWP) took a more confrontational approach. Paul was a Quaker who had worked in the settlement movement and earned a PhD in political science. Finding as a NAWSA lobbyist that congressmen dismissed her, Paul founded the NWP in 1916. Inspired by militant British suff ragists, the group began in July 1917 to picket the White House. Standing silently with their banners, Paul and other NWP activists faced arrest for obstructing traffi c and were sentenced to seven months in jail. Th ey protested by going on a hunger strike, which prison author- ities met with forced feeding. Public shock at the women’s treatment drew attention to the suff rage cause.

Impressed by NAWSA’s patriotism and worried by the NWP’s militancy, the anti- suff rage Wilson reversed his position. In January 1918, he urged support for woman suff rage as a “war measure.” Th e constitutional amendment quickly passed the House of Representatives; it took eighteen months to get through the Senate and another year to win ratifi cation by the states. On August 26, 1920, when Tennessee voted for ratifi - cation, the Nineteenth Amendment became law. Th e state thus joined Texas as one of two ex-Confederate states to ratify it. In most parts of the South, the measure meant that white women began to vote: in this Jim Crow era, African American women’s vot- ing rights remained restricted along with men’s.

In explaining suff ragists’ victory, historians have debated the relative eff ectiveness of Catt’s patriotic strategy and Paul’s militant protests. Both played a role in persuading Wilson and Congress to act, but neither might have worked without the extraordinary

634 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

impact of the Great War. Across the globe, before 1914, the only places where women had full suff rage were New Zealand, Australia, Finland, and Norway. Aft er World War I, many nations moved to enfranchise women. Th e new Soviet Union acted fi rst, in 1917, with Great Britain and Canada following in 1918; by 1920, the measure

had passed in Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary as well as the United States. (Major exceptions were France and Italy, where women did not gain voting rights until aft er World War II, and Switzer- land, which held out until 1971.) Th us, while World War I introduced modern horrors on the battlefi eld — machine guns and poison gas — it brought some positive results at home: economic opportunity and women’s political participation.

Women Riveters at the Puget Sound Navy Yard, 1919 With men at the front, women took many new jobs during World War I — as mail carriers, police offi cers, and farm laborers who joined the Women’s Land Army. African American women, generally limited by white prejudice to jobs in domestic service and agriculture, found that the war opened up new opportunities and better wages in industry. When the war ended, women usually lost jobs deemed to be men’s work. In 1919, however, these women were still hard at work in the Puget Sound Navy Yard, near Seattle. What clues indicate their attitudes toward their work, and toward one another? National Archives.

What factors led the United States to enter World War I, despite the desire of so many Americans, including the president, to stay out of the war?

What were the diff erent eff ects of African Americans’, Mexican Americans’, and women’s civilian mobilization during World War I?

C H A P T E R 2 1 An Emerging World Power, 1890–1918 635

Catastrophe at Versailles Th e idealistic Wilson argued that no victor should be declared aft er World War I: only “peace among equals” could last. Having won at an incredible price, Britain and France showed zero interest in such a plan. But the devastation wrought by the war created popular pressure for a just and enduring outcome. Wilson scored a diplomatic victory at the peace conference, held at Versailles, near Paris, in 1919, when the Allies chose to base the talks on his Fourteen Points, a blueprint for peace that he had presented a year earlier in a speech to Congress.

Wilson’s Points embodied an important strand in progressivism. Th ey called for open diplomacy; “absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas”; arms reduction; removal of trade barriers; and national self-determination for peoples in the Austro- Hungarian, Russian, and German empires. Essential to Wilson’s vision was the cre- ation of an international regulatory body, eventually called the League of Nations, that would guarantee each country’s “independence and territorial integrity.” Th e League would mediate disputes, supervise arms reduction, and — according to its crucial Article X — curb aggressor nations through collective military action. Wilson hoped the League would “end all wars.” But his ideals had marked limits, and in negotiations table he confronted harsh realities.

The Fate of Wilson’s Ideas Th e peace conference included ten thousand representatives from around the globe, but leaders of France, Britain, and the United States dominated the proceedings. When the Japanese delegation proposed a declaration for equal treatment of all races, the Allies rejected it. Similarly, the Allies ignored a global Pan-African Congress, orga- nized by W. E. B. Du Bois and other black leaders; they also snubbed Arab representa- tives who had been military allies during the war. Even Italy’s prime minister — at fi rst included among the infl uential “Big Four” — eventually withdrew from the confer- ence, aggrieved at the way British and French leaders marginalized him. Th e Allies completely excluded two key players: Russia, because they distrusted its communist leaders, and Germany, because they planned to dictate terms to their defeated foe. For Wilson’s “peace among equals,” it was a terrible start.

Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Britain and Premier Georges Clemenceau of France imposed harsh punishments on Germany. Unbeknownst to others at the time, they had already made secret agreements to divide up Germany’s African colo- nies and take them as spoils of war. At Versailles, they also forced the defeated nation to pay $33 billion in reparations and surrender coal supplies, merchant ships, valuable patents, and even territory along the French border. Th ese terms caused keen resent- ment and economic hardship in Germany, and over the following two decades they helped lead to World War II.

Given these conditions, it is remarkable that Wilson infl uenced the Treaty of Ver- sailles as much as he did. He intervened repeatedly to soft en conditions imposed on Germany. In accordance with the Fourteen Points, he worked with the other Allies to fashion nine new nations, stretching from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. Th ese were intended as a buff er to protect Western Europe from communist Russia; the plan also

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embodied Wilson’s principle of self-determination for European states. Elsewhere in the world, the Allies dismantled their enemies’ empires but did not create indepen- dent nations, keeping colonized people subordinate to European power. France, for example, refused to give up its long-standing occupation of Indochina; Clemenceau’s snub of future Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, who sought representation at Ver- sailles, had grave long-term consequences for both France and the United States.

Th e establishment of a British mandate in Palestine (now Israel) also proved cru- cial. During the war, British foreign secretary Sir Arthur Balfour had stated that his country would work to establish there a “national home for the Jewish people,” with the condition that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Under the British mandate, thousands of Jews moved to Palestine and purchased land, in some cases evicting Pal- estinian tenants. As early as 1920, riots erupted between Jews and Palestinians — a situation that, even before World War II, escalated beyond British control.

Th e Versailles treaty thus created conditions for horrifi c future bloodshed, and it must be judged one of history’s great catastrophes. Balfour astutely described Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Wilson as “all-powerful, all-ignorant men, sitting there and carving up continents.” Wilson, however, remained optimistic as he returned home, even though his health was beginning to fail. Th e president hoped the new League of Nations, authorized by the treaty, would moderate the settlement and secure peaceful resolutions of other disputes. For this to occur, U.S. participation was crucial.

Congress Rejects the Treaty Th e outlook for U.S. ratifi cation was not promising. Th ough major opinion makers and religious denominations supported the treaty, openly hostile Republicans held a majority in the Senate. One group, called the “irreconcilables,” consisted of western progressive Republicans such as Hiram Johnson of California and Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, who opposed U.S. involvement in European aff airs. Another group, led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, worried that Article X — the provi- sion for collective security — would prevent the United States from pursuing an inde- pendent foreign policy. Was the nation, Lodge asked, “willing to have the youth of America ordered to war” by an international body? Wilson refused to accept any amendments, especially to placate Lodge, a hated rival. “I shall consent to nothing,” the president told the French ambassador. “Th e Senate must take its medicine.”

To mobilize support, Wilson embarked on an exhausting speaking tour. His impassioned defense of the League of Nations brought audiences to tears, but the strain proved too much for the president. While visiting Colorado in September 1919, Wilson collapsed. A week later, back in Washington, he suff ered a stroke that left one side of his body paralyzed. Wilson still urged Democratic senators to reject all Repub- lican amendments. When the treaty came up for a vote in November 1919, it failed to win the required two-thirds majority. A second attempt, in March 1920, fell seven votes short.

Th e treaty was dead and so was Wilson’s leadership. Th e president never fully recovered from his stroke. During the last eighteen months of his administration, the government drift ed as Wilson’s physician, his wife, and various cabinet heads secretly took charge. Th e United States never ratifi ed the Versailles treaty or joined the League

C H A P T E R 2 1 An Emerging World Power, 1890–1918 637

of Nations. In turn, the League was weak. When Wilson died in 1924, his dream of a just and peaceful international order lay in ruins.

Th e impact of World War I can hardly be overstated. Despite bids for power by Britain and France, Europe’s hold on its colonial empires never recovered. Th e United States, now a major world power, appeared to turn its back on the world when it rejected the Versailles treaty. But in laying claim to Hawaii and the Philippines, asserting power in Latin America, and intervening in Asia, the United States had entangled itself deeply in global politics. By 1918, the nation had gained too much diplomatic clout — and was too dependent on overseas trade — for isolation to be a realistic long-term option.

On the home front, the eff ects of World War I were no less dramatic. Wartime jobs and prosperity ushered in an era of exuberant consumerism, while the achievements of women’s voting rights seemed to presage a new progressive era. But as peace returned, it became clear that the war had not advanced reform. Rather than embracing government activism, Americans of the 1920s proved eager to relinquish it.

S U M M A RY Between 1877 and 1918, the United States rose as a major economic and military power. Justifi cations for overseas expansion emphasized access to global markets, the impor- tance of sea power, and the need to police international misconduct and trade. Th ese justifi cations shaped U.S. policy toward European powers in Latin America, and victory in the War of 1898 enabled the United States to take control of former Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and Pacifi c. Victory, however, also led to bloody confl ict in the Philip- pines as the United States struggled to suppress Filipino resistance to American rule.

Aft er 1899, the United States aggressively asserted its interests in Asia and Latin America. In China, the United States used the so-called Boxer Rebellion to make good its claim to an open door to Chinese markets. Later, President Th eodore Roosevelt strengthened relations with Japan, and his successor, William Howard Taft , supported U.S. business interests in China. In the Caribbean, the United States constructed the Panama Canal and regularly exercised the right, claimed under the Roosevelt Corol- lary, to intervene in the aff airs of states in the region. President Woodrow Wilson publicly disparaged the imperialism of his predecessors but repeatedly used the U.S. military to “police” Mexico.

At the outbreak of World War I, the United States asserted neutrality, but its eco- nomic ties to the Allies rapidly undercut that claim. In 1917, German submarine attacks drew the United States into the war on the side of Britain and France. Involve- ment in the war profoundly transformed the economy, politics, and society of the nation, resulting in an economic boom, mass migrations of workers to industrial cen- ters, and the achievement of national voting rights. At the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson attempted to implement his Fourteen Points. However, the designs of the Allies in Europe undermined the Treaty of Versailles, while Republican resistance at home prevented ratifi cation of the treaty. Although Wilson’s dream of a just inter- national order failed, the United States had taken its place as a major world power.

In what ways did the Treaty of Versailles embody — or fail to embody — Wilson’s Fourteen Points?

638 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

Fo r Fu r t h e r E x p l o rat i o n Jean H. Baker, Votes for Women (2002). A collection of essays on the achievement of women’s

suff rage. Frank Freidel, Over Th ere (1990). A collection of American soldiers’ fi rsthand accounts of

their experiences in World War I. Th e Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century. An excellent PBS documentary with

accompanying documents at pbs.org/greatwar/index.html. Julie Greene, Th e Canal Builders (2009). Th e story of the Panama Canal through the view-

point of the diverse workers who constructed it. James R. Grossman, Land of Hope (1999). A sweeping study of the Great Migration. Walter LaFeber, Th e American Search for Opportunity, 1865–1913 (1993). An excellent, up-

to-date synthesis of foreign policy in this era.

T I M E L I N E

1886 U.S. begins building modern battleships

1892 U.S.-backed planters overthrow Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani

1895 United States arbitrates border dispute between Britain and Venezuela

Guerrilla war against Spanish rule begins in Cuba

1898 War between United States and Spain

United States annexes Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam

1899– U.S.-Philippine War, ending in 1902 U.S. occupation of Philippines United States pursues open

door policy in China 1900 United States helps suppress

nationalist rebellion in China (“Boxer Rebellion”)

1901 Hay-Pauncefote Treaty 1902 Platt Amendment gives U.S.

exclusive role in Cuba 1903 U.S. recognizes Panama’s

independence from Colombia 1905 Russo-Japanese War; Roosevelt

mediates peace 1908 Root-Takahira Agreement

1914 Panama Canal opens U.S. military action in Veracruz,

Mexico World War I begins in Europe 1916 Jones Act commits United

States to future Philippine independence

1917 United States declares war on Germany and its allies, creates new agencies to mobilize economy and promote national unity

Espionage Act 1918 Sedition Act World War I ends Beginning of two-year

infl uenza pandemic that kills 50 million people worldwide

1919 Schenck v. United States and Abrams v. United States

Wilson promotes Fourteen Points at Paris Peace Conference

Senate rejects the Treaty of Versailles

1920 Nineteenth Amendment grants women suff rage

M AK E IT S T I C K

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22 Cultural Confl ict, Bubble, and Bust 1919–1932 Rising to fame in Th e Sheik (1922), Rudolph Valentino became a con-troversial Hollywood star. Calling him “dark, darling, and delightful,” female fans mobbed his appearances. In Chi- cago, Mexican American boys slicked back their hair and called each other “sheik.” But some Anglo men said they loathed Valentino. One reviewer claimed the star had stolen his style from female “vamps” and ridiculed him for wearing a bracelet (a

gift from his wife). Th e Chicago Tribune blamed Valentino for the rise of “eff eminate men,” shown by the popularity of “fl oppy pants and slave bracelets.” Outraged, Valen- tino challenged the journalist to a fi ght — and defeated the writer’s stand-in.

Valentino, an Italian immigrant, upset racial and ethnic boundaries. Nicknamed the Latin Lover, he played among other roles a Spanish bullfi ghter and the son of a maharajah. When a reporter called his character in Th e Sheik a “savage,” Valentino retorted, “People are not savages because they have dark skins. Th e Arab civilization is one of the oldest in the world.”

But to many American-born Protestants, movies were morally dangerous — “vile and atrocious,” one women’s group declared. Th e appeal of “dark” stars like Valentino and his predecessor, Japanese American actor Sessue Hayakawa, was part of the prob- lem. Hollywood became a focal point for political confl ict as the nation took a sharp right turn. A year before Th e Sheik appeared, the Reverend Wilbur Craft s published a widely reprinted article warning of “Jewish Supremacy in Film.” He accused “Hebrew” Hollywood executives of “gross immorality” and claimed they were racially incapable of understanding “the prevailing standards of the American people.” Th ese were not fringe views. Craft s’s editorial fi rst appeared in a newspaper owned by prominent auto- maker Henry Ford.

Critics, though, failed to slow Hollywood’s success. Faced with threats of regula- tion, movie-makers did what other big businesses did in the 1920s: they used their clout to block government intervention. At the same time, they expanded into world markets; when Valentino visited Paris, he was swarmed by thousands of French fans. Th e Sheik highlighted America’s business success and its political and cultural divides.

IDENTIFY THE BIG IDEA What confl icts in culture and politics arose in the 1920s, and how did economic developments in that decade help cause the Great Depression?

640 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

Young urban audiences, including women “fl appers,” were eager to challenge older sexual and religious mores. Rural Protestants saw American values going down the drain. In Washington, meanwhile, Republican leaders abandoned two decades of reform and deferred to business. Americans wanted prosperity, not progressivism — until the consequences arrived in the shock of the Great Depression.

Confl icted Legacies of World War I “Th e World War has accentuated all our diff erences,” a journalist observed in 1919. “It has not created those diff erences, but it has revealed and emphasized them.” In the war’s immediate aft ermath, thousands of strikes revealed continuing labor tensions. Violent riots exposed white resistance to the rising expectations of African Americans, while an obsessive hunt for “foreign” radicals — like angry denunciations of Holly- wood’s Latin Lover — showed that ethnic pluralism would not win easy acceptance.

Racial Strife African Americans emerged from World War I determined to achieve citizenship rights. Millions had loyally supported the war eff ort; 350,000 had served in uniform. At the same time, the Great Migration drew hundreds of thousands from the South to northern industrial cities, where they secured good wartime jobs and found they could vote and use their new economic clout to build community institutions and work for racial justice. Th e black man, one observer wrote, “realized that he was part and parcel of the great army of democracy. . . . With this realization came the con- sciousness of pride in himself as a man, and an American citizen.”

Th ese developments sparked white violence. In the South, the number of lynch- ings rose from 48 in 1917 to 78 in 1919, including several murders of returning black soldiers in their military uniforms. In 1921, aft er a brutal lynching in the railroad town of Rosewood, Florida, black residents armed for self-defense; mobs of furious whites responded by torching houses and hunting down African Americans. Police and state authorities refused to intervene. Th e town of Rosewood vanished from the map.

In northern and midwestern cities, the arrival of southern migrants deepened exist- ing racial tensions. Blacks competed with whites — including recent immigrants — for scarce housing and jobs. Unionized white workers resented blacks who served as strikebreakers. Racism turned such confl icts into violent confrontations. Attacks on African Americans broke out in more than twenty-fi ve cities. One of the deadliest riots occurred in 1917 in East St. Louis, Illinois, where nine whites and more than forty blacks died. Chicago endured fi ve days of rioting in July 1919. By September, the national death toll from racial violence reached 120.

Th e oil boomtown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was the site of a horrifi c incident in June 1921. Sensational, false reports of an alleged rape helped incite white mobs who resented growing black prosperity. Anger focused on the 8,000 residents of Tulsa’s prosperous Greenwood district, locally known as “the black Wall Street.” Th e mob — helped by National Guardsmen, who arrested blacks who resisted — burned thirty-fi ve blocks of Greenwood and killed several dozen people. Th e city’s leading paper

C H A P T E R 2 2 Cultural Confl ict, Bubble, and Bust, 1919–1932 641

acknowledged that “semi-organized bands of white men systematically applied the torch, while others shot on sight men of color.” It took a decade for black residents to rebuild Greenwood.

Erosion of Labor Rights African Americans were not the only ones who faced challenges to their hard-won gains. Th e war eff ort, overseen by a Democratic administration sympathetic to labor, had temporarily increased the size and power of labor unions. Th e National War Labor Board had instituted a series of prolabor measures, including recognition of workers’ right to organize. Membership in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) grew by a third during World War I, reaching more than 3 million by war’s end, and continued to climb aft erward. Workers’ expectations also rose as the war economy brought higher pay and better working conditions.

But when workers tried to maintain these standards aft er the war, employers cut wages and rooted out unions, prompting massive confrontations. In 1919, more than four million wage laborers — one in every fi ve — went on strike, a proportion never since equaled. A walkout of shipyard workers in Seattle sparked a general strike that shut down the city. Another strike disrupted the steel industry, as 350,000 workers demanded union recognition and an end to twelve-hour shift s. Elbert H. Gary, head of United States Steel Corporation, refused to negotiate; he hired Mexican and African American replacements and broke the strike. Meanwhile, business leaders in rising industries, such as automobile manufacturing, resisted unions, creating more and more nonunionized jobs.

Public employees fared no better. Late in 1919, Boston’s police force demanded a union and went on strike to get it. Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge won national fame by declaring, “Th ere is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.” Coolidge fi red the entire police force; the strike failed. A majority of the public supported the governor. Republicans rewarded Coolidge by nominating him for the vice-presidency in 1920.

Antilabor decisions by the Supreme Court were an additional key factor in unions’ decline. In Coronado Coal Company v. United Mine Workers (1925), the Court ruled that a striking union could be penalized for illegal restraint of trade. Th e Court also struck down federal legislation regulating child labor; in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923), it voided a minimum wage for women workers in the District of Columbia, reversing many of the gains that had been achieved through the groundbreaking deci- sion in Muller v. Oregon (Chapter 20). Such decisions, along with aggressive antiunion campaigns, caused membership in labor unions to fall from 5.1 million in 1920 to 3.6 million in 1929 — just 10 percent of the nonagricultural workforce.

In place of unions, the 1920s marked the heyday of welfare capitalism, a system of labor relations that stressed management’s responsibility for employees’ well-being. Automaker Henry Ford, among others, pioneered this system before World War I, famously paying $5 a day. Ford also off ered a profi t-sharing plan to employees who met the standards of its Social Department, which investigated to ensure that workers’ private lives met the company’s moral standards. At a time when government unem- ployment compensation and Social Security did not exist, General Electric and U.S.

642 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

Steel provided health insurance and old-age pensions. Other employers, like Chicago’s Western Electric Company, built athletic facilities and selectively off ered paid vaca- tions. Employers hoped this would build a loyal workforce and head off labor unrest. But such plans covered only about 5 percent of the industrial workforce. Facing new fi nancial pressures in the 1920s, even Henry Ford cut back his $5 day. In the tangible benefi ts it off ered workers, welfare capitalism had serious limitations.

The Red Scare Many well-off Americans sided with management in the upheavals of the postwar years. Th ey blamed workers for the rapidly rising cost of living, which jumped nearly 80 percent between 1917 and 1919. Th e socialist views of some recent immigrants frightened native-born citizens; communism terrifi ed them. When in 1919 the Soviet Union’s new Bolshevik leaders founded the Th ird International, intended to foster revolutions abroad, some Americans began to fear that dangerous radicals were hiding everywhere. Wartime hatred of Germans was replaced by hostility toward Bolsheviks (labeled “Reds,” aft er the color of communist fl ags). Ironically, American communists remained few in number and had little political infl uence. Of the 50 million adults in the United States in 1920, no more than 70,000 belonged to either the fl edgling U.S. Communist Party or the Communist Labor Party.

In April 1919, alert postal workers discovered and defused thirty-four mail bombs addressed to government offi cials. In June, a bomb detonated outside the Washington

The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, by Ben Shahn, 1931–1932 Ben Shahn (1898–1969) came to the United States from Lithuania as a child and achieved fame as a social real- ist painter and photographer. Shahn used his art to advance his belief in social justice. In this painting, Sacco and Vanzetti lie dead and pale, hovered over by three distinguished Massachusetts citizens. These grim-faced men — holding lilies, a symbol of death — are Harvard University president A. Lawrence Lowell and the two other members of a commission appointed by the governor in 1927 to review the case. The com- mission concluded that the men were guilty, a fi nding that led to their execution. Judge Webster Thayer, who presided at the original trial in 1921, stands in the win- dow in the background. The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti by Ben Shahn (1931–1932) Art © Estate of Ben Shahn/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photo © Geoffrey Clements.

C H A P T E R 2 2 Cultural Confl ict, Bubble, and Bust, 1919–1932 643

town house of recently appointed attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer. Palmer escaped unharmed, but he used the incident to fan public fears, precipitating a hysterical Red Scare. With President Woodrow Wilson incapacitated by stroke, Palmer had a free hand. He set up an antiradicalism division in the Justice Department and appointed his assistant J. Edgar Hoover to direct it; shortly aft erward, it became the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In November 1919, Palmer’s agents stormed the headquarters of radical organizations. Th e dragnet captured thousands of aliens who had committed no crimes but who held anarchist or revolutionary beliefs. Lacking the protection of U.S. citizenship, many were deported without indictment or trial.

Th e Palmer raids peaked on a notorious night in January 1920, when federal agents invaded homes and meeting halls, arrested six thousand citizens and aliens, and denied the prisoners access to legal counsel. Th en Palmer, who had presidential ambi- tions, overreached. He predicted that on May 1 a radical conspiracy would attempt to overthrow the U.S. government. State militia and police went on twenty-four-hour alert to guard against the alleged threat, but not a single incident occurred. As the summer of 1920 passed without major strikes or renewed bombings, the Red Scare began to abate.

Like other postwar legacies, however, antiradicalism had broad, long-lasting eff ects. In May 1920, at the height of the Red Scare, police arrested Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fi sh peddler, for the murder of two men dur- ing a robbery of a shoe company in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian aliens and self-proclaimed anarchists who had evaded the draft . Con- victed of the murders, Sacco and Vanzetti sat in jail for six years while supporters appealed their verdicts. In 1927, Judge Webster Th ayer denied a motion for a new trial and sentenced them to death. Scholars still debate their guilt or innocence. But the case was clearly biased by prosecutors’ emphasis on their ties to radical groups. Th e execution of Sacco and Vanzetti was one of the ugly scars left by the ethnic and political hostilities of the Great War.

Politics in the 1920s As the plight of labor suggested, the 1920s were a tough decade for progressives who had gained ground before World War I. Aft er a few early reform victories, including achievement of national women’s suff rage, the dominant motif of the 1920s was lim- ited government. Native-born white Protestants rallied against what they saw as big- city values and advocated such goals as immigration restriction. A series of Republican presidents placed responsibility for the nation’s well-being in the hands of business. President Calvin Coolidge declared, “Th e man who builds a factory builds a temple. Th e man who works there worships there.” Th e same theme prevailed in continued U.S. interventions in Latin America and elsewhere: American business needs were the top priority.

What factors contributed to anti- black violence, labor defeats, and the Red Scare, and what connec- tions might we draw among these events?

644 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

Women in Politics At the start of the 1920s, many progressives hoped the attainment of women’s voting rights would off er new leverage to tackle poverty. Th ey created organizations like the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee, a Washington-based advocacy group. Th e committee’s greatest accomplishment was the fi rst federally funded health-care legisla- tion, the Sheppard-Towner Federal Maternity and Infancy Act (1921). Sheppard- Towner provided federal funds for medical clinics, prenatal education programs, and visiting nurses. Th ough opponents warned that the act would lead to socialized medi- cine, Sheppard-Towner improved health care for the poor and signifi cantly lowered infant mortality rates. It also marked the fi rst time that Congress designated federal funds for the states to encourage them to administer a social welfare program.

In 1923, Alice Paul, founder of the National Woman’s Party, also persuaded con- gressional allies to consider an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitu- tion. It stated simply, “men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States.” Advocates were hopeful; Wisconsin had passed a similar law two years earlier,

and it helped women fi ght gen- der discrimination. But oppo- nents pointed out that the ERA would threaten recent labor laws that protected women from workplace abuses. Such laws recognized women’s vulnerable place in a heavily sex-segregated labor market. Would a theoreti- cal statement of “equality” help poor and working women more

The League of Women Voters The League of Women Voters was the brainchild of Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suff rage Association. Formed in 1920, as the Nineteenth Amendment was about to give women the vote, the league undertook to educate Americans in responsible citizenship and to win enactment of legislation favorable to women. The league helped secure passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, which provided federal aid for maternal and child-care programs. In the 1930s, members campaigned for the enactment of Social Security and other social welfare legislation. The Library of Virginia.

C H A P T E R 2 2 Cultural Confl ict, Bubble, and Bust, 1919–1932 645

than existing protections did? Th is question divided women’s rights advocates. Intro- duced repeatedly in Congress over the next fi ve decades but rarely making it out of committee, the ERA was debated again and again until the bitter ratifi cation struggle of the 1970s (Chapter 29).

Horrifi ed at the suff ering caused by World War I, some women joined a growing international peace movement. While diplomats conducted negotiations at Versailles, women peace advocates from around the world convened in Zurich and called on all nations to use their resources to end hunger and promote human welfare. Treaty nego- tiators ignored them, but the women organized for sustained activism. In 1919, they created the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), whose leading American members included Jane Addams. Members of the league denounced imperialism, stressed the human suff ering caused by militarism, and proposed social justice measures.

Such women faced serious opposition. Th e WILPF came under fi erce attack dur- ing the Red Scare because it included socialist women in its ranks. And though women proved to be eff ective lobbyists, they had diffi culty gaining access to positions inside the Republican and Democratic parties. Finding that women did not vote as a bloc, politicians in both parties began to take their votes for granted. New reforms failed to gain support, and others were rolled back. Many congressmen, for example, had sup- ported the Sheppard-Towner Act because they feared the voting power of women, but Congress ended the program in the late 1920s.

Republicans and Business With President Wilson ailing in 1920, Democrats nominated Ohio governor James M. Cox for president, on a platform calling for U.S. participation in the League of Nations and continuation of Wilson’s progressivism. Republicans, led by their probusiness wing, tapped genial Ohio senator Warren G. Harding. In a dig at Wilson’s idealism, Harding promised “not nostrums but normalcy.” On election day, he won in a land- slide, beginning an era of Republican dominance that lasted until 1932.

Harding’s most energetic appointee was Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, well known as head of the wartime Food Administration. Under Hoover’s direction, the Commerce Department helped create two thousand trade associations represent- ing companies in almost every major industry. Government offi cials worked closely with the associations, providing statistical research, suggesting industry-wide stan- dards, and promoting stable prices and wages. Hoover hoped that through voluntary business cooperation with government — an associated state — he could achieve what progressives had sought through governmental regulation. Th is meant, of course, giv- ing corporate leaders greater policymaking power.

More sinister links between government and corporate interests were soon revealed. When President Harding died suddenly of a heart attack in August 1923, evidence was just emerging that parts of his administration were riddled with corrup- tion. Th e worst scandal concerned secret leasing of government oil reserves in Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California, to private companies. Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall was eventually convicted of taking $300,000 in bribes and became the fi rst cabinet offi cer in U.S. history to serve a prison sentence.

646 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

Vice President Calvin Coolidge became president upon Harding’s death. He maintained Republican dominance while off ering, with his austere Yankee morality, a contrast to his predecessor’s cronyism. Campaigning for election in his own right in 1924, Coolidge called for limited government and tax cuts for business. Rural and urban Democrats, deeply divided over such issues as prohibition and immigration restriction, deadlocked at their national convention; aft er 102 ballots, delegates fi nally nominated John W. Davis, a Wall Street lawyer. Coolidge easily defeated Davis and

staved off a challenge from Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, who tried to resuscitate the Progressive Party. Th e 1924 Progressive platform called for stronger government regulation at home and international eff orts to reduce weapons produc- tion and prevent war. “Free men of every generation,”

it declared, “must combat the renewed eff orts of organized force and greed.” In the end, Coolidge received 15.7 million votes to Davis’s 8.4 million and La Follette’s 4.9 million.

For the most part, Republicans dropped progressive initiatives of the prewar years. Th e Federal Trade Commission failed to enforce antitrust laws. Th e Supreme Court, now headed by former Republican president William Howard Taft , refused to break up the mammoth U.S. Steel Corporation, despite evidence of its near-monopoly status. With the agricultural sector facing hardship, Congress sought to aid farmers with the McNary-Haugen bills of 1927 and 1928, which proposed a system of federal price supports for major crops. But President Coolidge opposed the bills as “special- interest legislation” and vetoed them both. While some state and municipal leaders continued to pursue ambitious agendas, they were shut out of federal power.

Dollar Diplomacy Political campaigns emphasized domestic issues in the 1920s, but while the United States refused to join the League of Nations, the federal government remained deeply engaged in foreign aff airs. Republican presidents worked to advance U.S. business interests, especially by encouraging private banks to make foreign loans — part of the broader government-business alliance in Republicans’ associated state. Policymakers hoped loans would stimulate growth and increase demand for U.S. products in devel- oping markets. Bankers, though, wanted government guarantees of repayment in countries they perceived as weak or unstable.

Offi cials provided such assurance. In 1922, for example, when American banks off ered an immense loan to Bolivia (at a heft y profi t), State Department offi cials pres- sured the South American nation to accept it. Diplomats also forced Bolivia to agree to fi nancial oversight by a commission under the banks’ control. A similar arrange- ment was reached with El Salvador’s government in 1923. In other cases, the United States intervened militarily, oft en to force repayment of debt. To implement such poli- cies, the U.S. Marines occupied Nicaragua almost continuously from 1912 to 1933, the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924, and Haiti from 1915 to 1934.

In these lengthy military deployments, Americans came to think of the occupied countries as essentially U.S. possessions, much like Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Sensational memoirs by marines who had served in Haiti popularized the island as the

To see a longer excerpt of the Progressive Party platform, along with other primary sources from this period, see Sources for America’s History.

C H A P T E R 2 2 Cultural Confl ict, Bubble, and Bust, 1919–1932 647

“American Africa.” White Americans became fascinated by vodou (voodoo) and other Haitian religious customs, reinforcing their view of Haitians as dangerous savages or childlike people who needed U.S. guidance and supervision. One commander testifi ed that his troops saw themselves as “trustees of a huge estate that belonged to minors. . . . Th e Haitians were our wards.”

At home, critics denounced loan guarantees and military interventions as dollar diplomacy. Th e term was coined in 1924 by Samuel Guy Inman, a Disciples of Christ missionary who toured U.S.-occupied Haiti and the Dominican Republic. “Th e United States,” Inman declared, “cannot go on destroying with impunity the sovereignty of other peoples, however weak.” African American leaders also denounced the Haitian occupation. On behalf of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, a delegation conducted a fact-fi nding tour of Haiti in 1926. Th eir report exposed, among other things, the sexual exploitation of Haitian women by U.S. soldiers.

By the late 1920s, dollar diplomacy was on the defensive, in keeping with a broader disgust over international aff airs. At the same time, political leaders became frustrated with their poor results. Dollar diplomacy usually managed to get loans repaid, secur- ing bankers’ profi ts. But the loans oft en ended up in the pockets of local elites; U.S. policies failed to build broad-based prosperity overseas. Military intervention had even worse results. In Haiti, for example, the marines crushed peasant protests and helped the Haitian elite consolidate power. U.S. occupation thus helped create the con- ditions for harsh dictatorships that Haitians endured through the rest of the twentieth century.

Culture Wars By 1929, ninety-three U.S. cities had populations of more than 100,000. New York City’s population exceeded 7 million; Los Angeles’s had exploded to 1.2 million. Th e lives and beliefs of urban Americans oft en diff ered dramatically from those in small towns and farming areas. Native-born rural Protestants, faced with a dire perceived threat, rallied in the 1920s to protect what they saw as American values.

Prohibition Rural and native-born Protestants started the decade with the achieve- ment of a longtime goal: national prohibition of liquor (Chapter 18).

Wartime anti-German prejudice was a major spur. Since breweries like Pabst and Anheuser-Busch were owned by German Americans, many citizens decided it was unpatriotic to drink beer. Mobilizing the economy for war, Congress also limited brewers’ and distillers’ use of barley and other scarce grains, causing consumption to decline. Th e decades-long prohibition campaign culminated with Congress’s passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1917. Ratifi ed over the next two years by nearly every state and taking eff ect in January 1920, the amendment prohibited “manufac- ture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” anywhere in the United States.

Defenders hailed prohibition as a victory for health, morals, and Christian values. In urban areas, though, thousands fl agrantly ignored the law. Patrons fl ocked to urban speakeasies, or illegal drinking sites, which fl ourished in almost every Chicago neigh- borhood; one raid on a South Side speakeasy yielded 200,000 gallons of alcohol. Profi ts

648 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

from the secret clubs enriched notorious gangsters such as Chicago’s Al Capone and New York’s Jack Diamond.

In California, Arizona, and Texas, tens of thousands of Americans streamed “south of the border.” Mexico regulated liquor but kept it legal (along with gambling, drugs, and prostitution), leading to the rise of booming vice towns such as Tijuana and Mexicali, places that had been virtually uninhabited before 1900. U.S. nightclub own- ers in these cities included such prominent fi gures as African American boxer Jack Johnson. By 1928, the American investors who built a $10 million resort, racetrack, and casino in Tijuana became known as border barons. Prohibitionists were outraged by Americans’ fl agrant circumventions of the law. Religious leaders on both sides of the border denounced illegal drinking — but profi ts were staggering. Th e diffi culties of enforcing prohibition contributed to its repeal in 1933 (Chapter 23).

Evolution in the Schools

At the state and local levels, controversy erupted as fundamentalist Protestants sought to mandate school curricula based on the biblical account of creation. In 1925, Tennessee’s legislature outlawed the teach-

ing of “any theory that denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, [and teaches] instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Th e American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), formed during the Red Scare to protect free speech rights, challenged the law’s constitutionality. Th e ACLU intervened in the trial of John T. Scopes, a high school biology teacher who taught the theory of evolu- tion to his class and faced a jail sentence for doing so. Th e case attracted national atten- tion because Clarence Darrow, a famous criminal lawyer, defended Scopes, while William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential candidate, spoke for the prosecution.

Journalists dubbed the Scopes trial “the monkey trial.” Th is label referred both to Darwin’s argument that human beings and other primates share a common ancestor and to the circus atmosphere at the trial, which was broadcast live over a Chicago radio station. (Proving that urbanites had their own prejudices, acerbic critic H. L. Mencken dismissed antievolutionists as “gaping primates of the upland valleys,” imply- ing that they had not evolved.) Th e jury took only eight minutes to deliver its verdict: guilty. Th ough the Tennessee Supreme Court later overturned Scopes’s conviction, the law remained on the books for more than thirty years.

Nativism Some native-born Protestants pointed to immigration as the primary cause of what they saw as America’s moral decline. A nation of 105 million

people had added more than 23 million immigrants over the previous four decades; the newcomers included many Catholics and Jews from Southern and Eastern Europe, whom one Maryland congressman referred to as “indigestible lumps” in the “national stomach.” Such attitudes recalled hostility toward Irish and Germans in the 1840s and 1850s. In this case, they fueled a momentous shift in immigration policy. “America must be kept American,” President Coolidge declared in 1924. Congress had banned Chinese immigration in 1882, and Th eodore Roosevelt had negotiated a so-called gentleman’s agreement that limited Japanese immigration in 1907. Now nativists charged that there were also too many European arrivals, some of whom undermined Protestantism and imported anarchism, socialism, and other radical doctrines.

C H A P T E R 2 2 Cultural Confl ict, Bubble, and Bust, 1919–1932 649

Responding to this pressure, Congress passed emergency immigration restrictions in 1921 and a permanent measure three years later. Th e National Origins Act (1924) used backdated census data to establish a baseline: in the future, annual immigration from each country could not exceed 2 percent of that nationality’s percentage of the U.S. population as it had stood in 1890. Since only small numbers of Italians, Greeks, Poles, Russians, and other Southern and Eastern European immigrants had arrived before 1890, the law drastically limited immigration from those places. In 1929, Congress imposed even more restrictive quotas, setting a cap of 150,000 immigrants per year from Europe and continuing to ban most immigrants from Asia.

Th e new laws, however, permitted unrestricted immigration from the Western Hemisphere. As a result, Latin Americans arrived in increasing numbers, fi nding jobs in the West that had gone to other immigrants before exclusion. More than 1 million Mexicans entered the United States between 1900 and 1930, including many during World War I. Nativists lobbied Congress to cut this fl ow; so did labor leaders, who argued that impoverished migrants lowered wages for other American workers. But Congress heeded the pleas of employers, especially farmers in Texas and California, who wanted cheap labor. Only the Great Depression cut off migration from Mexico.

Other anti-immigrant measures emerged at the state level. In 1913, by an over- whelming majority, California’s legislature had passed a law declaring that “aliens ineligible to citizenship” could not own “real property.” Th e aim was to discourage

The U.S. Border Patrol, Laredo, Texas, 1926 In 1926, San Antonio photographer Eugene O. Goldbeck took this photograph of U.S. Border Patrol offi cers in Laredo. Since 1917, Mexicans, like other immigrants, had been subject to a head tax and literacy test. The U.S. government had not enforced these provisions, however, because of pressure from southwestern employers eager for cheap Mexican labor. Following passage of the National Origins Act in 1924, the United States established the Border Patrol. Its increasing eff orts to police the border slowed the casual movement of Mexican workers in and out of the United States. Why do you think the Border Patrol posed in this way for Goldbeck’s picture? Notice that some of the offi cers depicted here were dressed as civilians. What might this signify? Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

650 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

Asians, especially Japanese immigrants, from owning land, though some had lived in the state for decades and built up prosperous farms. In the wake of World War I, Cali- fornia tightened these laws, making it increasingly diffi cult for Asian families to estab- lish themselves. California, Washington, and Hawaii also severely restricted any school that taught Japanese language, history, or culture. Denied both citizenship and land rights, Japanese Americans would be in a vulnerable position at the outbreak of World War II, when anti-Japanese hysteria swept the United States.

The National Klan Th e 1920s brought a nationwide resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), the white supremacist group formed in the post–Civil War

South. Soon aft er the premiere of Birth of a Nation (1915), a popular fi lm glorifying the Reconstruction-era Klan, a group of southerners gathered on Georgia’s Stone Mountain to revive the group. With its blunt motto, “Native, white, Protestant suprem- acy,” the Klan recruited supporters across the country. KKK members did not limit their harassment to blacks but targeted immigrants, Catholics, and Jews as well, with physical intimidation, arson, and economic boycotts.

At the height of its power, the Klan wielded serious political clout and counted more than three million members, including many women. Th e Klan’s mainstream appeal was illustrated by President Woodrow Wilson’s public praise for Birth of a Nation. Th ough the Klan declined nationally aft er 1925, robbed of a potent issue by passage of the anti-immigration bill, it remained strong in the South, and pockets of KKK activity persisted in all parts of the country (Map 22.1). Klan activism lent a menacing cast to political issues. Some local Klansmen, for example, cooperated with members of the Anti-Saloon League to enforce prohibition laws through threats and violent attacks (American Voices, p. 651).

Th e rise of the Klan was part of an ugly trend that began before World War I and extended into the 1930s. In 1915, for example, rising anti-Semitism was marked by the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory supervisor in Marietta, Georgia, who was wrongly accused of the rape and murder of a thirteen-year-old girl. Th e rise of the national Klan helped prepare the way for white supremacist movements of the 1930s, such as the Los Angeles–based Silver Legion, a fringe paramilitary group aligned with Hitler’s Nazis. Far more infl uential were major fi gures such as industrialist Henry Ford, whose Dearborn Independent railed against immigrants and warned that mem- bers of “the proud Gentile race” must arm themselves against a Jewish conspiracy aimed at world domination. Challenged by critics, Ford issued an apology in 1927 and admitted that his allegations had been based on “gross forgeries.” But with his paper’s editorials widely circulated by the Klan and other groups, considerable long-term damage had been done.

The Election of 1928

Confl icts over race, religion, and ethnicity created the climate for a stormy presidential election in 1928. Democrats had traditionally drawn strength from white voters in the South and immigrants in the

North: groups that divided over prohibition, immigration restriction, and the Klan. By 1928, the northern urban wing gained fi rm control. Democrats nominated Governor Al Smith of New York, the fi rst presidential candidate to refl ect the aspirations of the urban working class. A grandson of Irish peasants, Smith had risen through New York

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S

651

T h e F i g h t f o r A m e r i c a n i s m H I R A M W E S L E Y E VA N S Hiram Wesley Evans was a Texas dentist and Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, which boasted a nationwide membership of 3 million. He published this defense of the Klan in Th e North American Review, a leading journal of opinion. Like fascist movements in Italy and Germany, the Klan focused on racial identity. For the KKK, real Americans were those of Nordic (north European) descent; all others were “aliens,” including those of southern or central European ancestry (Italian, Spanish, Polish, Czech, etc.) and those with Jewish or African forebears.

We are a movement of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intel- lectual support, and trained leadership. We are demanding, and we expect to win, a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualized, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanized, average citizen of the old stock. . . .

Th is is undoubtedly a weakness. It lays us open to the charge of being hicks and “rubes” and “drivers of second-hand Fords.” We admit it. Far worse, it makes it hard for us to state our case and advocate our crusade in the most eff ective way, for most of us lack skill in language. . . .

To understand the Klan, then, it is necessary to understand the character and present mind of the mass of old-stock Americans. Th e mass, it must be remem- bered, as distinguished from the intellectually mongrelized “Liberals.”

Th ese are . . . a blend of various peoples of the so-called Nordic race . . . which, with all its faults, has given the world almost the whole of modern civilization. . . . Th ese Nordic Americans for the last generation have found themselves increasingly uncomfortable. . . .

Finally came the moral breakdown that has been going on for two decades. . . . All our traditional moral standards went by the boards or were so disregarded that they

ceased to be binding. Th e sacredness of our Sabbath, of our homes, of chastity, and fi nally even of our right to teach our own children in our own schools fundamental facts and truths were torn away from us. . . . One more point about the present attitude of the old-stock American: he has revived and increased his long-standing distrust of the Roman Catholic Church . . . [which is] the chief leader of alienism, and the most dangerous alien power with a foothold inside our boundaries. . . .

Th e Ku Klux Klan . . . is an organiza- tion which gives expression, direction and purpose to the most vital instincts, hopes, and resentments of the old-stock Ameri- cans, provides them with leadership, and is enlisting and preparing them for militant, constructive action toward fulfi lling their racial and national destiny . . . a defi nite crusade for Americanism! . . .

Th ere are three of these great racial instincts. . . . Th ese are the instincts of loyalty to the white race, to the traditions of America, and to the spirit of Protestantism, which has been an essential part of Americanism ever since the days of Roanoke and Plymouth Rock. Th ey are condensed into the Klan slogan: “Native, white, Protestant supremacy.”

SOURCE: Hiram Wesley Evans, “Th e Klan’s Fight for Americanism,” Th e North American Review 223 (March 1926): 37–39.

652 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

City’s Democratic machine to become a dynamic reformer. But he off ended many small-town and rural Americans with his heavy New York accent and brown derby hat, which highlighted his ethnic working-class origins. Middle-class reformers ques- tioned his ties to Tammany Hall; temperance advocates opposed him as a “wet.” But the governor’s greatest handicap was his religion. Although Smith insisted that his Catholic beliefs would not aff ect his duties as president, many Protestants opposed him. “No Governor can kiss the papal ring and get within gunshot of the White House,” vowed one Methodist bishop.

Smith proved no match for the Republican nominee, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who embodied the technological promise of the modern age. Women who had mobilized for Hoover’s conservation campaigns during World War I enlisted as Hoover Hostesses, inviting friends to their homes to hear the candidate’s radio speeches. Riding on eight years of Republican prosperity, Hoover promised that indi-

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MAP 22.1 Ku Klux Klan Politics and Violence in the 1920s Unlike the Reconstruction-era Klan, the Klan of the 1920s was geographically dispersed and had substantial strength in the West and Midwest as well as in the South. Although the Klan is often thought of as a rural movement, some of the strongest “klaverns” were in Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Detroit, and other large cities. The organization’s members operated as vigilantes in areas where they were strong; elsewhere, their aggressive tactics triggered riots between Klansmen and their ethnic and religious targets.

C H A P T E R 2 2 Cultural Confl ict, Bubble, and Bust, 1919–1932 653

vidualism and voluntary cooperation would banish poverty. He won overwhelmingly, with 444 electoral votes to Smith’s 87 (Map 22.2). Because many southern Protestants refused to vote for a Catholic, Hoover carried fi ve ex- Confederate states, breaking the Democratic “Solid South” for the fi rst time since Recon- struction. Smith, though, carried industrialized Massachusetts and Rhode Island as well as the nation’s twelve largest cities, suggesting that urban voters were moving into the Democrats’ camp.

Intellectual Modernism Th e horrors of World War I prompted many intellectuals to question long-standing assumptions about civilization, progress, and the alleged superiority of Western cul- tures over so-called primitive ways of life. In the United States, these questions con- tributed to struggles between modernity and tradition, refl ected not only in politics but also in art and literature. Some of these intellectual movements had their roots in the devastation of Europe; others — such as the Harlem Renaissance — emerged from social upheavals the Great War had wrought at home.

Harlem in Vogue Th e Great Migration tripled New York’s black population in the decade aft er 1910. Harlem stood as “the symbol of liberty and the Promised Land to Negroes every- where,” as one minister put it. Talented African Americans fl ocked to the district, where they created bold new art forms and asserted ties to Africa.

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MAP 22.2 The Presidential Election of 1928 Historians still debate the extent to which 1928 was a critical election — an election that produced a signifi cant realignment in voting behavior. Although the Republican Herbert Hoover swept the popular and the electoral votes, Democrat Alfred E. Smith won majorities not only in the South, his party’s traditional stronghold, but also in Rhode Island, Massachu- setts, and (although it is not evident on this map) all of the large cities of the North and Midwest. In subsequent elections, the Democrats won even more votes among African Americans and European ethnic groups and, until 1980, were the nation’s dominant political party.

Before World War I, women didn’t have full voting rights, but they had considerable success as reformers. After the war they could vote, but their proposals met defeat. How might we account for this apparent contradiction?

How did debates over alcohol use, the teaching of evolution, immi- gration, anti-Semitism, and racism evolve in the 1920s?

654 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

Black Writers and Artists

Poet Langston Hughes captured the upbeat spirit of the Harlem Renais- sance when he asserted, “I am a Negro — and beautiful.” Other writers and artists also championed race pride. Claude McKay and Jean

Toomer represented in fi ction what philosopher Alain Locke called, in an infl uential 1925 book, Th e New Negro. Painter Jacob Lawrence, who had grown up in crowded tenement districts of the urban North, used bold shapes and vivid colors to portray the daily life, aspirations, and suppressed anger of African Americans.

No one embodied the energy and optimism of the Harlem Renaissance more than Zora Neale Hurston. Born in the prosperous black community of Eatonville, Florida, Hurston had been surrounded as a child by examples of achievement, though she struggled later with poverty and isolation. In contrast to some other black thinkers, Hurston believed African American culture could be understood without heavy emphasis on the impact of white oppression. Aft er enrolling at Barnard College and studying with anthropologist Franz Boas, Hurston traveled through the South and the Caribbean for a decade, documenting folklore, songs, and religious beliefs. She incor- porated this material into her short stories and novels, celebrating the humor and spiritual strength of ordinary black men and women. Like other work of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston’s stories and novels sought to articulate what it meant, as black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “to be both a Negro and an American.”

Jazz To millions of Americans, the most famous product of the Harlem Renaissance was jazz. Th ough the origins of the word are unclear, many historians believe it

was a slang term for sex — an etymology that makes sense, given the music’s early association with urban vice districts. As a musical form, jazz coalesced in New Orleans and other parts of the South before World War I. Borrowing from blues, ragtime, and other popular forms, jazz musicians developed an ensemble style in which performers, keeping a rapid ragtime beat, improvised around a basic melodic line. Th e majority of early jazz musicians were black, but white performers, some of whom had more for- mal training, injected elements of European concert music.

In the 1920s, as jazz spread nationwide, musicians developed its signature mode, the improvised solo. Th e key fi gure in this development was trumpeter Louis Armstrong. A native of New Orleans, Armstrong learned his craft playing in the saloons and brothels of the city’s vice district. Like tens of thousands of other African Americans he moved north, settling in Chicago in 1922. Armstrong showed an inexhaustible capacity for melodic invention, and his dazzling solos inspired other musicians. By the late 1920s, soloists became the celebrities of jazz, thrilling audiences with their impro- visational skill.

As jazz spread, it followed the routes of the Great Migration from the South to northern and midwestern cities, where it met consumers primed to receive it. Most cities had plentiful dance halls where jazz could be featured. Radio also helped popu- larize jazz, with the emerging record industry marketing the latest tunes. As white listeners fl ocked to ballrooms and clubs to hear Duke Ellington and other stars, Har- lem became the hub of this commercially lucrative jazz. Th ose who hailed “primitive” black music rarely suspended their racial condescension: visiting a mixed-race club became known as “slumming.”

C H A P T E R 2 2 Cultural Confl ict, Bubble, and Bust, 1919–1932 655

Th e recording industry soon developed race records specifi cally aimed at urban working-class blacks. Th e breakthrough came in 1920, when Otto K. E. Heinemann, a producer who sold immigrant records in Yiddish, Swedish, and other languages, recorded singer Mamie Smith performing “Crazy Blues.” Th is smash hit prompted big recording labels like Columbia and Paramount to copy Heinemann’s approach. Yet, while its marketing refl ected the segregation of American society, jazz brought black music to the center stage of American culture. It became the era’s signature music, so much so that novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed the 1920s the “Jazz Age.”

Marcus Garvey and the UNIA

Harlem’s creative energy generated broad political aspirations. Th e Harlem-based Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), led by charismatic Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, arose in the 1920s

to mobilize African American workers and champion black separatism. Garvey urged followers to move to Africa, arguing that people of African descent would never be treated justly in white-run countries.

Th e UNIA soon claimed four million followers, including many recent migrants to northern cities. It published a newspaper, Negro World, and solicited funds for the Black Star steamship company, which Garvey created as an enterprise that would fos- ter trade with the West Indies and carry American blacks to Africa. But the UNIA declined as quickly as it had risen. In 1925, Garvey was imprisoned for mail fraud because of his solicitations for the Black Star Line. President Coolidge commuted his sentence but ordered his deportation to Jamaica. Without Garvey’s leadership, the movement collapsed.

However, the UNIA left a legacy of activism, especially among the working class. Garvey and his followers represented an emerging pan-Africanism. Th ey argued that people of African descent, in all parts of the world, had a common destiny and

Augusta Fells Savage, African American Sculptor Born in Florida in 1892, Augusta Fells Savage arrived in New York in 1921 to study and remained to take part in the Harlem Renaissance. Widowed at a young age and struggling to support her parents and young daughter, Savage faced both racism and poverty. Much of her work has been lost because she sculpted in clay and could not aff ord to cast in bronze. Savage began to speak out for racial justice after she was denied, on the basis of her race, a fellowship to study in Paris. In 1923, she married a close associate of UNIA leader Marcus Garvey. Augusta Savage with her sculpture Realization, ca. 1938/Andrew Herman, photographer. Federal Art Project, Photographic Division collection, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

656 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

should cooperate in political action. Several developments contributed to this ideal: black men’s military service in Europe during World War I, the Pan-African Congress that had sought representation at the Versailles treaty table, protests against U.S. occu- pation of Haiti, and modernist experiments in literature and the arts. One African American historian wrote in 1927, “Th e grandiose schemes of Marcus Garvey gave to the race a consciousness such as it had never possessed before. Th e dream of a united Africa, not less than a trip to France, challenged the imagination.”

Critiquing American Life Paralleling the defi ant creativity of Harlem, other artists and intellectuals of the 1920s raised voices of dissent. Some had endured fi rsthand the shock of World War I, an experience so searing that American writer Gertrude Stein dubbed those who sur- vived it the Lost Generation. Novelist John Dos Passos railed at the obscenity of “Mr. Wilson’s war” in Th e Th ree Soldiers (1921). Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) portrayed war’s futility and dehumanizing consequences.

Other writers also explored the dark side of the human psyche. In such dramas as Desire Under the Elms (1924), playwright Eugene O’Neill depicted characters driven by raw, ungovernable sexual impulses. O’Neill fi rst made his mark with Th e Emperor Jones (1920), a popular Broadway drama about a black dictator driven from power by his people. Appealing to Americans’ fascination with Haiti, the play off ered an ambig- uous message: its black protagonist was played not by the customary white actors made up in blackface, but by African Americans who won acclaim for their perfor- mances. W. E. B. Du Bois called it “a splendid tragedy.” But others were dissatisfi ed with the play’s primitivism; one actor who played Emperor Jones altered the script to omit the off ensive word nigger. Th e white crowds who made Th e Emperor Jones a hit, like those who fl ocked to Harlem’s jazz clubs, indulged a problematic fascination with “primitive” sexuality.

In a decade of confl ict between traditional and modern worldviews, many writers exposed what they saw as the hypocrisy of small-town and rural life. Th e most savage critic of conformity was Sinclair Lewis, whose novel Babbitt (1922) depicted the disil- lusionment of an ordinary small-town salesman. Babbitt was widely denounced as

un-American; Elmer Gantry (1927), a satire about a greedy evangelical minister on the make, provoked even greater outrage. But crit- ics found Lewis’s work superb, and in 1930 he became the fi rst American to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Even more famous was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Th e Great Gatsby (1925), which off ered a scathing indictment of Ameri- cans’ mindless pursuit of pleasure and material wealth.

How did the Great Migration lead to fl ourishing African American culture, politics, and intellectual life, and what form did these activities take?

What criticisms of mainstream culture did modernist American writers off er in the 1920s?

C H A P T E R 2 2 Cultural Confl ict, Bubble, and Bust, 1919–1932 657

From Boom to Bust Spurred by rapid expansion during the war, American business thrived in the 1920s. Corporations expanded more and more into overseas markets, while at home a national consumer culture emphasized leisure and fun. But some sectors of the econ- omy, notably agriculture, never recovered from a sharp recession in the wake of World War I. Meanwhile, close observers worried over the rapid economic growth and easy credit that fueled the Roaring Twenties. Th eir fears proved well founded: the “Roar” ended in the Great Depression.

The Postwar Economy Immediately aft er World War I, the United States experienced a series of economic shocks. Th ey began with rampant infl ation, as prices jumped by one-third in 1919 alone. Th en came a two-year recession that raised unemployment to 10 percent. Finally, the economy began to grow smoothly, and more Americans began to benefi t. Between 1922 and 1929, national per capita income rose an impressive 24 percent.

Large-scale corporations continued to replace small business in many sectors of the economy. By 1929, through successive waves of consolidation, the two hundred largest businesses had come to control almost half of the country’s nonbanking corpo- rate wealth. Th e greatest number of mergers occurred in rising industries such as chemicals (with DuPont in the lead) and electrical appliances (General Electric). At the same time, mergers between Wall Street banks enhanced New York City’s position as the fi nancial center of the nation and increasingly the world. Aided by Washington’s dollar diplomats, U.S. companies exercised growing global power. Seeking cheaper livestock, giant American meat-packers opened plants in Argentina; the United Fruit Company developed plantations in Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala; General Electric set up production facilities in Latin America, Asia, and Australia.

Despite the boom, the U.S. economy had areas of signifi cant weakness throughout the 1920s. Agriculture, which still employed one-fourth of all American workers, never fully recovered from the postwar recession. Once Europe’s economy revived, its farmers fl ooded world markets with grain and other farm products, causing agricul- tural prices to fall. Other industries, including coal and textiles, languished for similar reasons. As a consequence, many rural Americans shared little of the decade’s prosper- ity. Th e bottom 40 percent of American families earned an average annual income of only $725 (about $9,100 today). Many, especially rural tenants and sharecroppers, lan- guished in poverty and malnutrition.

Consumer Culture In middle-class homes, Americans of the 1920s sat down to a breakfast of Kellogg’s corn fl akes before getting into Ford Model Ts to work or shop at Safeway. On weekends, they might head to the local theater to see the newest Charlie Chaplin fi lm. By 1929, electric refrigerators and vacuum cleaners came into use in affl uent homes; 40 percent of American households owned a radio. Th e advertising industry reached new levels of ambition and sophistication, entering what one historian calls the era of the “aggressive

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hard sell.” Th e 1920s gave birth, for example, to fashion modeling and style consulting. “Sell them their dreams,” one radio announcer urged advertisers in 1923. “People don’t buy things to have things. . . . Th ey buy hope — hope of what your merchandise will do for them.”

In practice, participation in consumer culture was as contested as the era’s politics. It was no accident that white mobs in the Tulsa race riot plundered radios and phono- graph players from prosperous African American homes: the message was that whites deserved such items and blacks did not. But neither prosperity nor poverty was lim- ited by race. Surrounded by exhortations to indulge in luxuries, millions of working- class Americans barely squeaked by, with wives and mothers oft en working to pay for basic necessities. In times of crisis, some families sold their furniture, starting with pianos and phonographs and continuing, if necessary, to dining tables and beds. In the Los Angeles suburb of South Gate, white working-class men secured jobs in the steel and automobile industries, but prices were high and families oft en found it diffi cult to make ends meet. Self-help was the watchword as families bartered with neighbors and used their yards to raise vegetables, rabbits, and chickens.

Th e lure of consumer culture created friction. Wives resented husbands who spent all their discretionary cash at the ballpark. Generational confl icts emerged, especially when wage-earning children challenged the expectation that their pay should go “all to mother.” In St. Louis, a Czech-born woman was exasperated when her son and daughter stopped contributing to rent and food and pooled their wages to buy a car. In Los Angeles, one fi ft een-year-old girl spent her summer earning $2 a day at a local factory. Planning to enroll in business school, she spent $75 on dressy shoes and “a black coat with a red fox collar.” Her brother reported that “Mom is angry at her for ‘squandering’ so much money.”

Many poor and affl uent families shared one thing in common: they stretched their incomes, small or large, through new forms of borrowing such as auto loans and installment plans. “Buy now, pay later,” said the ads, and millions did. Anyone, no mat- ter how rich, could get into debt, but consumer credit was particularly perilous for those living on the economic margins. In Chicago, one Lithuanian man described his neighbor’s situation: “She ain’t got no money. Sure she buys on credit, clothes for the children and everything.” Such borrowing turned out to be a factor in the bust of 1929.

The Automobile No possession proved more popular than the automobile, a show- piece of modern consumer capitalism that revolutionized American

life. Car sales played a major role in the decade’s economic boom: in one year, 1929, Americans spent $2.58 billion on automobiles. By the end of the decade, they owned 23 million cars — about 80 percent of the world’s automobiles — or an average of one for every six people.

Th e auto industry’s exuberant expansion rippled through the economy, with both positive and negative results. It stimulated steel, petroleum, chemical, rubber, and glass production and, directly or indirectly, created 3.7 million jobs. Highway con- struction became a billion-dollar-a-year enterprise, fi nanced by federal subsidies and state gasoline taxes. Car ownership spurred urban sprawl and, in 1924, the fi rst subur- ban shopping center: Country Club Plaza outside Kansas City, Missouri. But cars were expensive, and most Americans bought them on credit. Th is created risks not only for

C H A P T E R 2 2 Cultural Confl ict, Bubble, and Bust, 1919–1932 659

buyers but for the whole economy. Borrowers who could not pay off car loans lost their entire investment in the vehicle; if they defaulted, banks were left holding unpaid loans. Amid the boom of the 1920s, however, few worried about this result.

Cars changed the way Americans spent their leisure time, as proud drivers took their machines on the road. An infrastructure of gas stations, motels, and drive-in restaurants soon catered to drivers. Railroad travel faltered. Th e American Automo- bile Association, founded in 1902, estimated that by 1929 almost a third of the popula- tion took vacations by car. As early as 1923, Colorado had 247 autocamps. “I had a few days aft er I got my wheat cut,” reported one Kansas farmer, “so I just loaded my fam- ily . . . and lit out.” An elite Californian complained that automobile travel was no lon- ger “aristocratic.” “Th e clerks and their wives and sweethearts,” observed a reporter, “driving through the Wisconsin lake country, camping at Niagara, scattering tin cans and pop bottles over the Rockies, made those places taboo for bankers.”

Hollywood Movies formed a second centerpiece of consumer culture. In the 1910s, the moviemaking industry had begun moving to southern California to

take advantage of cheap land, sunshine, and varied scenery within easy reach. Th e large studios — United Artists, Paramount, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer — were run mainly by Eastern European Jewish immigrants like Adolph Zukor, who arrived from

Automobiles at Jacksonville Beach, Florida, 1923 The automobile transformed Americans’ leisure pursuits. As proud car owners took to the road in ever-larger numbers, the “vacation” became a summer staple. Auto travel created a booming business in gas stations, roadside motels, campgrounds, and sightseeing destinations. A Florida vacation — once reserved for wealthy northeasterners who had traveled to Miami’s exclusive hotels by fi rst- class rail car — became an attainable luxury for middle-class and even some working-class families. © Curt Teich Postcard Archives, Lake County Museum.

660 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

Hungary in the 1880s. Starting with fur sales, Zukor and a partner then set up fi ve-cent theaters in Manhattan. “I spent a good deal of time watching the faces of the audience,” Zukor recalled. “With a little experience I could see, hear, and ‘feel’ the reaction to each melodrama and comedy.” Founding Paramount Pictures, Zukor signed emerging stars and produced successful feature-length fi lms.

By 1920, Hollywood reigned as the world’s movie capital, producing nearly 90 percent of all fi lms. Large, ornate movie palaces attracted both middle-class and working-class audiences. Idols such as Rudolph Valentino, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks set national trends in style. Th ousands of young women followed the lead of actress Clara Bow, Hollywood’s famous fl apper, who fl aunted her boyish fi gure. Decked out in knee- length skirts, fl appers shocked the older generation by smoking and wearing makeup.

Flappers represented only a tiny minority of women, but thanks to the movies and advertising, they became infl uential symbols of women’s sexual and social emancipa- tion. In cities, young immigrant women eagerly bought makeup and the latest fl apper fashions and went dancing to jazz. Jazz stars helped popularize the style among working-class African Americans. Mexican American teenagers joined the trend, though they usually found themselves under the watchful eyes of la dueña, the chaperone.

Politicians quickly grasped the publicity value of American radio and fi lm to for- eign relations. In 1919, with government support, General Electric spearheaded the creation of Radio Corporation of America (RCA) to expand U.S. presence in foreign radio markets. RCA — which had a federal appointee on its board of directors — emerged as a major provider of radio transmission in Latin America and East Asia. Meanwhile, by 1925, American fi lms made up 95 percent of the movies screened in Britain, 80 percent in Latin America, and 70 percent in France (America Compared, p. 661). Th e United States was experimenting with what historians call soft power — the exercise of popular cultural infl uence — as radio and fi lm exports celebrated the American Dream.

The Coming of the Great Depression By 1927, strains on the economy began to show. Consumer lending had become the tenth-largest business in the country, topping $7 billion that year. Increasing numbers of Americans bought into the stock market, oft en with unrealistic expectations. One Yale professor proclaimed that stocks had reached a “permanently high plateau.” Cor- porate profi ts were so high that some companies, fully invested in their own opera- tions, plowed excess earnings into the stock market. Other market players compounded risk by purchasing on margin. An investor might, for example, spend $20 of his own money and borrow $80 to buy a $100 share of stock, expecting to pay back the loan as the stock rose quickly in value. Th is worked as long as the economy grew and the stock market climbed. But those conditions did not last.

Yet when the stock market fell, in a series of plunges between October 25 and November 13, 1929, few onlookers understood the magnitude of the crisis. Cyclical downturns had been a familiar part of the industrializing economy since the panic of the 1830s; they tended to follow periods of rapid growth and speculation. A sharp recent recession, in 1921, had not triggered disaster. Th e market rose again in late 1929 and early 1930, and while a great deal of money had been lost, most Americans hoped

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H o l l y w o o d i n E u r o p e European fi lm studios struggled aft er World War I to reach audiences who had fallen in love with American movies. Working-class Europeans, in particular, preferred Hollywood’s off erings to the fi lms produced by Europeans. In this 1928 article from a cinematography journal, German expressionist fi lmmaker Erich Pommer suggested new strategies for expanding an audience for European fi lms. Expressionists, infl uenced by romanticism and modernism, explored dark themes such as spiritual crisis and insanity. (A famous example of expressionist painting is Edvard Munch’s Th e Scream.) Pommer worked for American studios and later fl ed to the United States aft er the rise of Hitler.

Th e towering importance of the American motion picture on the world’s markets cannot be safely explained by the unlimited fi nancial resources at the disposal of the American producers. . . . Its main reason is the mentality of the American picture, which, notwithstanding all attacks and claims to the contrary, apparently comes nearest to the taste of international cinema audiences.

. . . Th e specifi c and unique element of the American fi lm is the fact of its being absolutely uncomplicated. Being what is called “naïve” it knows no problems. . . .

Universal Appeal. It is really preferable to have a picture too light rather than too heavy, because in the latter case there is a danger that the public will not understand the story. Th is is the worst thing that can happen with a picture. . . .

Spectacular Appeal. Th e international appeal of a picture has its foundation in a story. It is totally independent of the capital

invested and of the splendor and luxury used in its production. Th e fact that in most cases the supers and monumental pictures have proved to be such international successes, does not disprove this claim. Such productions always have a simple story of universal appeal, because it is simply impossible to use spiritual thoughts and impressions of the soul in a picture deluxe. Th e splendour in such production is not merely created for decoration — it is its outstanding purpose. . . . But splendour means show, and a show is always and everywhere easy to understand. . . .

SOURCE: Excerpt from “Th e International Picture: A Lesson on Simplicity” by Erich Pommer from “Film Europe” and “Film America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939, Edited by Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby, 1999, ISBN: 978-0-85989-546-0. Used by permis- sion of Exeter University Press.

the aft ermath of the crash would be brief. In fact, the nation had entered the Great Depression. Over the next four years, industrial production fell 37 percent. Construc- tion plunged 78 percent. Prices for crops and other raw materials, already low, fell by half. By 1932, unemployment had reached a staggering 24 percent.

A precipitous drop in consumer spending deepened the crisis. Facing hard times and unemployment, Americans cut back dramatically, creating a vicious cycle of fall- ing demand and forfeited loans. In late 1930, several major banks went under, victims of overextended credit and reckless management. Th e following year, as industrial

662 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

production slowed, a much larger wave of bank failures occurred, causing an even greater shock. Since the government did not insure bank deposits, accounts in failed banks simply vanished. Some people who had had steady jobs and comfortable savings found themselves broke and out of work.

Not all Americans were devastated by the depression; the middle class did not disappear and the rich lived in accustomed luxury. But incomes plummeted even among workers who kept their jobs. Salt Lake City went bankrupt in 1931. Barter sys- tems developed, as barbers traded haircuts for onions and potatoes and laborers worked for payment in eggs or pork. “We do not dare to use even a little soap,” reported one jobless Oregonian, “when it will pay for an extra egg, a few more carrots for our children.” “I would be only too glad to dig ditches to keep my family from going hun- gry,” wrote a North Carolina man.

Where did desperate people turn for aid? Th eir fi rst hope lay in private charity, especially churches and synagogues. But by the winter of 1931, these institutions were overwhelmed, unable to keep pace with the extraordinary need. Only eight states pro- vided even minimal unemployment insurance. Th ere was no public support for the elderly, statistically among the poorest citizens. Few Americans had any retirement savings, and many who had saved watched their accounts erased by failing banks.

Even those who were not wiped out had to adapt to depression conditions. Couples delayed marriage and reduced the number of children they conceived. As a result, the marriage rate fell to a historical low, and by 1933 the birthrate dropped from 97 births per 1,000 women to 75. Oft en the responsibility for birth control fell to women. It was “one of the worst problems of women whose husbands were out of work,” a Califor- nian told a reporter. Campaigns against hiring married women were common, on the theory that available jobs should go to male breadwinners. Th ree-quarters of the nation’s school districts banned married women from working as teachers — ignoring the fact that many husbands were less able to earn than ever before. Despite restric- tions, female employment increased, as women expanded their fi nancial contributions to their families in hard times.

Th e depression crossed regional boundaries, though its severity varied from place to place. Bank failures clustered heavily in the Midwest and plains, while areas depen- dent on timber, mining, and other extractive industries suff ered catastrophic declines. Although southern states endured less unemployment because of their smaller manu- facturing base, farm wages plunged. In many parts of the country, unemployment rates among black men stood at double that of white men; joblessness among African American women was triple that of white women.

By 1932, comprehending the magnitude of the crisis, Americans went to the bal- lot box and decisively rejected the probusiness, antiregulatory policies of the 1920s. A

few years earlier, with business booming, poli- tics had been so placid that people chuckled when President Coolidge disappeared on extended fi shing trips. Now, Americans wanted bold action in Washington. Faced with the cat- aclysm of the Great Depression, Americans would transform their government and create a modern welfare state.

How did the radio, automobile, and Hollywood movies exemplify the opportunities and the risks of 1920s consumer culture?

What domestic and global factors helped cause the Great Depression?

C H A P T E R 2 2 Cultural Confl ict, Bubble, and Bust, 1919–1932 663

S U M M A RY Although involvement in World War I strengthened the United States economically and diplomatically, it left the nation profoundly unsettled. Racial tensions exploded aft er the war as African Americans pursued new opportunities and asserted their rights. Meanwhile, labor unrest grew as employers cut wages and sought to break unions. Labor’s power declined sharply in the war’s aft ermath, while anxieties over radicalism and immigration prompted a nationwide Red Scare.

Th e politics of the 1920s brought a backlash against prewar progressivism. Th e agenda of women reformers met very limited success. Republican administrations pursued probusiness “normalcy” at home and “dollar diplomacy” abroad. Prohibition and the Scopes trial demonstrated the infl uence religion could exert on public policy, while rising nativism fueled a resurgent Ku Klux Klan and led to sweeping new restric- tions on immigration.

Postwar alienation found artistic expression in new forms of modernism, which denounced the dehumanizing eff ects of war and criticized American materialism and hypocrisy. Spreading throughout the nation from New Orleans, jazz appealed to elite and popular audiences alike. Black artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance, including many inspired by pan-African ideas, explored the complexities of African American life.

Business thrived and a booming consumer culture, exemplifi ed by the radio, the automobile, and Hollywood fi lms, created new forms of leisure, infl uencing daily life and challenging older sexual norms. However, the risky speculation and easy credit of the 1920s undermined the foundations of the economy. Aft er the 1929 crash, these factors, along with a range of interconnected global conditions, plunged the United States into the Great Depression.

Fo r Fu r t h e r E x p l o rat i o n Lynn Dumenil, Th e Modern Temper (1995). A readable overview of events in the 1920s. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (1979). A wonderful account of politics,

arts, and culture in the vibrant “Negro capital of the world.” Daniel Okrent, Last Call: Th e Rise and Fall of Prohibition (2010). A lively recent history of the

movement to ban liquor. Martha L. Olney, Buy Now, Pay Later (1991). Explores the rise and impact of consumer credit. Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti (2001). A compelling exploration of U.S. occupation of Haiti

and its impact on Haiti and especially the United States. Th e PBS series American Experience has produced an excellent documentary on the Scopes

trial; information and documents are available at pbs.org/wgbh/amex/monkeytrial/. For a broad view of the 1929 crash and its impact, see pbs.org/wgbh/amex/crash.

664 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

T I M E L I N E

1915 New Ku Klux Klan founded United States occupies Haiti 1916 United States occupies

Dominican Republic 1917 Race riot in East St. Louis,

Illinois 1919 Race riot in Chicago Boston police strike Palmer raids Women’s International League

for Peace and Freedom founded

1920 Height of Red Scare Eighteenth Amendment

(prohibition) takes eff ect Warren Harding wins

presidency Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor

Jones 1921 Race riots in Rosewood,

Florida, and Tulsa, Oklahoma Sheppard-Towner Federal

Maternity and Infancy Act

1923 Adkins v. Children’s Hospital President Harding dies Calvin Coolidge assumes

presidency Teapot Dome scandal Equal Rights Amendment fi rst

introduced in Congress 1924 National Origins Act Coolidge wins presidential

election against Democrats and La Follette’s Progressive Party

First suburban shopping center opens outside Kansas City, Missouri

1925 Coronado Coal Company v. United Mine Workers

Scopes “monkey trial” Alain Locke’s The New Negro F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great

Gatsby 1927 Sacco and Vanzetti executed 1928 Herbert Hoover wins

presidency 1929 Stock market crashes precipi-

tate Great Depression

M AK E IT S T I C K

Go online and use LearningCurve to retain what you’ve read.

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23 Managing the Great Depression, Forging the New Deal 1929–1939

In his inaugural address in March 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not hide the country’s precarious condition. “A host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence,” he said, “and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.” Roosevelt, his demeanor sincere and pur- poseful, saw both despair and determina- tion as he looked out over the country.

“Th is nation asks for action, and action now.” From Congress he would request “broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” With these words, Roosevelt launched a program of federal activism — which he called the New Deal — that would change the nature of American government.

Th e New Deal represented a new form of liberalism, a fresh interpretation of the ideology of individual rights that had long shaped the character of American society and politics. Classical nineteenth-century liberals believed that, to protect those rights, government should be small and relatively weak. However, the “regulatory” liberals of the early twentieth century had safeguarded individ- ual freedom and opportunity by strengthening state and federal control over large businesses and monop- olies. New Deal activists went much further: their social-welfare liberalism expanded individual rights to include economic security. Beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s, they increased the responsibility of the national government for the welfare of ordinary citizens. Th eir eff orts did not go unchallenged. Conservative critics of the New Deal charged that its “big government” programs were paternalistic and dangerous, undermining individual responsibility and constraining personal freedom. Th is division between the advocates and the critics of the New Deal shaped American politics for the next half century.

Before Roosevelt was elected president, between the onset of the depression in 1929 and November 1932, the “dark realities of the moment” wore down American society.

IDENTIFY THE BIG IDEA What new roles did the American government take on during the New Deal, and how did these roles shape the economy and society?

To see a longer excerpt of Roosevelt’s inaugural address, along with other primary sources from this period, see Sources for America’s History.

666 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

Rising unemployment, shuttered businesses, failing banks, and home foreclosures tore at the nation’s social fabric. As crisis piled upon crisis and the federal government’s initiatives under President Hoover proved ineff ectual, Americans had to reconsider more than the role of government in economic life: they had to rethink many of the principles of indi- vidualism and free enterprise that had guided so much of the nation’s history.

Early Responses to the Depression, 1929–1932 Th e American economy collapsed between 1929 and 1932. U.S. gross domestic prod- uct fell almost by half, from $103.1 billion to $58 billion. Consumption dropped by 18 percent, construction by 78 percent, and private investment by 88 percent. Nearly 9,000 banks closed their doors, and 100,000 businesses failed. Corporate profi ts fell from $10 billion to $1 billion. Unemployment rose to 25 percent. Fift een million people were out of work by 1933, and many who had jobs took wage cuts. “Hoover made a souphound outa me!” sang jobless harvest hands in the Southwest.

Th e depression respected no national boundaries. Germany had preceded the United States into economic contraction in 1928, and its economy, burdened by heavy World War I reparations payments, was brought to its knees by 1929. France, Britain, Argentina, Brazil, Poland, and Canada were hard hit as well (America Compared, p. 667). Th e legacies of World War I made recovery diffi cult in two respects. First, Britain’s central bank was in no position to resume its traditional role in managing the international fi nancial system. Second, the war disrupted the international gold stan- dard. Th e United States and most European nations had tied the value of their curren- cies to the price of gold, and the amount of gold held in reserves, since the late nineteenth century. Th is system had worked fairly well for a few decades, but it was vulnerable during economic downturns, when large fi nanciers withdrew their invest- ments and demanded gold payments. Th e gold standard rendered the international monetary system infl exible at a moment that required great fl exibility in global fi nance.

Enter Herbert Hoover President Herbert Hoover and Congress responded to the downturn by drawing on two powerful American traditions. Th e fi rst was the belief that economic outcomes were the product of individual character. People’s fate was in their own hands, and suc- cess went to those who deserved it. Th e second tradition held that through voluntary action, the business community could right itself and recover from economic down- turns without relying on government assistance. Following these principles, Hoover asked Americans to tighten their belts and work hard. Aft er the stock market crash, he cut federal taxes in an attempt to boost private spending and corporate investment. “Any lack of confi dence in the economic future or the strength of business in the United States is foolish,” Hoover assured the country in late 1929. Treasury secretary Andrew Mellon suggested that the downturn would help Americans “work harder” and “live a more moral life.”

While many factors caused the Great Depression, Hoover’s adherence to the gold standard was a major reason for its length and severity in the United States. Faced with

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T h e G r e a t D e p r e s s i o n i n E n g l a n d a n d t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s In a 1954 book, Denis Brogan, a professor at Cambridge University in England, looked back at the descent into the Great Depression between 1929 and 1932 and explained the signifi - cance of Franklin Roosevelt’s election from an English perspective. Th e second selection is from an oral history conducted in the 1970s with an ordinary resident of London, who recalled life in the 1930s.

Denis W. Brogan, “From England”

No event . . . has so colored the European view of the United States as “the Depres- sion.” Th e fi rst news of the crash of 1929 was not ill received. Th ere was not only a marked feeling of Schadenfreude at the snub that destiny had given to the overcon- fi dent masters of the new world, but also a widespread belief that the extravagant gambling of the New York market was one of the chief causes of our ills. . . . But as the extent, depth, and duration of the American depression began to be appreciated, as its impact on all the world, especially on the dangerously unstable political and eco- nomic status quo of Germany and Austria, became more evident, as the old wound of unemployment was made to bleed more deeply in Britain, the tendency to blame the United States became overwhelming. Gone were the illusions about the “secret of high wages.” If ever found, it had now been lost.

American politics was seen as not only sterile but positively immoral and danger- ous. . . . American business and its political arm, the Republican Party, had been tried in the balance and found wanting. And it is safe to say that the election of F. D. Roosevelt was welcomed in every country

of Europe as good news almost overshad- owing the nomination of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of the German Reich.

SOURCE: Joseph, Franz M., As Others See Us. © 1959 Princeton University Press, 1987 renewed PUP. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Gladys Gibson, a Resident of London in the 1930s

Most of the unemployed were genuinely seeking work. A heavy snowfall was a blessing, when men with broken boots earned a little money by sweeping the streets. Th e Boroughs [a form of local administration in London] took on unemployed, in strict rotation, for thirteen weeks of unskilled work. It sometimes put a man back in benefi t and took him off the hated dole. Th e situation began to change aft er Munich, when more men found work. Salvation came with the War, when the despised unemployed became valued workers or serving helpers.

SOURCE: Nigel Gray, Th e Worst of Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression in Britain (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1985), 54.

668 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

economic catastrophe, both Britain and Germany abandoned the gold standard in 1931; when they did so, their economies recovered modestly. But the Hoover admin- istration feared that such a move would weaken the value of the dollar. In reality, an infl exible money supply discouraged investment and therefore prevented growth. Th e Roosevelt administration would ultimately remove the United States from the burdens of the gold standard in 1933. By that time, however, the crisis had achieved cata- strophic dimensions. Billions had been lost in business and bank failures, and the economy had stalled completely.

Along with their adherence to the gold standard, the Hoover administration and many congressional Republicans believed in another piece of economic orthodoxy that had protected American manufacturing in good economic times but that proved damaging during the downturn: high tariff s (taxes on imported goods designed to encourage American manufacturing). In 1930, Republicans enacted the Smoot- Hawley Tariff . Despite receiving a letter from more than a thousand economists urging him to veto it, Hoover approved the legislation. What served American interests in earlier eras now confounded them. Smoot-Hawley triggered retaliatory tariff s in other countries, which further hindered global trade and led to greater economic contrac- tion throughout the industrialized world.

Th e president recognized that individual initiative, voluntarism, and high tariff s might not be enough, given the depth of the crisis, so he proposed government action as well. He called on state and local governments to provide jobs by investing in public projects. And in 1931, he secured an unprecedented increase of $700 million in federal spending for public works. Hoover’s most innovative program was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which provided federal loans to railroads, banks, and other businesses. But the RFC lent money too cautiously, and by the end of 1932, aft er a year in operation, it had loaned out only 20 percent of its $1.5 billion in funds. Like most federal initiatives under Hoover, the RFC was not nearly aggressive enough given the severity of the depression. With federal offi cials fearing budget defi cits and reluc- tant to interfere with the private market, caution was the order of the day.

Few chief executives could have survived the downward economic spiral of 1929– 1932, but Hoover’s reluctance to break with the philosophy of limited government and his insistence that recovery was always just around the corner contributed to his unpopularity. By 1932, Americans perceived Hoover as insensitive to the depth of the country’s economic suff ering. Th e nation had come a long way since the depressions of the 1870s and 1890s, when no one except the most radical fi gures, such as Jacob Coxey, called for direct federal aid to the unemployed (Chapter 20). Compared with previous chief executives — and in contrast to his popular image as a “do-nothing” president — Hoover had responded to the national emergency with unprecedented government action. But the nation’s needs were even more unprecedented, and Hoover’s programs failed to meet them.

Rising Discontent As the depression deepened, the American vocabulary now included the terms Hoovervilles (shantytowns where people lived in packing crates) and Hoover blankets (newspapers). Bankrupt farmers banded together to resist the bank agents and sheriff s

C H A P T E R 2 3 Managing the Great Depression, Forging the New Deal, 1929–1939 669

who tried to evict them from their land. To protest low prices for their goods, in the spring of 1932 thousands of midwestern farmers joined the Farmers’ Holiday Association, which cut off supplies to urban areas by barricading roads and dumping milk, vegetables, and other foodstuff s onto the roadways. Agricultural prices were so low that the Farmers’ Holiday Association favored a government-supported farm program.

In the industrial sector, layoff s and wage cuts led to violent strikes. When coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, went on strike over a 10 percent wage cut in 1931, the mine owners called in the state’s National Guard, which crushed the union. A 1932 confrontation between workers and security forces at the Ford Motor Company’s giant River Rouge factory outside Detroit left fi ve workers dead and fi fty with serious inju- ries. A photographer had his camera shot from his hands, and fi ft een policemen were clubbed or stoned. Whether on farms or in factories, those who produced the nation’s food and goods had begun to push for a more aggressive response to the nation’s eco- nomic troubles.

Veterans staged the most publicized — and most tragic — protest. In the summer of 1932, the Bonus Army, a determined group of 15,000 unemployed World War I veterans, hitchhiked to Washington to demand immediate payment of pension awards that were due to be paid in 1945. “We were heroes in 1917, but we’re bums now,” one veteran complained bitterly. While their leaders unsuccessfully lobbied Congress, the Bonus Army set up camps near the Capitol building. Hoover called out regular army troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, who forcefully evicted the marchers and burned their main encampment to the ground. When newsreel footage showing the U.S. Army attacking and injuring veterans reached movie theaters across the nation, Hoover’s popularity plunged. In another measure of how the country had

Hooverville The depression cast hundreds of thousands of Americans out of their homes. Most found shelter with relatives, but those with little choice had to make do as they could. Encampments such as this one south of downtown Seattle, Washington — places where the homeless crafted makeshift lodging out of whatever materials were at hand — became known as Hoovervilles. The name refl ected Americans’ attitudes toward President Hoover, whose popular- ity plummeted as the depression deepened. University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW2129.

670 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

changed since the 1890s, what Americans had applauded when done to Coxey in 1894 was condemned in 1932.

The 1932 Election Despite rising discontent, the national mood was mixed as the 1932 election approached. Many Americans had internalized the ideal of the self-made man and blamed them- selves for their economic hardships. Despair, not anger, characterized their mood. Others, out of work for a year or more, perhaps homeless, felt the deeper stirrings of frustration and rage. Regardless of their circumstances, most Americans believed that something altogether new had to be tried — whatever that might be. Th e Republicans, reluctant to dump an incumbent president, unenthusiastically renominated Hoover. Th e Democrats turned to New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose state had initiated innovative relief and unemployment programs.

Roosevelt, born into a wealthy New York family, was a distant cousin to former president Th eodore Roosevelt, whose career he emulated. Aft er attending Harvard College and Columbia University, Franklin Roosevelt served as assistant secretary of the navy during World War I (as Th eodore Roosevelt had done before the War of 1898). Th en, in 1921, a crippling attack of polio left both of his legs permanently para- lyzed. Supported by his wife, Eleanor, he slowly returned to public life and campaigned successfully for the governorship of New York in 1928 and again in 1930. Running for the presidency in 1932, Roosevelt pledged vigorous action but gave no indication what that action might be, arguing simply that “the country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.” He won easily, receiv- ing 22.8 million votes to Hoover’s 15.7 million.

Elected in November, Roosevelt would not begin his presidency until March 1933. (Th e Twentieth Amendment, ratifi ed in 1933, set subsequent inaugurations for Janu- ary 20.) Meanwhile, Americans suff ered through the worst winter of the depression. Unemployment continued to climb, and in three major industrial cities in Ohio, it shot to staggering levels: 50 percent in Cleveland, 60 percent in Akron, and 80 percent

in Toledo. Private charities and public relief agencies reached only a fraction of the needy. Th e nation’s banking system was so close to col- lapse that many state governors closed banks temporarily to avoid further withdrawals. Sev- eral states were approaching bankruptcy, their tax revenues too low to pay for basic ser- vices. By March 1933, the nation had hit rock bottom.

The New Deal Arrives, 1933–1935 Th e ideological diff erences between Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt were not vast. Both leaders wished to maintain the nation’s economic institutions and social values, to save capitalism while easing its worst downturns. Both believed in a bal-

What economic principles guided President Hoover and Congress in their response to the Great Depression?

What did the depression look like when seen from the vantage of ordinary Americans?

C H A P T E R 2 3 Managing the Great Depression, Forging the New Deal, 1929–1939 671

anced government budget and extolled the values of hard work, cooperation, and sac- rifi ce. But Roosevelt’s personal charm, political savvy, and willingness to experiment made him far more eff ective and more popular than Hoover. Most Americans felt a kinship with their new president, calling him simply FDR. His New Deal would put people to work and restore hope for the nation’s future.

The New Deal This Federal Arts Project poster from 1936 captured the spirit of the New Deal under President Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt and other “New Dealers” hoped to get people working again during the depths of the Great Depression, raise their spirits, and help rebuild the national infrastructure. Library of Congress.

672 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

Roosevelt and the First Hundred Days A wealthy patrician, Roosevelt was an unlikely fi gure to inspire millions of ordinary Americans. But his close rapport with the American people was critical to his politi- cal success. More than 450,000 letters poured into the White House in the week aft er his inauguration. Th e president’s masterful use of the new medium of radio, especially his evening radio addresses to the American public known as fi reside chats, made him an intimate presence in people’s lives. Th ousands of citizens felt a personal relation- ship with FDR, saying, “He gave me a job” or “He saved my home” (American Voices, p. 673).

Citing the national economic emergency, Roosevelt further expanded the presi- dential powers that Th eodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had increased previ- ously. To draft legislation and policy, he relied heavily on fi nancier Bernard Baruch and a “Brains Trust” of professors from Columbia, Harvard, and other leading univer- sities. Roosevelt also turned to his talented cabinet, which included Harold L. Ickes, secretary of the interior; Frances Perkins at the Labor Department; Henry A. Wallace at Agriculture; and Henry Morgenthau Jr., secretary of the treasury. Th ese intellectuals and administrators attracted hundreds of highly qualifi ed recruits to Washington. Inspired by New Deal idealism, many of them would devote their lives to public ser- vice and the principles of social-welfare liberalism.

Roosevelt could have done little, however, without a sympathetic Congress. Th e 1932 election had swept Democratic majorities into both the House and Senate, giving the new president the lawmaking allies he needed. Th e fi rst months of FDR’s adminis- tration produced a whirlwind of activity on Capitol Hill. In a legendary session, known as the Hundred Days, Congress enacted fi ft een major bills that focused primarily on four problems: banking failures, agricultural overproduction, the business slump, and soaring unemployment. Derided by some as an “alphabet soup” because of their many abbreviations (CCC, WPA, AAA, etc.), the new policies and agencies were more than bureaucracies: they represented the emergence of a new American state.

Banking Reform Th e weak banking system hobbled the entire economy, curtailing consumer spending and business investment. Widespread bank

failures had reduced the savings of nearly nine million families, and panicked account holders raced to withdraw their funds. On March 5, 1933, the day aft er his inaugura- tion, FDR declared a national “bank holiday” — closing all the banks — and called Congress into special session. Four days later, Congress passed the Emergency Bank- ing Act, which permitted banks to reopen if a Treasury Department inspection showed that they had suffi cient cash reserves.

In his fi rst Sunday night fi reside chat, to a radio audience of sixty million, the president reassured citizens that their money was safe. When the banks reopened on March 13, calm prevailed and deposits exceeded withdrawals, restoring stability to the nation’s basic fi nancial institutions. “Capitalism was saved in eight days,” quipped Roosevelt’s advisor Raymond Moley. Four thousand banks had collapsed in the months prior to Roosevelt’s inauguration; only sixty-one closed their doors in all of 1934. A second banking law, the Glass-Steagall Act, further restored public confi dence by creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which insured deposits

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S

673

O r d i n a r y P e o p l e R e s p o n d t o t h e N e w D e a l Franklin Roosevelt’s fi reside chats and relief programs prompted thousands of Americans to write directly to him and his wife, Eleanor. Mrs. M. H. A. worked in the County Court House in Eureka, California; R. A., a sixty-nine-year-old man, was an architect and builder in Lincoln, Nebraska; and M. A., a woman, held a low-level salaried position in a corporation.

June 14, 1934 Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: My husband and I are a young couple of very simple, almost poor families. We married eight years ago on the proverbial shoe-string but with a wealth of love. . . . But with the exception of two and one-half months work with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey under the C.W.A. [Civil Works Administration], my husband has not had work since August, 1932.

My salary could continue to keep us going, but I am to have a baby. . . .

We have always stood on our own feet and been proud and happy. But you are a mother and you’ll understand this crisis.

Very sincerely yours, Mrs. M. H. A.

May 19/34 Dear Mrs Roosevelt: In the Presidents inaugral address deliv- ered from the capitol steps the aft ernoon of his inaugration he made mention of Th e Forgotten Man, and I with thousands of others am wondering if the folk who was borned here in America some 60 or 70 years a go are this Forgotten Man, the President had in mind, if we are this Forgotten Man then we are still Forgotten. . . .

First we have grown to what is termed Old Age, this befalls every man.

Second, . . . we are confronted on every hand with the young generation, taking our places, this of corse is what we have looked forward to in training our children. But with the extra ordinary crisese which left us helpless and placed us in the position that our fathers did not have to contend with. . . .

Yours very truly. R. A.

Jan. 18, 1937 [Dear Mrs. Roosevelt:] I . . . was simply astounded to think that anyone could be nitwit enough to wish to be included in the so called social security act if they could possibly avoid it. Call it by any name you wish it, in my opinion, (and that of many people I know) [it] is nothing but downright stealing. . . .

I am not an “economic royalist,” just an ordinary white collar worker at $1600 per [year — about $23,600 in 2011]. Please show this to the president and ask him to remember the wishes of the forgotten man, that is, the one who dared to vote against him. We expect to be tramped on but we do wish the stepping would be a little less hard.

M. A.

SOURCES: Robert S. McElvaine, Down & Out in the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 54–55, 97, 147, 143.

674 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

up to $2,500 (and now insures them up to $250,000). Th e act also prohibited banks from making risky, unsecured investments with the deposits of ordinary people. And in a profoundly important economic and symbolic gesture, Roosevelt removed the U.S. Treasury from the gold standard in June 1933, which allowed the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates; since 1931, it had been raising rates, which had only deepened the downturn. Saving the banks and leaving the gold standard led to a mild and, it would turn out, brief recovery.

Agriculture and Manufacturing

Roosevelt and the New Deal Congress next turned to agriculture and manufacturing. In those sectors, a seeming paradox was evi- dent: the depression led to overproduction in agriculture and under-

production in manufacturing. Reversing both problematic trends was critical. Th e Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) began direct governmental regulation of the farm economy for the fi rst time. To solve the problem of overproduction, which lowered prices, the AAA provided cash subsidies to farmers who cut production of seven major commodities: wheat, cotton, corn, hogs, rice, tobacco, and dairy products. Policymak- ers hoped that farm prices would rise as production fell.

By dumping cash in farmers’ hands, the AAA briefl y stabilized the farm economy. But the act’s benefi ts were not evenly distributed. Subsidies went primarily to the own- ers of large and medium-sized farms, who oft en cut production by reducing the amount of land they rented to tenants and sharecroppers. In Mississippi, one plantation owner received $26,000 from the federal government, while thousands of black sharecroppers living in the same county received only a few dollars in relief payments.

In manufacturing, the New Deal attacked declining production with the National Industrial Recovery Act. A new government agency, the National Recovery Adminis- tration (NRA), set up separate self-governing private associations in six hundred industries. Each industry — ranging from large corporations producing coal, cotton tex- tiles, and steel to small businesses making pet food and costume jewelry — regulated itself by agreeing on prices and production quotas. Because large companies usually ran these associations, the NRA solidifi ed their power at the expense of smaller enter- prises and consumer interests.

Th e AAA and the NRA were designed to rescue the nation’s productive industries and stabilize the economy. Th e measures had positive eff ects in some regions, but most historians agree that, overall, they did little to end the depression.

Unemployment Relief

Th e Roosevelt administration next addressed the massive unemploy- ment problem. By 1933, local governments and private charities had exhausted their resources and were looking to Washington for assis-

tance. Although Roosevelt wanted to avoid a budget defi cit, he asked Congress to provide relief for millions of unemployed Americans. In May, Congress established the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). Directed by Harry Hopkins, a hard-driving social worker from New York, the FERA provided federal funds for state relief programs.

Roosevelt and Hopkins had strong reservations about the “dole,” the nickname for government welfare payments. As Hopkins put it, “I don’t think anybody can go year aft er year, month aft er month, accepting relief without aff ecting his character.” To sup- port the traditional values of individualism, the New Deal put people to work. Early in

C H A P T E R 2 3 Managing the Great Depression, Forging the New Deal, 1929–1939 675

1933, Congress established the Public Works Administration (PWA), a construction program, and several months later, Roosevelt created the Civil Works Administration (CWA) and named Hopkins its head. Within thirty days, Hopkins had put 2.6 million men and women to work; at its peak in 1934, the CWA provided jobs for 4 million Americans repairing bridges, building highways, and constructing public buildings. A stopgap measure to get the country through the winter of 1933–1934, the CWA lapsed in the spring, when Republican opposition compelled New Dealers to abandon it. A longer-term program, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), mobilized 250,000 young men to do reforestation and conservation work. Over the course of the 1930s, the “CCC boys” built thousands of bridges, roads, trails, and other structures in state and national parks, bolstering the national infrastructure (Map 23.1).

Housing Crisis Millions of Americans also faced the devastating prospect of losing their homes. Th e economic expansion of the 1920s had produced the

largest infl ationary housing bubble in American history to that point, a scenario in which home prices rose wildly, fueled by excessive borrowing. In the early 1930s, as

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MAP 23.1 Civilian Conservation Corps Camps The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) gave hope to unemployed young men during the Great Depres- sion. The fi rst camp opened in Big Meadows, Virginia, in July 1933, and by the end of the decade CCC camps had appeared across the length of the country, located in rural, mountainous, and forested regions alike. Young men constructed bridges and roads, built hiking trails, erected public campgrounds, and performed other improvements. By the early 1940s, the CCC had planted three billion trees, among its many other contributions to the national infrastructure.

676 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

home prices collapsed and banks closed, home owners were dragged down with them. More than half a million Americans lost their homes between 1930 and 1932, and in cities such as Cleveland and Indianapolis, half of all home mortgage holders faced pos- sible foreclosure. In response, Congress created the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) to refi nance home mortgages. In just two years, the HOLC helped more than a million Americans retain their homes. Th e Federal Housing Act of 1934 would extend this program under a new agency, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). Together, the HOLC, the FHA, and the subsequent Housing Act of 1937 permanently changed the mortgage system and set the foundation for the broad expansion of home ownership in the post–World War II decades (Chapter 25).

When an exhausted Congress recessed in June 1933, at the end of the Hundred Days, it had enacted Roosevelt’s agenda: banking reform, recovery programs for agri- culture and industry, public works, and unemployment relief. Few presidents had won the passage of so many measures in so short a time. Th e new federal agencies were far from perfect and had their critics on both the radical left and the conservative right. But the vigorous actions taken by Roosevelt and Congress had halted the downward economic spiral of the Hoover years, stabilized the fi nancial sector, and sent a message of hope from the nation’s political leaders. For all that, however, the New Deal did not break the grip of the depression.

The New Deal Under Attack As New Dealers waited anxiously for the economy to revive, Roosevelt turned his attention to the reform of Wall Street, where reckless speculation and overleveraged buying of stocks had helped trigger the fi nancial panic of 1929. In 1934, Congress established the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to regulate the stock mar- ket. Th e commission had broad powers to determine how stocks and bonds were sold to the public, to set rules for margin (credit) transactions, and to prevent stock sales by those with inside information about corporate plans. Th e Banking Act of 1935 autho- rized the president to appoint a new Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Sys- tem, placing control of interest rates and other money-market policies in a federal agency rather than in the hands of private bankers.

Critics on the Right

Such measures exposed the New Deal to attack from economic conserva- tives — also known as the political right. A man of wealth, Roosevelt saw himself as the savior of American capitalism, declaring simply, “To pre-

serve we had to reform.” Many bankers and business executives disagreed. To them, FDR became “Th at Man,” a traitor to his class. In 1934, Republican business leaders joined with conservative Democrats in the Liberty League to fi ght what they called the “reckless spending” and “socialist” reforms of the New Deal. Herbert Hoover con- demned the NRA as a “state-controlled or state-directed social or economic system.” Th at, declared the former president, was “tyranny, not liberalism.”

Th e National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) was even more important than the Liberty League in opposing the New Deal, as the NAM’s infl uence stretched far into the post–World War II decades. Sparked by a new generation of business lead- ers who believed that a publicity campaign was needed to “serve the purposes of busi-

C H A P T E R 2 3 Managing the Great Depression, Forging the New Deal, 1929–1939 677

ness salvation,” the NAM produced radio programs, motion pictures, billboards, and direct mail in the late 1930s. In response to what many conservatives perceived as Roosevelt’s antibusiness policies, the NAM promoted free enterprise and unfettered capitalism. Aft er World War II, the NAM emerged as a staunch critic of liberalism and forged alliances with infl uential conservative politicians such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

For its part, the Supreme Court repudiated several cornerstones of the early New Deal. In May 1935, in Schechter v. United States, the Court unanimously ruled the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional because it delegated Congress’s lawmaking power to the executive branch and extended federal authority to intrastate (in contrast to interstate) commerce. Roosevelt protested but watched helplessly as the Court struck down more New Deal legislation: the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Railroad Retirement Act, and a debt-relief law known as the Frazier-Lemke Act.

Critics on the Populist Left

If business leaders and the Supreme Court thought that the New Deal had gone too far, other Americans believed it had not gone far enough. Among these were public fi gures who, in the tradition of American

populism, sought to place government on the side of ordinary citizens against corpo- rations and the wealthy. Francis Townsend, a doctor from Long Beach, California, spoke for the nation’s elderly, most of whom had no pensions and feared poverty. In 1933, Townsend proposed the Old Age Revolving Pension Plan, which would give $200 a month (about $3,300 today) to citizens over the age of sixty. To receive pay- ments, the elderly would have to retire and open their positions to younger workers. Townsend Clubs sprang up across the country in support of the Townsend Plan, mobi- lizing mass support for old-age pensions.

Th e most direct political threat to Roosevelt came from Louisiana senator Huey Long. As the Democratic governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932, the fl amboyant Long had achieved stunning popularity. He increased taxes on corporations, lowered the utility bills of consumers, and built new highways, hospitals, and schools. To push through these measures, Long seized almost dictatorial control of the state govern- ment. Now a U.S. senator, Long broke with the New Deal in 1934 and, like Townsend, established a national movement. According to his Share Our Wealth Society, inequal- ities in the distribution of wealth prohibited millions of ordinary families from buying goods, which kept factories humming. Long’s society advocated a tax of 100 percent on all income over $1 million and on all inheritances over $5 million. He hoped that this populist program would carry him into the White House.

Th at prospect encouraged conservatives, who hoped that a split between New Dealers and populist reformers might return the Repub- lican Party, and its ideology of limited govern- ment and free enterprise, to political power. In fact, Roosevelt feared that Townsend and Long, along with the popular “radio priest,” Father Charles Coughlin, might join forces to form a third party. He had to respond or risk the politi- cal unity of the country’s liberal forces.

What specifi c new roles did the American government take up as a result of the legislation passed during the fi rst hundred days?

How did critics on the right and left represent diff erent kinds of challenges to Roosevelt and the New Deal?

678 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

The Second New Deal and the Redefi ning of Liberalism, 1935–1938 As attacks on the New Deal increased, Roosevelt and his advisors moved politically to the left . Historians have labeled this shift in policy the Second New Deal. Roosevelt now openly criticized the “money classes,” proudly stating, “We have earned the hatred of entrenched greed.” He also decisively countered the rising popularity of Townsend, Coughlin, and Long by adopting parts of their programs. Th e administration’s Revenue Act of 1935 proposed a substantial tax increase on corporate profi ts and higher income and estate taxes on the wealthy. When conservatives attacked this legislation as an attempt to “soak the rich,” Congress moderated its taxation rates. But FDR was satisfi ed. He had met the Share Our Wealth Society’s proposal with a tax plan of his own.

The Welfare State Comes into Being Th e Revenue Act symbolized the administration’s new outlook. Unlike the First New Deal, which focused on economic recovery, the Second New Deal emphasized social justice and the creation of a safety net: the use of the federal government to assist working people and to provide economic security for the old, the disabled, and the unemployed. Th e resulting welfare state — a term applied to industrial democracies that adopted various government-guaranteed social-welfare programs — fundamentally changed American society.

The Wagner Act and Social Security

Th e fi rst benefi ciary of Roosevelt’s Second New Deal was the labor movement. Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recov- ery Act (NIRA) had given workers the right to organize unions,

producing a dramatic growth in rank-and-fi le militancy and leading to a strike wave in 1934. When the Supreme Court voided the NIRA in 1935, labor unions called for new legislation that would allow workers to organize and bargain collectively with employers. Named for its sponsor, Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York, the Wagner Act (1935) upheld the right of industrial workers to join unions. Th e act outlawed many practices that employers had used to suppress unions, such as fi ring workers for organizing activities. It also established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a federal agency with the authority to protect workers from employer coercion and to guarantee collective bargaining.

A second initiative, the Social Security Act of 1935, had an equally widespread impact. Other industrialized societies, such as Germany and Britain, had created national old-age pension systems at the turn of the century, but American reformers had failed to secure a similar program in the United States. Th e Townsend and Long movements now pressed Roosevelt to act, giving political muscle to pension propo- nents within the administration. Children’s welfare advocates, concerned about the fate of fatherless families, also pressured the president. Th e resulting Social Security Act had three main provisions: old-age pensions for workers; a joint federal-state sys- tem of compensation for unemployed workers; and a program of payments to wid- owed mothers and the blind, deaf, and disabled. Roosevelt, however, limited the reach

C H A P T E R 2 3 Managing the Great Depression, Forging the New Deal, 1929–1939 679

of the legislation. Knowing that compulsory pension and unemployment legislation alone would be controversial, he dropped a provision for national health insurance, fearing it would doom the entire bill.

Th e Social Security Act was a milestone in the creation of an American welfare state. Never before had the federal government assumed such responsibility for the well-being of so many citizens. Social Security, as old-age pensions were known, became one of the most popular government programs in American history. On the other hand, the assistance program for widows and children known as Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) became one of its most controversial measures. ADC covered only 700,000 youngsters in 1939; by 1994, its successor, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), enrolled 14.1 million Americans. A minor program during the New Deal, AFDC grew enormously in the 1960s and remained an oft en maligned cornerstone of the welfare state until it was eliminated under President Clinton in 1996.

United Auto Workers Strike Trade unions were among the most active and vocal organizations of the 1930s. Organized labor led a number of major strikes between 1934 and 1936 in various industries. None was more important to the future of trade unions than the sit-down strikes at major automobile plants, including General Motors and Chevrolet in Flint, Michigan, in 1936 and 1937. These strikes, in which workers stopped the assembly lines but refused to leave the factories, compelled GM to recognize the United Auto Workers (UAW), which became one of the strongest trade unions in American history. © Bettmann/Corbis.

680 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

New Deal Liberalism

Th e Second New Deal created what historians call New Deal liberalism. Classical liberalism held individual liberty to be the foundation of a dem- ocratic society, and the word liberal had traditionally denoted support for

free-market policies and weak government. Roosevelt and his advisors, along with intellectuals such as British economist John Maynard Keynes, disagreed. Th ey coun- tered that, to preserve individual liberty, government must assist the needy and guar- antee the basic welfare of citizens. Th is liberal welfare state was opposed by inheritors of the nineteenth-century ideology of laissez-faire capitalism, who gradually became known as conservatives. Th ese two visions of liberty and government — with liberals on one side and conservatives on the other — would shape American politics for the next half century.

From Reform to Stalemate Roosevelt’s fi rst term had seen an extraordinary expansion of the federal state. Th e great burst of government action between 1933 and 1935 was unequaled in the nation’s history (though Congress and President Lyndon Johnson nearly matched it in 1965– 1966; see Chapter 28). Roosevelt’s second term, however, was characterized by a series of political entanglements and economic bad news that stifl ed further reform.

The 1936 Election FDR was never enthusiastic about public relief programs. But with the election of 1936 on the horizon and 10 million Americans still

out of work, he won funding for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Under the energetic direction of Harry Hopkins, the WPA employed 8.5 million Americans between 1935, when it was established, and 1943. Th e agency’s workers constructed or repaired 651,087 miles of road, 124,087 bridges, 125,110 public buildings, 8,192 parks, and 853 airports. But although the WPA was an extravagant operation by 1930s stan- dards, it reached only about one-third of the nation’s unemployed.

As the 1936 election approached, new voters joined the Democratic Party. Many had personally benefi tted from New Deal programs such as the WPA or knew people who had. One was Jack Reagan, a down-on-his-luck shoe salesman (and the father of future president Ronald Reagan), who took a job as a federal relief administrator in Dixon, Illinois, and became a strong supporter of the New Deal. In addition to voters such as Reagan, Roosevelt could count on a powerful coalition of organized labor, midwestern farmers, white ethnic groups, northern African Americans, and middle- class families concerned about unemployment and old-age security. He also com- manded the support of intellectuals and progressive Republicans. With diffi culty, the Democrats held on to the votes of their white southern constituency as well.

Republicans recognized that the New Deal was too popular to oppose directly, so they chose as their candidate the progressive governor of Kansas, Alfred M. Landon. Landon accepted the legitimacy of many New Deal programs but criticized their inef- fi ciency and expense. He also pointed to authoritarian regimes in Italy and Germany and hinted that FDR harbored similar dictatorial ambitions. Th ese charges fell on deaf ears. Roosevelt’s victory in 1936 was one of the most lopsided in American history. Th e assassination of Huey Long by a Louisiana political rival in September 1935 had elimi- nated the threat of a serious third-party challenge. Roosevelt received 60 percent of the

C H A P T E R 2 3 Managing the Great Depression, Forging the New Deal, 1929–1939 681

popular vote and carried every state except Maine and Vermont. Organized labor, in particular, mobilized on behalf of FDR, donating money, canvassing door to door, and registering hundreds of thousands of new voters. Th e New Republic, a liberal publica- tion, boasted that “it was the greatest revolution in our political history.”

“I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” the president declared in his second inaugural address in January 1937. But any hopes that FDR had for expanding the liberal welfare state were quickly dashed. Within a year, staunch opposition to Roosevelt’s initiatives arose in Congress, and a sharp recession under- mined confi dence in his economic leadership.

Court Battle and Economic Recession

Roosevelt’s fi rst setback in 1937 came when he surprised the nation by asking for fundamental changes to the Supreme Court. In 1935, the Court had struck down a series of New Deal mea-

sures by the narrow margin of 5 to 4. With the Wagner Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Social Security all slated to come before the Court, the future of the New Deal rested in the hands of a few elderly, conservative-minded judges. To dimin- ish their infl uence, the president proposed adding a new justice to the Court for every member over the age of seventy, a scheme that would have brought six new judges to the bench at the time the legislation was proposed. Roosevelt’s opponents protested that he was trying to “pack” the Court. Aft er a bitter, months-long debate, Congress rejected this blatant attempt to alter the judiciary to the president’s advantage.

If Roosevelt lost the battle, he went on to win the war. Swayed in part by the pres- ident’s overwhelming electoral victory in the 1936 election, the Court upheld the Wagner and Social Security Acts. Moreover, a series of timely resignations allowed Roosevelt to reshape the Supreme Court aft er all. His new appointees — who included the liberal-leaning and generally pro–New Deal Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, and William O. Douglas — viewed the Constitution as a “living document” that had to be interpreted in the light of present conditions.

Th e so-called Roosevelt recession of 1937–1938 dealt another blow to the presi- dent. From 1933 to 1937, gross domestic product had grown at a yearly rate of about 10 percent, bringing industrial output back to 1929 levels. Unemployment had declined from 25 percent to 14 percent. “Th e emergency has passed,” declared Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina. Acting on this assumption, Roosevelt slashed the federal budget. Following the president’s lead, Congress cut the WPA’s funding in half, causing layoff s of about 1.5 million workers, and the Federal Reserve, fearing infl ation, raised interest rates. Th ese measures halted recovery. Th e stock market responded by dropping sharply, and unemployment jumped to 19 percent. Quickly reversing course, Roosevelt began once again to spend his way out of the recession by boosting funding for the WPA and resuming public works projects.

Although improvised, this spending program accorded with the theories of John Maynard Keynes, a visionary British economist. Keynes transformed economic think- ing in capitalist societies in the 1920s by arguing that government intervention could smooth out the highs and lows of the business cycle through defi cit spending and the manipulation of interest rates, which determined the money supply. Th is view was sharply criticized by Republicans and conservative Democrats in the 1930s, who dis- liked government intervention in the economy. But Keynesian economics gradually

682 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

won wider acceptance as World War II defense spending fi nally ended the Great Depression.

A reformer rather than a revolutionary, Roosevelt had preserved capitalism and liberal individualism — even as he transformed them in signifi cant ways. At the same time, conservatives had reclaimed a measure of power in Congress, and those who believed the New Deal had created an intrusive federal bureaucracy kept reform in check aft er 1937. Th roughout Roosevelt’s second term, a conservative coalition of southern

Democrats, rural Republicans, and industrial interests in both parties worked to block or impede social legislation. By 1939, the era of change was over.

The New Deal’s Impact on Society Whatever its limits, the New Deal had a tremendous impact. Its ideology of social- welfare liberalism fundamentally altered Americans’ relationship to their government and provided assistance to a wide range of ordinary people: the unemployed, the elderly, workers, and the poor. In doing so, New Dealers created a sizable federal bureaucracy: the number of civilian federal employees increased by 80 percent between 1929 and 1940, reaching a total of 1 million. Th e expenditures — and defi cits — of the federal government grew at an even faster rate. In 1930, the Hoover administration spent $3.1 billion and had a surplus of almost $1 billion; in 1939, New Dealers expended $9.4 billion and ran a defi cit of nearly $3 billion (still small by later stan- dards). But the New Deal represented more than fi gures on a balance sheet. Across the country, the new era in government inspired democratic visions among ordinary citizens.

A People’s Democracy In 1939, writer John La Touche and musician Earl Robinson produced “Ballad for Americans.” A patriotic song, it called for uniting “everybody who’s nobody . . . Irish, Negro, Jewish, Italian, French, and English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Polish, Scotch, Hungarian, Litvak, Swedish, Finnish, Canadian, Greek, and Turk, and Czech and double Czech American.” Th e song captured the democratic aspirations that the New Deal had awakened. Millions of ordinary people believed that the nation could, and should, become more egalitarian. Infl uenced by the liberal spirit of the New Deal, Americans from all walks of life seized the opportunity to push for change in the nation’s social and political institutions.

Organized Labor Demoralized and shrinking during the 1920s, labor unions increased their numbers and clout during the New Deal, thanks to

the Wagner Act. “Th e era of privilege and predatory individuals is over,” labor leader John L. Lewis declared. By the end of the decade, the number of unionized workers had tripled to 23 percent of the nonagricultural workforce. A new union movement,

How did the Second New Deal diff er from the fi rst?

C H A P T E R 2 3 Managing the Great Depression, Forging the New Deal, 1929–1939 683

led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), promoted “industrial unionism” — organizing all the workers in an industry, from skilled machinists to unskilled janitors, into a single union. Th e American Federation of Labor (AFL), rep- resenting the other major group of unions, favored organizing workers on a craft -by- craft basis. Both federations dramatically increased their membership in the second half of the 1930s.

Labor’s new vitality translated into political action and a long-lasting alliance with the Democratic Party. Th e CIO helped fund Democratic campaigns in 1936, and its political action committee became a major Democratic contributor during the 1940s. Th ese successes were real but limited. Th e labor movement did not become the domi- nant force in the United States that it was in Europe, and unions never enrolled a majority of American wageworkers. Antiunion employer groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce remained powerful forces in American business life. Aft er a decade of gains, organized labor remained an important, but secondary, force in American industry.

Women and the New Deal

Because policymakers saw the depression primarily as a crisis of male breadwinners, the New Deal did not directly challenge gender inequi- ties. New Deal measures generally enhanced women’s welfare, but few

addressed their specifi c needs and concerns. However, the Roosevelt administration did welcome women into the higher ranks of government. Frances Perkins, the fi rst woman named to a cabinet post, served as secretary of labor throughout Roosevelt’s presidency. While relatively few, female appointees oft en worked to open up other opportunities in government for talented women.

Th e most prominent woman in American politics was the president’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt. In the 1920s, she had worked to expand positions for women in political parties, labor unions, and education. A tireless advocate for women’s rights, during her years in the White House Mrs. Roosevelt emerged as an independent public fi gure and the most infl uential First Lady in the nation’s history. Descending into coal mines to view working conditions, meeting with African Americans seeking antilynching laws, and talking to people on breadlines, she became the conscience of the New Deal, pushing her husband to do more for the disadvantaged. “I sometimes acted as a spur,” Mrs. Roosevelt later refl ected, “even though the spurring was not always wanted or welcome.”

Without the intervention of Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, and other promi- nent women, New Deal policymakers would have largely ignored the needs of women. A fourth of the National Recovery Act’s employment rules set a lower minimum wage for women than for men performing the same jobs, and only 7 percent of the workers hired by the Civil Works Administration were female. Th e Civilian Conservation Corps excluded women entirely. Women fared better under the Works Progress Administration; at its peak, 405,000 women were on the payroll. Most Americans agreed with such policies. When Gallup pollsters in 1936 asked people whether wives should work outside the home when their husbands had jobs, 82 percent said no. Such sentiment refl ected a persistent belief in women’s secondary status in American eco- nomic life.

684 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

African Americans Under the New Deal

Across the nation, but especially in the South, African Ameri- cans held the lowest-paying jobs and faced harsh social and political discrimination. Th ough FDR did not fundamentally

change this fact, he was the most popular president among African Americans since Abraham Lincoln. African Americans held 18 percent of WPA jobs, although they constituted 10 percent of the population. Th e Resettlement Administration, estab- lished in 1935 to help small farmers and tenants buy land, actively protected the rights of black tenant farmers. Black involvement in the New Deal, however, could not undo centuries of racial subordination, nor could it change the overwhelming power of southern whites in the Democratic Party.

Nevertheless, black Americans received signifi cant benefi ts from New Deal relief programs and believed that the White House cared about their plight, which caused a momentous shift in their political allegiance. Since the Civil War, black voters had staunchly supported the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, known as the Great Emancipator. Even in the depression year of 1932, they overwhelmingly sup- ported Republican candidates. But in 1936, as part of the tidal wave of national sup- port for FDR, northern African Americans gave Roosevelt 71 percent of their votes and have remained solidly Democratic ever since.

African Americans supported the New Deal partly because the Roosevelt admin- istration appointed a number of black people to federal offi ce, and an informal “black cabinet” of prominent African American intellectuals advised New Deal agencies. Among the most important appointees was Mary McLeod Bethune. Born in 1875 in South Carolina to former slaves, Bethune founded Bethune-Cookman College and served during the 1920s as president of the National Association of Colored Women. She joined the New Deal in 1935, confi ding to a friend that she “believed in the demo- cratic and humane program” of FDR. Americans, Bethune observed, had to become “accustomed to seeing Negroes in high places.” Bethune had access to the White House and pushed continually for New Deal programs to help African Americans.

Roosevelts Visit Camp Tara Franklin Roosevelt was a wealthy patrician, but one of his great political skills was the ability to connect with ordinary Americans. His wife, Eleanor, shared a similar gift, perhaps to an even greater degree. In an era when staged photographs had become an important part of a politician’s image-making, Roosevelt made certain to appear frequently in settings in which he mingled with the public. Here, he and Eleanor visit a vocational training camp for jobless women in 1934; FDR is seated on the far left, while Eleanor greets the two women standing beside the car. AP/Wide World Photos.

C H A P T E R 2 3 Managing the Great Depression, Forging the New Deal, 1929–1939 685

But the New Deal was limited in its approach to race. Roosevelt did not go further in support of black rights, because of both his own racial blinders and his need for the votes of the white southern Democrats in Congress — including powerful southern senators, many of whom held infl uential committee posts in Congress. Most New Deal programs refl ected prevailing racial attitudes. Roosevelt and other New Dealers had to trim their proposals of measures that would substantially benefi t African Americans. Civilian Conservation Corps camps segregated blacks, and most NRA rules did not protect black workers from discrimination. Both Social Security and the Wagner Act explicitly excluded the domestic and agricultural jobs held by most African Americans in the 1930s. Roosevelt also refused to support legislation making lynching a federal crime, which was one of the most pressing demands of African Americans in the 1930s. Between 1882 and 1930, more than 2,500 African Americans were lynched by white mobs in the southern states, which means that statistically, one man, woman, or child was murdered every week for fi ft y years. But despite pleas from black leaders, and from Mrs. Roosevelt herself, FDR feared that southern white Democrats would block his other reforms in retaliation for such legislation.

If lynching embodied southern lawlessness, southern law was not much better. In an infamous 1931 case in Scottsboro, Alabama, nine young black men were accused of rape by two white women hitching a ride on a freight train. Th e women’s stories contained many inconsistencies, but within weeks a white jury had convicted all nine defendants; eight received the death sentence. Aft er the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the sen- tences because the defendants had been denied adequate legal counsel, fi ve of the men were again convicted and sentenced to long prison terms. Across the country, the Scotts- boro Boys, as they were known, inspired solidarity within African American communi- ties. Among whites, the Communist Party took the lead in publicizing the case — and was one of the only white organizations to do so — helping to support the Scottsboro Defense Committee, which raised money for legal eff orts on the defendants’ behalf.

In southern agriculture, where many sharecroppers were black while landowners and government administrators were white, the Agricultural Adjustment Act hurt rather than helped the poorest African Americans. White landowners collected gov- ernment subsidy checks but refused to distribute payments to their sharecroppers. Such practices forced 200,000 black families off the land. Some black farmers tried to protect themselves by joining the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), a biracial organization founded in 1934. “Th e same chain that holds you holds my people, too,” an elderly black farmer reminded his white neighbors. But landowners had such eco- nomic power and such support from local sheriff s that the STFU could do little.

A generation of African American leaders came of age inspired by the New Deal’s democratic promise. But it remained just a promise. From the outset, New Dealers wrestled with potentially fatal racial politics. Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party depended heavily on white voters in the South, who were determined to main- tain racial segregation and white supremacy. But many Democrats in the North and West — centers of New Deal liberalism — would come to oppose racial discrimination. Th is meant, ironically, that the nation’s most liberal political forces and some of its most conservative political forces existed side by side in the same political party. Another thirty years would pass before black Americans would gain an opportunity to reform U.S. racial laws and practices.

686 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

Indian Policy New Deal reformers seized the opportunity to implement their vision for the future of Native Americans, with mixed results. Indian peoples

had long been one of the nation’s most disadvantaged and powerless groups. In 1934, the average individual Indian income was only $48 per year, and the Native American unemployment rate was three times the national average. Th e plight of Native Ameri- cans won the attention of the progressive commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Aff airs (BIA), John Collier, an intellectual and critic of past BIA practices. Collier understood what Native Americans had long known: that the government’s decades-long policy of forced assimilation, prohibition of Indian religions, and confi scation of Indian lands had left most tribes poor, isolated, and without basic self-determination.

Collier helped to write and push through Congress the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, sometimes called the Indian New Deal. On the positive side, the law reversed the Dawes Act of 1887 (Chapter 16) by promoting Indian self-government through formal constitutions and democratically elected tribal councils. A majority of Indian peoples — some 181 tribes — accepted the reorganization policy, but 77 declined to participate, primarily because they preferred the traditional way of making decisions by consensus rather than by majority vote. Th rough the new law, Indians won a greater degree of religious freedom, and tribal governments regained their status as semi- sovereign dependent nations. When the latter policy was upheld by the courts, Indian people gained a measure of leverage that would have major implications for native rights in the second half of the twentieth century.

Like so many other federal Indian policies, however, the “Indian New Deal” was a mixed blessing. For some peoples, the act imposed a model of self-government that proved incompatible with tribal traditions and languages. Th e Papagos of southern Arizona, for instance, had no words for budget or representative, and they made no linguistic distinctions among law, rule, charter, and constitution. In another case, the nation’s largest tribe, the Navajos, rejected the BIA’s new policy, largely because the government was simultaneously reducing Navajo livestock to protect the Boulder Dam project. In theory, the new policy gave Indians a much greater degree of self- determination. In practice, however, although some tribes did benefi t, the BIA and Congress continued to interfere in internal Indian aff airs and retained fi nancial con- trol over reservation governments.

Struggles in the West

By the 1920s, agriculture in California had become a big business — intensive, diversifi ed, and export-oriented. Large-scale corporate- owned farms produced specialty crops — lettuce, tomatoes, peaches,

grapes, and cotton — whose staggered harvests allowed the use of transient laborers. Th ousands of workers, immigrants from Mexico and Asia and white migrants from the midwestern states, trooped from farm to farm and from crop to crop during the long picking season. Some migrants settled in the rapidly growing cities along the West Coast, especially the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles. Under both Hoover and FDR, the federal government promoted the “repatriation” of Mexican citizens — their deportation to Mexico. Between 1929 and 1937, approximately half a million people of Mexican descent were deported. But historians estimate that more than 60 percent of these were legal U.S. citizens, making the government’s actions constitu- tionally questionable.

C H A P T E R 2 3 Managing the Great Depression, Forging the New Deal, 1929–1939 687

Despite the deportations, many Mexican Americans benefi tted from the New Deal and generally held Roosevelt and the Democratic Party in high regard. People of Mexi- can descent, like other Americans, took jobs with the WPA and the CCC, or received relief in the worst years of the depression. Th e National Youth Administration (NYA), which employed young people from families on relief and sponsored a variety of school programs, was especially important in southwestern cities. In California, the Mexican American Movement (MAM), a youth-focused organization, received assis- tance from liberal New Dealers. New Deal programs did not fundamentally improve the migrant farm labor system under which so many people of Mexican descent labored, but Mexicans joined the New Deal coalition in large numbers because of the Democrats’ commitment to ordinary Americans. “Franklin D. Roosevelt’s name was the spark that started thousands of Spanish-speaking persons to the polls,” noted one Los Angeles activist.

Men and women of Asian descent — mostly from China, Japan, and the Philip- pines — formed a small minority of the American population but were a signifi cant presence in some western cities. Immigrants from Japan and China had long faced discrimination. A 1913 California law prohibited them from owning land. Japanese farmers, who specialized in fruit and vegetable crops, circumvented this restriction by putting land titles in the names of their American-born children. As the depression cut farm prices and racial discrimination excluded young Japanese Americans from nonfarm jobs, about 20 percent of the immigrants returned to Japan.

Chinese Americans were less prosperous than their Japanese counterparts. Only 3 percent of Chinese Americans worked in professional and technical positions, and discrimination barred them from most industrial jobs. In San Francisco, the majority of Chinese worked in small businesses: restaurants, laundries, and fi rms that imported textiles and ceramics. During the depression, they turned for assistance to Chinese social organizations such as huiguan (district associations) and to the city govern- ment; in 1931, about one-sixth of San Francisco’s Chinese population was receiving public aid. But few Chinese benefi tted from the New Deal. Until the repeal of the Exclusion Act in 1943, Chinese immigrants were classifi ed as “aliens ineligible for citi- zenship” and therefore were excluded from most federal programs.

Because Filipino immigrants came from a U.S. territory, they were not aff ected by the ban on Asian immigration enacted in 1924. During the 1920s, their numbers swelled to about 50,000, many of whom worked as laborers on large corporate-owned farms. As the depression cut wages, Filipino immigration slowed to a trickle, and it was virtually cut off by the Tydings-McDuffi e Act of 1934. Th e act granted indepen- dence to the Philippines (which since 1898 had been an American colony), classifi ed all Filipinos in the United States as aliens, and restricted immigration from the Philip- pines to fi ft y people per year.

Reshaping the Environment Attention to natural resources was a dominant theme of the New Deal, and the shap- ing of the landscape was among its most visible legacies. Franklin Roosevelt and Inte- rior Secretary Harold Ickes saw themselves as conservationists in the tradition of FDR’s cousin, Th eodore Roosevelt. In an era before environmentalism, FDR practiced

688 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

what he called the “gospel of conservation.” Th e president cared primarily about mak- ing the land — and other natural resources, such as trees and water — better serve human needs. National policy stressed scientifi c land management and ecological balance. Preserving wildlife and wilderness was of secondary importance. Under Roosevelt, the federal government both responded to environmental crises and reshaped the use of natural resources, especially water, in the United States.

The Dust Bowl Among the most hard-pressed citizens during the depression were farmers fl eeing the “dust bowl” of the Great Plains. Between 1930 and

1941, a severe drought affl icted the semiarid states of Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arkansas, and Kansas. Farmers in these areas had stripped the land of its native vegetation, which destroyed the delicate ecology of the plains. To grow wheat and other crops, they had pushed agriculture beyond the natural limits of the soil, mak- ing their land vulnerable, in times of drought, to wind erosion of the topsoil. When the winds came, huge clouds of thick dust rolled over the land, turning the day into night. Th is ecological disaster prompted a mass exodus. At least 350,000 “Okies” (so called whether or not they were from Oklahoma) loaded their belongings into cars and trucks and headed to California. John Steinbeck’s novel Th e Grapes of Wrath (1939) immortal- ized them, and New Deal photographer Dorothea Lange’s haunting images of Califor- nia migrant camps made them the public face of the depression’s human toll.

Roosevelt and Ickes believed that poor land practices made for poor people. Under their direction, government agencies tackled the dust bowl’s human causes. Agents from the newly created Soil Conservation Service, for instance, taught farmers to prevent soil erosion by tilling hillsides along the contours of the land. Th ey also encouraged (and sometimes paid) farmers to take certain commercial crops out of production and plant soil-preserving grasses instead. One of the U.S. Forest Service’s most widely publicized programs was the Shelterbelts, the planting of 220 million trees running north along the 99th meridian from Abilene, Texas, to the Canadian border. Planted as a windbreak, the trees also prevented soil erosion. A variety of government agencies, from the CCC to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, lent their expertise to establishing sound farming practices in the plains.

Tennessee Valley Authority

Th e most extensive New Deal environmental undertaking was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which Roosevelt saw as the fi rst step in modernizing the South. Funded by Congress in 1933, the

TVA integrated fl ood control, reforestation, electricity generation, and agricultural and industrial development. Th e dams and their hydroelectric plants provided cheap electric power for homes and factories as well as ample recreational opportunities for the valley’s residents. Th e massive project won praise around the world (Map 23.2).

Th e TVA was an integral part of the Roosevelt administration’s eff ort to keep farmers on the land by enhancing the quality of rural life. Th e Rural Electrifi cation Administration (REA), established in 1935, was also central to that goal. Fewer than one-tenth of the nation’s 6.8 million farms had electricity. Th e REA addressed this problem by promoting nonprofi t farm cooperatives that off ered loans to farmers to install power lines. By 1940, 40 percent of the nation’s farms had electricity; a decade later, 90 percent did. Electricity brought relief from the drudgery and isolation of farm

C H A P T E R 2 3 Managing the Great Depression, Forging the New Deal, 1929–1939 689

life. Electric irons, vacuum cleaners, and washing machines eased women’s burdens, and radios brightened the lives of the entire family. Along with the automobile and the movies, electricity broke down the barriers between urban and rural life.

Grand Coulee As the nation’s least populated but fastest-growing region, the West benefi tted enormously from the New Deal’s attention to the environ-

ment. With the largest number of state and federal parks in the country, the West gained countless trails, bridges, cabins, and other recreational facilities, laying the groundwork for the post–World War II expansion of western tourism. On the Colo- rado River, Boulder Dam (later renamed Hoover Dam) was completed in 1935 with Public Works Administration funds; the dam generated power for the region’s growing cities such as Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Phoenix.

Th e largest project in the West, however, took shape in an obscure corner of Washington State, where the PWA and the Bureau of Reclamation built the Grand

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MAP 23.2 The Tennessee Valley Authority, 1933–1952 The Tennessee Valley Authority was one of the New Deal’s most far-reaching environmental projects. Between 1933 and 1952, the TVA built twenty dams and improved fi ve others, taming the fl ood-prone Tennessee River and its main tributaries. The cheap hydroelectric power generated by the dams brought electricity to industries as well as hundreds of thousands of area residents, and artifi cial lakes provided extensive recreational facilities. Widely praised at the time, the TVA came under attack in the 1970s for its practice of strip mining and the pollution caused by its power plants and chemical factories.

690 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

Coulee Dam on the Columbia River. When it was completed in 1941, Grand Coulee was the largest electricity-producing structure in the world, and its 150-mile lake pro- vided irrigation for the state’s major crops: apples, cherries, pears, potatoes, and wheat. Inspired by the dam and the modernizing spirit of the New Deal, folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote a song about the Columbia. “Your power is turning our darkness to dawn,” he sang, “so roll on, Columbia, roll on!”

New Deal projects that enhanced people’s enjoyment of the natural environment can be seen today throughout the country. CCC and WPA workers built the famous Blue Ridge Parkway, which connects the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina. In the West, govern- ment workers built the San Francisco Zoo, Berkeley’s Tilden Park, and the canals of San Antonio. Th e Civilian Conservation Corps helped to complete the East Coast’s Appalachian Trail and the West Coast’s Pacifi c Crest Trail through the Sierra Nevada. In state parks across the country, cabins, shelters, picnic areas, lodges, and observation towers stand as monuments to the New Deal ethos of recreation coexisting with nature.

The New Deal and the Arts In response to the Great Depression, many American writers and artists redefi ned their relationship to society. Never had there been a decade, critic Malcolm Cowley sug- gested in 1939, “when literary events followed so closely on the fl ying coat-tails of social

Grand Coulee Dam This extraordinary photo from a Life magazine essay shows workers hitching a ride on a 13-ton conduit as it is lowered into place on the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State. Dozens of dams were constructed across the country under the auspices of various New Deal programs, but none were more majestic than two in the West: Boulder Dam (renamed Hoover Dam in 1947) and Grand Coulee. Built to harness the awesome power of the Columbia River as it rushed to the Pacifi c, Grand Coulee would ultimately provide electric power to Seattle, Portland, and other West Coast cities and new irrigation waters for Washington’s apple and cherry orchards, among many other crops. Library of Congress.

C H A P T E R 2 3 Managing the Great Depression, Forging the New Deal, 1929–1939 691

events.” New Deal administrators encouraged artists to create projects that would be of interest to the entire community, not just the cultured elite. Encouraged by the popular New Deal slogan “Art for the millions,” artists painted murals in hundreds of public buildings. Th e WPA’s Federal Art Project gave work to many young artists who would become the twentieth century’s leading painters, muralists, and sculptors. Jackson Pollock, Alice Neel, Willem de Kooning, and Louise Nevelson all received support. Th e Federal Music Project and Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) employed 15,000 musicians and 5,000 writers, respectively. Among the latter were Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and John Cheever, who became great American writers. Th e FWP also collected oral histo- ries, including two thousand narratives by former slaves. Th e black folklorist and novel- ist Zora Neale Hurston fi nished three novels while in the Florida FWP, among them Th eir Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Richard Wright won the 1938 Story magazine prize for the best tale by a WPA writer and went on to complete Native Son (1940), a searing novel about white racism. Similarly, the Federal Th eatre Project (FTP) nurtured such talented directors, actors, and playwrights as Orson Welles, John Huston, and Arthur Miller.

The Legacies of the New Deal Th e New Deal addressed the Great Depression by restoring hope and promising secu- rity. FDR and Congress created a powerful social-welfare state that took unprecedented responsibility for the well-being of American citizens. During the 1930s, millions of people began to pay taxes directly to the Social Security Administration, and more than one-third of the population received direct government assistance from federal pro- grams, including old-age pensions, unemployment compensation, farm loans, relief work, and mortgage guarantees. New legislation regulated the stock market, reformed the Federal Reserve System, and subjected business corporations to federal regulation. Th e New Deal’s pattern of government involvement in social life would persist for the rest of the twentieth century. In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson and the “Great Society” Congress dramatically expanded social-welfare programs, most of which remained intact in the wake of the “Reagan Revolution” of the 1980s.

Like all other major social transformations, the New Deal was criticized both by those who thought it did too much and by those who believed it did too little. Con- servatives, who prioritized limited government and individual freedom, pointed out that the New Deal state intruded deeply into the personal and fi nancial lives of citi- zens and the aff airs of business. Conversely, advocates of social-welfare liberalism complained that the New Deal’s safety net had too many holes: no national health- care system, welfare programs that excluded domestic workers and farm laborers, and state governments that oft en limited the benefi ts distributed under New Deal programs.

Whatever the merits of its critics, the New Deal unquestionably transformed the American political landscape. From 1896 to 1932, the Republican Party had com- manded the votes of a majority of Americans. Th at changed as Franklin Roosevelt’s magnetic personality and innovative programs brought millions of voters into the Democratic fold. Democratic recruits included fi rst- and second-generation immi- grants from southern and central Europe — Italians, Poles, Slovaks, and Jews — as

692 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

well as African American migrants to northern cities. Organized labor aligned itself with a Democratic administration that had recognized unions as a legitimate force in modern industrial life. Th e elderly and the unemployed, assisted by the Social

Security Act, likewise supported FDR. Th is New Deal coalition of ethnic groups, city dwell- ers, organized labor, African Americans, and a cross section of the middle class formed the nucleus of the northern Democratic Party and supported additional liberal reforms in the decades to come.

S U M M A RY We have seen how Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s First New Deal focused on stimulating recovery, providing relief to the unemployed, and regulating banks and other fi nancial institutions. Th e Second New Deal was diff erent. Infl uenced by the persistence of the depression and the growing popularity of Huey Long’s Share the Wealth proposals, Roosevelt promoted social-welfare legislation that provided Americans with eco- nomic security.

We also explored the impact of the New Deal on various groups of citizens, espe- cially African Americans, women, and unionized workers. Our survey paid particular attention to the lives of the Mexicans, Asians, and Okies who worked in the farms and factories of California. Because of New Deal assistance, the members of those groups gravitated toward the Democratic Party. Th e party’s coalition of ethnic workers, Afri- can Americans, farmers, parts of the middle classes, and white southerners gave FDR and other Democrats a landslide victory in 1936.

Finally, we examined the accomplishments of the New Deal. In 1933, New Deal programs resolved the banking crisis while preserving capitalist institutions. Subse- quently, these programs expanded the federal government and, through the Social Security system, farm subsidy programs, and public works projects, launched federal policies that were important to nearly every American. Great dams and electricity projects sponsored by the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Works Progress Administra- tion in the West, and the Rural Electrifi cation Administration permanently improved the quality of life for the nation’s citizens.

Fo r Fu r t h e r E x p l o rat i o n Kristen Downey, Th e Woman Behind the New Deal: Th e Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secre-

tary of Labor and His Moral Conscience (2009). Discusses women and the New Deal years as seen through the life and career of an important reformer.

Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: Th e New Deal and the Origins of Our Times (2013). A powerful explanation of the New Deal’s racial politics.

Robert S. McElvaine, Th e Great Depression (1984) and Down & Out in the Great Depression (1983). Th e fi rst is an excellent overview of the depression and the New Deal; the second contains letters written by ordinary people.

What aspects of the New Deal inspired ordinary Americans? What stymied their ambitions?

What was the New Deal’s long- term legacy?

C H A P T E R 2 3 Managing the Great Depression, Forging the New Deal, 1929–1939 693

T I M E L I N E

1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff 1931– Scottsboro case: trials and 1937 appeals 1932 Bonus Army marches on

Washington, D.C. Franklin Delano Roosevelt

elected president 1933 FDR’s inaugural address and

fi rst fi reside chats Emergency Banking Act begins

the Hundred Days FDR takes U.S. off the gold

standard Civilian Conservation Corps

(CCC) created Agricultural Adjustment Act

(AAA) National Industrial Recovery

Act (NIRA) Tennessee Valley Authority

(TVA) established Townsend Clubs promote Old

Age Revolving Pension Plan 1934 Securities and Exchange

Commission (SEC) created Southern Tenant Farmers

Union (STFU) founded

Indian Reorganization Act Senator Huey Long promotes

Share Our Wealth Society Father Charles Coughlin founds

National Union for Social Justice

1935 Supreme Court voids NIRA in Schechter v. United States

National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act

Social Security Act creates old-age pension system

Works Progress Administration (WPA) created

Rural Electrifi cation Administra- tion (REA) established

Supreme Court voids Agricul- tural Adjustment Act

Congress of Industrial Organi- zations (CIO) formed

1936 Landslide reelection of FDR marks peak of New Deal power

1937 FDR’s Supreme Court plan fails 1937– “Roosevelt recession” raises 1938 unemployment

M AK E IT S T I C K

Go online and use LearningCurve to retain what you’ve read.

James F. Simon, FDR and Chief Justice Hughes: Th e President, the Supreme Court, and the Epic Battle over the New Deal (2012). Shows the legal controversies surrounding FDR’s expan- sion of the state.

John Steinbeck, Th e Grapes of Wrath (1939); Josephine Herbst, Pity Is Not Enough (1933); and Richard Wright, Native Son (1940). Classic depression-era novels.

For extensive collections of 1930s materials, see the “New Deal Network” at newdeal.feri.org; government-commissioned art at archives.gov/exhibits/new_deal_for_the_arts; and the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers’ Project at memory.loc.gov/ammem /snhtml.

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24 The World at War1937–1945 The Second World War was the defi n-ing international event of the twen-tieth century. Battles raged across six of the world’s seven continents and all of its oceans. It killed more than 50 million people and wounded hundreds of millions more. When it was over, the industrial economies and much of the infrastructure of Europe and East Asia lay in ruins. Waged with both technologically advanced weap- ons and massive armies, the war involved

every industrialized power in Europe, North America, and Asia, as well as dozens of other nations, many of them colonies of the industrialized countries.

Th e military confl ict began on two continents: in Asia with Japan’s 1937 invasion of China across the Sea of Japan, and in Europe with the 1939 blitzkrieg (lightning war) conducted by Germany in Poland. It ended in 1945 aft er American planes dropped two atomic bombs, the product of stunning yet ominous scientifi c break- throughs, on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In between these demon- strations of technological prowess and devastating power, huge armies confronted and destroyed one another in the fi elds of France, the forests and steppes of Russia, the river valleys of China, the volcanic islands of the Pacifi c, and the deserts of North Africa.

“Armed defense of democratic existence is now being gallantly waged in four con- tinents,” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told the nation in January 1941. Aft er remaining neutral for several years, the United States would commit to that “armed defense.” Both FDR and British prime minister Winston Churchill came to see the war as a defense of democratic values from the threat posed by German, Italian, and Japa- nese fascism. For them, the brutal confl ict was the “good war.” When the grim reality of the Jewish Holocaust came to light, U.S. participation in the war seemed even more just. But as much as it represented a struggle between democracy and fascism, it was also inescapably a war to maintain British, French, and Dutch control of colonies in Africa, India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. By 1945, democracy in the indus- trialized world had been preserved, and a new Euro-American alliance had taken hold; the future of the vast European colonial empires, however, remained unresolved.

IDENTIFY THE BIG IDEA How did World War II transform the United States domestically and change its relationship with the world?

C H A P T E R 2 4 The World at War, 1937–1945 695

On the U.S. domestic front, World War II ended the Great Depression, hastened profound social changes, and expanded the scope and authority of the federal govern- ment. Racial politics and gender roles shift ed under the weight of wartime migration and labor shortages. Th e pace of urbanization increased as millions of Americans uprooted themselves and moved hundreds or thousands of miles to join the military or to take a war job. A stronger, more robust federal government, the product of a long, hard-fought war, would remain in place to fi ght an even longer, more expensive, and potentially more dangerous Cold War in the ensuing years. Th ese developments, which accelerated transformations already under way, would have repercussions far into the postwar decades.

The Road to War Th e Great Depression disrupted economic life around the world and brought the col- lapse of traditional political institutions. In response, an antidemocratic movement known as fascism, which had originated in Italy during the 1920s, developed in Ger- many, Spain, and Japan. By the mid-1930s, these nations had instituted authoritarian, militaristic governments led by powerful dictators: Benito Mussolini in Italy, Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, Francisco Franco in Spain, and, aft er 1940, Hideki Tojo in Japan. As early as 1936, President Roosevelt warned that other peoples had “sold their heritage of freedom” and urged Americans to work for “the survival of democracy” both at home and abroad. Constrained by strong isolationist sentiment, by 1940 FDR was cautiously leading the nation toward war against the fascist powers.

The Rise of Fascism World War II had its roots in the settlement of World War I. Germany struggled under the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and Japan and Italy had their desire for over- seas empires thwarted by the treaty makers. Faced with the expansive ambitions and deep resentments of those countries, the League of Nations, the collective security sys- tem established at Versailles, proved unable to maintain the existing international order.

Fascism, as instituted in Germany by Hitler, combined a centralized, authoritar- ian state, a doctrine of Aryan racial supremacy, and intense nationalism in a call for the spiritual reawakening of the German people. Fascist leaders worldwide disparaged parliamentary government, independent labor movements, and individual rights. Th ey opposed both the economic collectivism of the Soviet Union — where, in theory, the state managed the economy to ensure social equality — and the competitive capi- talist economies of the United States and Western Europe. Fascist movements arose around the world in the 1930s but managed to achieve power in only a handful of countries. Th ose countries were at the center of global war making in the 1930s.

Japan and Italy Th e fi rst challenge came from Japan. To become an industrial power, Japan required raw materials and overseas markets. Like the West-

ern European powers and the United States before it, Japan embraced an expansionary foreign policy in pursuit of colonial possessions and overseas infl uence. In 1931, its

696 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

troops occupied Manchuria, an industrialized province in northern China, and in 1937 the Japanese launched a full-scale invasion of China. In both instances, the League of Nations condemned Japan’s actions but did nothing to stop them.

Japan’s defi ance of the League encouraged a fascist leader half a world away: Italy’s Benito Mussolini, who had come to power in 1922. Il Duce (Th e Leader), as Mussolini was known, had long denounced the Versailles treaty, which denied Italy’s colonial claims in Africa and the Middle East aft er World War I. As in Japan, the Italian fascists desired overseas colonies for raw materials, markets, and national prestige. In 1935, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, one of the few remaining independent countries in Africa. Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie appealed to the League of Nations, but the League’s verbal condemnation and limited sanctions, its only real leverage, did not stop Italy from taking control of Ethiopia in 1936.

Hitler’s Germany Germany, however, posed the gravest threat to the existing world order. Huge World War I reparation payments, economic depres-

sion, fear of communism, labor unrest, and rising unemployment fueled the ascent of Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist (Nazi) Party. When Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, the Reichstag (the German legislature) granted him dictatorial powers to deal with the economic crisis. Hitler promptly outlawed other political par- ties, arrested many of his political rivals, and declared himself führer (leader). Under Nazi control, the Reichstag invested all legislative power in Hitler’s hands.

Hitler’s goal was nothing short of European domination and world power, as he had made clear in his 1925 book Mein Kampf (My Struggle). Th e book outlined his plans to overturn the territorial settlements of the Versailles treaty, unite Germans liv- ing throughout central Europe in a great German fatherland, and annex large areas of Eastern Europe. Th e “inferior races” who lived in these regions — Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs — would be removed or subordinated to the German “master race.” Th ese terri- tories would provide Germany with what Hitler called “lebensraum” — a new region of settlement and farming and a source of natural resources. A virulent anti-Semite, Hitler had long blamed Jews for Germany’s problems. Once in power, he began a sus- tained and brutal persecution of Jews, which expanded into a campaign of extermina- tion in the early 1940s.

In 1935, Hitler began to rearm Germany, in violation of the Versailles treaty. No one stopped him. In 1936, he sent troops into the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone under the terms of Versailles. Again, France and Britain took no action. Later that year, Hitler and Mussolini formed the Rome-Berlin Axis, a political and military alliance between the two fascist nations. Also in 1936, Germany signed a pact to create a mili- tary alliance with Japan against the Soviet Union. With these alliances in place, and with France and Great Britain reluctant to oppose him, Hitler had seized the military advantage in Europe by 1937.

War Approaches As Hitler pushed his initiatives in Europe, which was mired in economic depression as deeply as the United States, the Roosevelt administration faced widespread isolationist sentiment at home. In part, this desire to avoid European entanglements refl ected dis-

C H A P T E R 2 4 The World at War, 1937–1945 697

illusion with American participation in World War I. In 1934, Gerald P. Nye, a pro- gressive Republican senator from North Dakota, launched an investigation into the profi ts of munitions makers during that war. Nye’s committee alleged that arms manu- facturers (popularly labeled “merchants of death”) had maneuvered President Wilson into World War I.

Although Nye’s committee failed to prove its charge against weapon makers, its factual fi ndings prompted an isolationist-minded Congress to pass a series of acts to prevent the nation from being drawn into another overseas war. Th e Neutrality Act of 1935 imposed an embargo on selling arms to warring countries and declared that Americans traveling on the ships of belligerent nations did so at their own risk. In 1936, Congress banned loans to belligerents, and in 1937 it imposed a “cash-and- carry” requirement: if a warring country wanted to purchase nonmilitary goods from

Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler salutes German troops during a parade at the Nazi Party’s annual congress at Nuremberg. German fascism reveled in great public spectacles, such as the famous Nuremberg rallies held every year between the early 1920s and the late 1930s. Hitler used these mass rallies, at which tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians gathered, to build wide support for his policies of aggressive militarism abroad and suppression of Jews and other minorities at home. Getty Images.

698 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

the United States, it had to pay cash and carry them in its own ships, keeping the United States out of potentially dangerous naval warfare.

Americans for the most part had little enthusiasm for war, and a wide variety of groups and individuals espoused isolationism. Many isolationists looked to Republi- can Ohio senator Robert Taft , who distrusted both Roosevelt and European nations with equal conviction, or to the aviator hero Charles A. Lindbergh, who delivered impassioned speeches against intervention in Europe. Some isolationists, such as the conservative National Legion of Mothers of America, combined anticommunism, Christian morality, and even anti-Semitism. Isolationists were primarily conserva- tives, but a contingent of progressives (or liberals) opposed America’s involvement in the war on pacifi st or moral grounds. Whatever their philosophies, ardent isolationists forced Roosevelt to approach the brewing war cautiously.

The Popular Front Other Americans responded to the rise of European fascism by advocating U.S. intervention. Some of the most prominent Ameri-

cans pushing for greater involvement in Europe, even if it meant war, were affi liated with the Popular Front. Fearful of German and Japanese aggression, the Soviet Union instructed Communists in Western Europe and the United States to join with liberals in a broad coalition opposing fascism. Th is Popular Front supported various interna- tional causes — backing the Loyalists in their fi ght against fascist leader Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), for example, even as the United States, France, and Britain remained neutral.

In the United States, the Popular Front drew from a wide range of social groups. Th e American Communist Party, which had increased its membership to 100,000 as the depression revealed fl aws in the capitalist system, led the way. African American civil rights activists, trade unionists, left -wing writers and intellectuals, and even a few New Deal administrators also joined the coalition. In time, however, many supporters in the United States grew uneasy with the Popular Front because of the rigidity of Communists and the brutal political repression in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. Nevertheless, Popular Front activists were among a small but vocal group of Americans encouraging Roosevelt to take a stronger stand against European fascism.

The Failure of Appeasement

Encouraged by the weak worldwide response to the invasions of China, Ethiopia, and the Rhineland, and emboldened by British and French neutrality during the Spanish Civil War, Hitler grew more aggressive

in 1938. He sent troops to annex German-speaking Austria while making clear his intention to seize part of Czechoslovakia. Because Czechoslovakia had an alliance with France, war seemed imminent. But at the Munich Conference in September 1938, Britain and France capitulated, agreeing to let Germany annex the Sudeten- land — a German-speaking border area of Czechoslovakia — in return for Hitler’s pledge to seek no more territory. Th e agreement, declared British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, guaranteed “peace for our time.” Hitler drew a diff erent conclu- sion, telling his generals: “Our enemies are small fry. I saw them in Munich.”

Within six months, Hitler’s forces had overrun the rest of Czechoslovakia and were threatening to march into Poland. Realizing that their policy of appeasement — capitulating to Hitler’s demands — had been disastrous, Britain and France warned

C H A P T E R 2 4 The World at War, 1937–1945 699

Hitler that further aggression meant war. Th en, in August 1939, Hitler and Stalin shocked the world by signing a mutual nonaggression pact. For Hitler, this pact was crucial, as it meant that Germany would not have to wage a two-front war against Britain and France in the west and the Soviet Union in the east. On September 1, 1939, Hitler launched a blitzkrieg against Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. World War II had offi cially begun.

Two days aft er the European war started, the United States declared its neutrality. But President Roosevelt made no secret of his sympathies. When war broke out in 1914, Woodrow Wilson had told Americans to be neutral “in thought as well as in action.” FDR, by contrast, now said: “Th is nation will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well.” Th e overwhelming majority of Americans — some 84 percent, according to a poll in 1939 — supported Britain and France rather than Germany, but most wanted America to avoid another European war.

At fi rst, the need for U.S. intervention seemed remote. Aft er Germany conquered Poland in September 1939, calm settled over Europe. Th en, on April 9, 1940, German forces invaded Denmark and Norway. In May, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxem- bourg fell to the swift German army. Th e fi nal shock came in mid-June, when France too surrendered. Britain now stood alone against Hitler’s plans for domination of Europe.

Isolationism and Internationalism

What Time magazine would later call America’s “thousand-step road to war” had already begun. Aft er a bitter battle in Congress in 1939, Roosevelt won a change in the neutrality laws to allow the

Allies to buy arms as well as nonmilitary goods on a cash-and-carry basis. Interven- tionists, led by journalist William Allen White and his Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, became increasingly vocal in 1940 as war escalated in Europe. (Interventionists were also known as “internationalists,” since they believed in engag- ing with, rather than withdrawing from, international developments.) In response, isolationists formed the America First Committee (AFC), with well-respected fi gures such as Lindbergh and Senator Nye urging the nation to stay out of the war. Th e AFC held rallies across the United States, and its posters, brochures, and broadsides warn- ing against American involvement in Europe suff used many parts of the country, espe- cially the Midwest.

Because of the America Firsters’ eff orts, Roosevelt proceeded cautiously in 1940 as he moved the United States closer to involvement. Th e president did not want war, but he believed that most Americans “greatly underestimate the serious implications to our own future,” as he confi ded to White. In May, Roosevelt created the National Defense Advisory Commission and brought two prominent Republicans, Henry Stimson and Frank Knox, into his cabinet as secretaries of war and the navy, respec- tively. During the summer, the president traded fi ft y World War I destroyers to Great Britain in exchange for the right to build military bases on British possessions in the Atlantic, circumventing neutrality laws by using an executive order to complete the deal. In October 1940, a bipartisan vote in Congress approved a large increase in defense spending and instituted the fi rst peacetime draft in American history. “We must be the great arsenal of democracy,” FDR declared.

700 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

As the war in Europe and the Pacifi c expanded, the United States was preparing for the 1940 presidential election. Th e crisis had convinced Roosevelt to seek an unprecedented third term. Th e Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie of Indiana, a former Democrat who supported many New Deal policies. Th e two parties’ platforms diff ered only slightly. Both pledged aid to the Allies, and both candidates promised not to “send an American boy into the shambles of a European war,” as Willkie put it. Willkie’s spirited campaign resulted in a closer election than that of 1932 or 1936; nonetheless, Roosevelt won 55 percent of the popular vote.

Having been reelected, Roosevelt now undertook to persuade Congress to increase aid to Britain, whose survival he viewed as key to American security. In January 1941, he delivered one of the most important speeches of his career. Defi ning “four essential human freedoms” — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear — Roosevelt cast the war as a noble defense of democratic socie- ties. He then linked the fate of democracy in Western Europe with the new welfare state at home. Sounding a decidedly New Deal note, Roosevelt pledged to end “special

privileges for the few” and to preserve “civil liberties for all.” Like President Wilson’s speech championing national self-determination at the close of World War I, Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech outlined a lib- eral international order with appeal well beyond its intended European and American audiences.

Two months later, in March 1941, with Britain no longer able to pay cash for arms, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to pass the Lend-Lease Act. Th e legislation authorized the president to “lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of ” arms and equipment to Britain or any other country whose defense was considered vital to the security of the United States. When Hitler abandoned his nonaggression pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the United States extended lend-lease to the Soviets. Th e implementation of lend-lease marked the unoffi cial entrance of the United States into the European war.

Roosevelt underlined his support for the Allied cause by meeting in August 1941 with British prime minister Winston Churchill (who had succeeded Chamberlain in 1940). Th eir joint press release, which became known as the Atlantic Charter, provided the ideological foundation of the Western cause. Drawing from Wilson’s Fourteen Points and Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, the charter called for economic cooperation, national self-determination, and guarantees of political stability aft er the war to ensure “that all men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.” It would become the basis for a new American-led transatlantic alliance aft er the war’s conclusion. Its promise of national self-determination, however, set up potential con- fl ict in Asia and Africa, where European powers would be reluctant to abandon their imperial holdings.

In the fall of 1941, the reality of U.S. involvement in the war drew closer. By Sep- tember, Nazi U-boats and the American navy were exchanging fi re in the Atlantic. With isolationists still a potent force, Roosevelt hesitated to declare war and insisted that the United States would defend itself only against a direct attack. But behind the scenes, the president openly discussed American involvement with close advisors and considered war inevitable.

To see a longer excerpt of the “Four Freedoms” speech, along with other primary sources from this period, see Sources for America’s History.

C H A P T E R 2 4 The World at War, 1937–1945 701

The Attack on Pearl Harbor Th e crucial provocation came not from Germany but from Japan. Aft er Japan invaded China in 1937, Roosevelt had denounced “the present reign of terror and international lawlessness” and suggested that aggressors be “quarantined” by peaceful nations. Despite such rhetoric, the United States refused to intervene later that year when Japa- nese troops sacked the city of Nanjing, massacred 300,000 Chinese residents, and raped thousands of women.

FDR and other American offi cials prioritized events in Europe over those in East Asia, and without a counterweight, Japan’s military and imperial ambitions expanded. In 1940, General Hideki Tojo became war minister. Aft er concluding a formal military alliance with Germany and Italy that year, Tojo dispatched Japanese troops to occupy the northern part of the French colony of Indochina (present-day Vietnam, Cambo- dia, and Laos). Tojo’s goal, supported by Emperor Hirohito, was to create a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” under Japan’s control stretching from the Korean Peninsula south to Indonesia. Like Germany and Italy, Japan sought to match the over- seas empires of Britain, France, Holland, and the United States.

Th e United States responded to the stationing of Japanese troops in Indochina by restricting trade with Japan. Roosevelt hoped that these economic sanctions would deter Japanese aggression. But in July 1941, Japanese troops staged a full-scale inva- sion of Indochina. Roosevelt then froze Japanese assets in the United States and stopped all trade with Japan, including vital oil shipments that accounted for almost 80 percent of Japanese consumption.

In October 1941, General Tojo became prime minister and accelerated secret preparations for war against the United States. By November, American military intel- ligence knew that Japan was planning an attack but did not know where it would occur. Early on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, killing more than 2,400 Americans. Th ey destroyed or heavily damaged eight battleships, three cruisers, three destroyers, and almost two hundred airplanes.

Although the assault was devastating, it united the American people. Calling December 7 “a date which will live in infamy,” President Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration of war against Japan. Th e Senate voted unanimously for war, and the House concurred by a vote of 388 to 1. Th e lone dissenter was Jeannette Rankin of Montana, a committed pacifi st — she also voted against entry into World War I — and the fi rst female member of Congress. Th ree days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, which in turn declared war on the Axis powers. Th e long shadows of two wars, one in Europe and one in Asia, had at long last con- verged over the United States.

What motivated Japanese, Italian, and German expansionism?

How did Roosevelt use the Four Freedoms speech and the Atlantic Charter to defi ne the war for Americans?

702 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

Organizing for Victory Th e task of fi ghting on a global scale dramatically increased the power of the fed- eral government. Shift ing from civilian to military production, raising an army, and assembling the necessary workforce required a massive expansion in government authority. When Congress passed the War Powers Act in December 1941, it gave Pres- ident Roosevelt unprecedented control over all aspects of the war eff ort. Th is act marked the beginning of what some historians call the imperial presidency: the far- reaching use (and sometimes abuse) of executive authority during the latter part of the twentieth century.

Financing the War Defense mobilization, not the New Deal eff orts of the 1930s, ended the Great Depres- sion. Between 1940 and 1945, the annual gross national product doubled, and aft er-tax profi ts of American businesses nearly doubled (America Compared, p. 703). Federal spending on war production powered this advance. By late 1943, two-thirds of the economy was directly involved in the war eff ort. Th e government paid for these mili- tary expenditures by raising taxes and borrowing money. Th e Revenue Act of 1942 expanded the number of people paying income taxes from 3.9 million to 42.6 mil- lion. Taxes on personal incomes and business profi ts paid half the cost of the war. Th e

One City (and Island) at a Time By late 1944, the victory of the United States and its allies was nearly certain, but Japanese and German troops continued to fi ght with great courage and determination. Many European cities and every Pacifi c island had to be taken foot by foot. Here, American troops from the 325th Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division advance slowly through the rubble-fi lled street of a German city in early 1945. Jeff Ethell Color Archives.

A M E R I C A C O M PA R E D

T h e S c a l e s o f Wa r : L o s s e s a n d G a i n s D u r i n g Wo r l d Wa r I I World War II saw an extraordinary loss of life. Worldwide, at least 50 million people perished between 1939 and 1945 from war-related causes. Th e majority of those who died were civilians, though many millions of soldiers perished in battle as well. For most coun- tries, we have reasonable estimates rather than precise fi gures. Th e chart below compares the United States with other major combatants and nations caught in this global struggle.

On the other side of the scale, the war fueled tremendous economic growth, at least in the United States, which was spared the physical devastation of Europe and East Asia. Military production for World War II lift ed the United States out of the Great Depression. Gross domestic product (GDP) nearly doubled between 1938 and 1945. Economic produc- tion in other combatant nations, as shown in the second fi gure, grew little if at all.

SOURCE: GDP data adapted from Mark Harrison, “Th e Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers” in International Comparison (1998), 11. Copyright © 1998 Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.

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6 million

15 million

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420,000

23 million

FIGURE 24.1 World War II Military and Civilian Deaths, 1939–1945

0

200

400

600

800

1,000

1,200

1,400

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FIGURE 24.2 Gross Domestic Product Rates Worldwide, 1938–1945

704 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

government borrowed the rest, both from wealthy Americans and from ordinary citi- zens, who invested in long-term treasury bonds known as war bonds.

Financing and coordinating the war eff ort required far-reaching cooperation between government and private business. Th e number of civilians employed by the government increased almost fourfold, to 3.8 million — a far higher rate of growth than that during the New Deal. Th e powerful War Production Board (WPB) awarded defense contracts, allocated scarce resources — such as rubber, copper, and oil — for military uses, and persuaded businesses to convert to military production. For example, it encouraged Ford and General Motors to build tanks rather than cars by granting generous tax advantages for re-equipping existing factories and building new ones. In other instances, the board approved “cost-plus” contracts, which guaranteed corporations a profi t, and allowed them to keep new steel mills, factories, and ship- yards aft er the war. Such government subsidies of defense industries would intensify during the Cold War and continue to this day.

To secure maximum production, the WPB preferred to deal with major enter- prises rather than with small businesses. Th e nation’s fi fty-six largest corporations received three-fourths of the war contracts; the top ten received one-third. Th e best- known contractor was Henry J. Kaiser. Already highly successful from building roads in California and the Hoover and Grand Coulee dams, Kaiser went from government construction work to navy shipbuilding. At his shipyard in Richmond, California, he revolutionized ship construction by applying Henry Ford’s techniques of mass pro- duction. To meet wartime production schedules, Kaiser broke the work process down into small, specialized tasks that newly trained workers could do easily. Soon, each of his work crews was building a “Liberty Ship,” a large vessel to carry cargo and troops to the war zone, every two weeks. Th e press dubbed him the Miracle Man.

Central to Kaiser’s success were his close ties to federal agencies. Th e government fi nanced the great dams that he built during the depression, and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation lent him $300 million to build shipyards and manufacturing plants during the war. Working together in this way, American business and govern- ment turned out a prodigious supply of military hardware: 86,000 tanks; 296,000 air- planes; 15 million rifl es and machine guns; 64,000 landing craft ; and 6,500 cargo ships and naval vessels. Th e American way of war, wrote the Scottish historian D. W. Brogan in 1944, was “mechanized like the American farm and kitchen.” America’s productive industrial economy, as much as or more than its troops, proved the decisive factor in winning World War II.

Th e system of allotting contracts, along with the suspension of antitrust prosecu- tions during the war, created giant corporate enterprises. By 1945, the largest one hun- dred American companies produced 70 percent of the nation’s industrial output. Th ese corporations would form the core of what became known as the nation’s “military- industrial complex” during the Cold War (Chapter 25).

Mobilizing the American Fighting Force Th e expanding federal bureaucracy also had a human face. To fi ght the war, the gov- ernment mobilized tens of millions of soldiers, civilians, and workers — coordinated on a scale unprecedented in U.S. history. During World War II, the armed forces of the

C H A P T E R 2 4 The World at War, 1937–1945 705

United States enlisted more than fi ft een million men and women. In no other military confl ict have so many American citizens served in the armed services. Th ey came from every region and economic station: black sharecroppers from Alabama; white farmers from the Midwest; the sons and daughters of European, Mexican, and Carib- bean immigrants; native men from Navajo and Choctaw reservations and other tribal communities; women from every state in the nation; even Hollywood celebrities. From urban, rural, and suburban areas, from working-class and middle-class back- grounds — they all served in the military.

In contrast to its otherwise democratic character, the American army segregated the nearly one million African Americans in uniform. Th e National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other civil rights groups repri- manded the government, saying, “A Jim Crow army cannot fi ght for a free world,” but the military continued to separate African Americans and assign them menial duties. Th e poet Langston Hughes observed the irony: “We are elevator boys, janitors, red caps, maids — a race in uniform.” Th e military uniform, Hughes implied, was not assigned to African Americans so readily. Native Americans and Mexican Americans, on the other hand, were never offi cially segregated; they rubbed elbows with the sons of European immigrants and native-born soldiers from all regions of the country.

Among the most instrumental soldiers were the Native American “code talkers.” In the Pacifi c theater, native Navajo speakers communicated orders to fl eet command- ers. Japanese intelligence could not decipher the code because it was based on the Navajo language, which fewer than fi ft y non-Navajos in the world understood. At the battle of Iwo Jima, for instance — one of the war’s fi ercest — Navajo code talkers, work- ing around the clock, sent and received more than eight hundred messages without error. In the European theater, army commanders used Comanche, Choctaw, and Cherokee speakers to thwart the Nazis and exchange crucial military commands on the battlefi eld. No Axis nation ever broke these Native American codes.

Approximately 350,000 American women enlisted in the military. About 140,000 served in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), and 100,000 served in the navy’s Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES). One-third of the nation’s regis- tered nurses, almost 75,000 overall, volunteered for military duty. In addition, about 1,000 Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) ferried planes and supplies in non- combat areas. Th e armed forces limited the duties assigned to women, however. Female offi cers could not command men, and WACs and WAVES were barred from combat duty, although nurses of both sexes served close to the front lines, risking cap- ture or death. Most of the jobs that women did in the military — clerical work, com- munications, and health care — resembled women’s jobs in civilian life.

Historians still debate how to characterize the World War II American military. As an army of “citizen-soldiers,” it represented a wide stratum of society. Military ser- vice gave a generation of men a noble purpose, following a decade of economic depres- sion. And its ethic of patriotism further advanced the children of immigrants into mainstream American life. Yet the military embodied the tensions and contradictions of American society as well. Th e draft revealed appalling levels of health, fi tness, and education among millions of Americans, spurring reformers to call for improved lit- eracy and nutrition. Women’s integration into the military was marked by deep anxi- eties about their potentially negative eff ects on male soldiers as well as the threat to

706 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

“womanhood” posed by service. Th e American army was like the nation itself. United in wartime purpose, the military refl ected the strengths and weaknesses of a diverse, fractious society.

Workers and the War Eff ort As millions of working-age citizens joined the military, the nation faced a critical labor shortage. Consequently, many women and African Americans joined the industrial workforce, taking jobs unavailable to them before the confl ict. Unions, benefi tting from the demand for labor, negotiated higher wages and improved conditions for America’s workers. By 1943, with the economy operating at full capacity, the bread- lines and double-digit unemployment of the 1930s were a memory.

Rosie the Riveter Government offi cials and corporate recruiters urged women to take jobs in defense industries, creating a new image of working

women. “Longing won’t bring him back sooner . . . get a war job!” one poster urged, while artist Norman Rockwell’s famous “Rosie the Riveter” illustration beckoned to women from the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. Th e government directed its pub- licity at housewives, but many working women gladly abandoned low-paying “ women’s jobs” as domestic servants or secretaries for higher-paying work in the defense indus- try. Suddenly, the nation’s factories were full of women working as airplane riveters, ship welders, and drill-press operators (American Voices, p. 707). Women made up 36 percent of the labor force in 1945, compared with 24 percent at the beginning of the war. War work did not free women from traditional expectations and limitations, however. Women oft en faced sexual harassment on the job and usually received lower wages than men did. In shipyards, women with the most seniority and responsibility earned $6.95 a day, whereas the top men made as much as $22.

Wartime work was thus bittersweet for women, because it combined new oppor- tunities with old constraints. Th e majority labored in low-wage service jobs. Child care was oft en unavailable, despite the largest government-sponsored child-care program in history. When the men returned from war, Rosie the Riveter was usually out of a job. Government propaganda now encouraged women back into the home — where, it was implied, their true calling lay in raising families and standing behind the return- ing soldiers. But many married women refused, or could not aff ord, to put on aprons and stay home. Women’s participation in the paid labor force rebounded by the late 1940s and continued to rise over the rest of the twentieth century, bringing major changes in family life (Chapter 26).

Wartime Civil Rights

Among African Americans, a new militancy prevailed during the war. Pointing to parallels between anti-Semitism in Germany and racial dis- crimination in the United States, black leaders waged the Double V cam-

paign: calling for victory over Nazism abroad and racism at home. “Th is is a war for freedom. Whose freedom?” the renowned black leader W. E. B. Du Bois asked. If it meant “the freedom of Negroes in the Southern United States,” Du Bois answered, “my gun is on my shoulder.”

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Women in the War time Workplace D O N N A J E A N H A R V E Y During World War II, millions of men served in the armed forces and millions of women worked in war-related industries. A generation later, some of these women workers recounted their wartime experiences to historians in oral interviews. Donna Jean Harvey grew up in Casper, Wyoming. Aft er graduating from high school in 1940 she married Lewis Early Harvey. Aft er her husband was draft ed, Donna Jean worked as a riveter and radio installer in defense plants in Cheyenne.

Labor force was critical at that time so I went to United Modifi cation Plant and learned how to rivet, do installations of various kinds and etc. When the “new” radar system was implemented, I asked to be put on that crew. Th e F.B.I. investigated me and found me to be worthy and I proceeded to install radar along with my riveting duties, while waiting for the next shipment of planes to come in. . . . I was awarded the Army-Navy E Award and was presented with a pin. I’ve always been very proud of that!!! I certainly got educated in more ways than I ever expected, being a very young girl. But looking back I wouldn’t trade my experiences for anything.

My feeling about the war in most instances was a conglomerate of mixed emotions. I had lived a fairly sheltered life, but I listened and learned and managed to survive, but I must admit, it left a scar on my memory that can never be erased.

I was living in one of my parent’s apartments during the war and since they were both retired, they baby-sat my young son. My mother decided aft er a while that she too would like to do something in some little way to help. So she applied for maintenance and between my father and the girl next door, I managed to have a baby-sitter available at all times. Th e government was asking for rubber donations so my mother and I gave them our rubber girdles!! We liked to think that our girdles helped win the war!!!

My life took on a totally new perspec- tive the longer I worked there. I saw many tragic accidents, none of which I care to talk about which haunt me to this day.

I couldn’t do much socializing as I had a small infant at home to care for when off work and besides I was really pooped. Th ose midnight shift s were “killers.” . . . I tried to write weekly letters to my husband in between my other duties. . . .

Our community gathered together and collected scrap metals and such to help in the war eff ort and thanks to a good neighbor, who was growing a victory garden; we managed to get gift s of potatoes and lettuce etc. Th e government issued coupon books that allowed us two bananas a week, one pound of sugar and so many gallons of gas. We traded back and forth depending on our individual needs. . . .

Th ere were no unions there at that time and no baby sitting service provided. Th e single people formed a club and they entertained themselves aft er work but I was a married person with a child and so I didn’t participate in any of their activities. . . .

Aft er the war was over, most people went back to their previous jobs. I opened a beauty salon and when my husband returned home from the service he got a job with the Frontier Refi nery.

SOURCE: National Park Service, Rosie the Riveter: Women Working During World War II, nps.gov /pwro/collection/website/donna.htm.

708 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

Even before Pearl Harbor, black labor activism was on the rise. In 1940, only 240 of the nation’s 100,000 aircraft workers were black, and most of them were janitors. African American leaders demanded that the government require defense contractors to hire more black workers. When Washington took no action, A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the largest black labor union in the country, announced plans for a march on Washington in the summer of 1941.

Roosevelt was not a strong supporter of African American equality, but he wanted to avoid public protest and a disruption of the nation’s war preparations. So the president made a deal: he issued Executive Order 8802, and in June 1941 Randolph canceled the march. Th e order prohibited “discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin” and estab- lished the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC). Mary McLeod Bethune called the wartime FEPC “a refreshing shower in a thirsty land.” Th is federal commit- ment to black employment rights was unprecedented but limited: it did not aff ect segre- gation in the armed forces, and the FEPC could not enforce compliance with its orders.

Rosie the Riveter Women workers install fi xtures and assemblies to a tail fuselage section of a B-17 bomber at the Douglas Aircraft Company plant in Long Beach, California. To entice women to become war workers, the War Manpower Commission created the image of “Rosie the Riveter,” later immortalized in posters and by a Norman Rockwell illustration on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. A popular 1942 song celebrating Rosie went: “Rosie’s got a boyfriend, Charlie / Charlie, he’s a marine / Rosie is protecting Charlie / Working overtime on the riveting machine.” Even as women joined the industrial workforce in huge numbers (half a million in the aircraft industry alone), they were understood as fulfi lling a nurturing, protective role. Library of Congress.

C H A P T E R 2 4 The World at War, 1937–1945 709

Nevertheless, wartime developments laid the groundwork for the civil rights revo- lution of the 1960s. Th e NAACP grew ninefold, to 450,000 members, by 1945. In Chi- cago, James Farmer helped to found the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942, a group that would become known nationwide in the 1960s for its direct action pro- tests such as sit-ins. Th e FEPC inspired black organizing against employment discrim- ination in hundreds of cities and workplaces. Behind this combination of government action and black militancy, the civil rights movement would advance on multiple fronts in the postwar years.

Mexican Americans, too, challenged long-standing practices of discrimination and exclusion. Th roughout much of the Southwest, it was still common for signs to read “No Mexicans Allowed,” and Mexican American workers were confi ned to menial, low-paying jobs. Several organizations, including the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the Congress of Spanish Speaking Peoples, pressed the government and private employers to end anti-Mexican discrimination. Mexican American workers themselves, oft en in Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions such as the Cannery Workers and Shipyard Workers, also led eff orts to enforce the FEPC’s equal employment mandate.

Exploitation persisted, however. To meet wartime labor demands, the U.S. gov- ernment brought tens of thousands of Mexican contract laborers into the United States under the Bracero Program. Paid little and treated poorly, the braceros (who took their name from the Spanish brazo, “arm”) highlighted the oppressive conditions of farm labor in the United States. Aft er the war, the federal government continued to partici- pate in labor exploitation, bringing hundreds of thousands of Mexicans into the coun- try to perform low-wage agricultural work. Future Mexican American civil rights leaders Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez began to fi ght this labor system in the 1940s.

Organized Labor During the war, unions solidifi ed their position as the most power- ful national voice for American workers and extended gains made

during the New Deal. By 1945, almost 15 million workers belonged to a union, up from 9 million in 1939. Representatives of the major unions made a no-strike pledge for the duration of the war, and Roosevelt rewarded them by creating the National War Labor Board (NWLB), composed of representatives of labor, management, and the public. Th e NWLB established wages, hours, and working conditions and had the authority to seize manufacturing plants that did not comply. Th e Board’s “mainte- nance of membership” policy, which encouraged workers in major defense industries to join unions, also helped organized labor grow.

Despite these arrangements, unions endured government constraints and faced a sometimes hostile Congress. Frustrated with limits on wage increases and the no- strike pledge, in 1943 more than half a million United Mine Workers went out on strike, demanding a higher wage increase than that recommended by the NWLB. Congress responded by passing (over Roosevelt’s veto) the Smith-Connally Labor Act of 1943, which allowed the president to prohibit strikes in defense industries and for- bade political contributions by unions. Congressional hostility would continue to hamper the union movement in the postwar years. Although organized labor would emerge from World War II more powerful than at any time in U.S. history, its business and corporate opponents, too, would emerge from the war with new strength.

710 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

Politics in Wartime In his 1944 State of the Union address, FDR called for a second Bill of Rights, one that would guarantee all Americans access to education and jobs, adequate food and cloth- ing, and decent housing and medical care. Like his Four Freedoms speech, this was a call to extend the New Deal by broadening the rights to individual security and welfare guaranteed by the government. Th e answer to his call, however, would have to wait for the war’s conclusion. Congress created new government benefi ts only for military vet- erans, known as GIs (short for “government issue”). Th e Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (1944), an extraordinarily infl uential program popularly known as the “GI Bill of Rights,” provided education, job training, medical care, pensions, and mortgage loans for men and women who had served in the armed forces (Chapter 26).

Th e president’s call for social legislation sought to reinvigorate the New Deal political coalition. In the election of 1944, Roosevelt again headed the Democratic ticket. But party leaders, aware of FDR’s health problems and fearing that Vice Presi- dent Henry Wallace’s outspoken support for labor and civil rights would alienate mod- erate voters, dropped him from the ticket. In his place, they chose Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri, a straight-talking, no-nonsense politician with little national experience. Th e Republicans nominated Governor Th omas E. Dewey of New York.

Dewey, who accepted the general principles of welfare-state liberalism domestically and favored internationalism in foreign aff airs, attracted some of Roosevelt’s supporters. But a majority of voters preferred political continuity, and Roosevelt was reelected with 53.5 percent of the nationwide vote. Th e Democratic coali- tion retained its hold on government power, and the era of Republican political dominance (1896–1932) slipped further into the past.

Life on the Home Front Th e United States escaped the physical devastation that ravaged Europe and East Asia, but the war profoundly changed the country. Americans welcomed wartime prosper- ity but shuddered when they saw a Western Union boy on his bicycle, fearing that he carried a War Department telegram reporting the death of someone’s son, husband, or father. Citizens also grumbled about annoying wartime regulations and rationing but accepted that their lives would be diff erent “for the duration.”

“For the Duration” Spurred by both government propaganda and a desire to serve the war cause, people on the home front took on wartime responsibilities. Th ey worked on civilian defense committees, recycled old newspapers and scrap material, and served on local ration- ing and draft boards. About twenty million backyard “victory gardens” produced 40

How did the war aff ect the relationship between private corporations and the federal government?

How does the slogan “A Jim Crow army cannot fi ght for a free world” connect the war abroad with the civil rights struggle at home?

C H A P T E R 2 4 The World at War, 1937–1945 711

percent of the nation’s vegetables. Various federal agencies encouraged these eff orts, especially the Offi ce of War Information (OWI), which disseminated news and pro- moted patriotism. Th e OWI urged advertising agencies to link their clients’ products to the war eff ort, arguing that patriotic ads would not only sell goods but also “invigo- rate, instruct and inspire” citizens.

Popular culture, especially the movies, reinforced connections between the home front and the war eff ort. Hollywood producers, directors, and actors off ered their tal- ents to the War Department. Director Frank Capra created a documentary series titled Why We Fight to explain war aims to conscripted soldiers. Movie stars such as John Wayne and Spencer Tracy portrayed heroic American fi ghting men in numerous fi lms, such as Guadalcanal Diary (1943) and Th irty Seconds over Tokyo (1945). In this pretelevision era, newsreels accompanying the feature fi lms kept the public up-to- date on the war, as did on-the-spot radio broadcasts by Edward R. Murrow and Mary Marvin Breckenridge, the fi rst female radio correspondent for CBS.

For many Americans, the major inconvenience during the war years was the short- age of consumer goods. Beginning in 1942, federal agencies subjected almost every- thing Americans ate, wore, or used to rationing or regulation. Th e fi rst major scarcity was rubber. Th e Japanese conquest of Malaysia and Dutch Indonesia cut off 97 percent of America’s imports of that essential raw material. To conserve rubber for the war eff ort, the government rationed tires, so many of the nation’s 30 million car owners put their cars in storage. As more people walked, they wore out their shoes. In 1944, shoes were rationed to two pairs per person a year. By 1943, the government was rationing meat, butter, sugar, and other foods. Most citizens cooperated with the complicated rationing and coupon system, but at least one-quarter of the population bought items on the black market, especially meat, gasoline, cigarettes, and nylon stockings.

Migration and the Wartime City Th e war determined where people lived. When men entered the armed services, their families oft en followed them to training bases or points of debarkation. Civilians moved to take high-paying defense jobs. About 15 million Americans changed resi- dences during the war years, half of them moving to another state. One of them was Peggy Terry, who grew up in Paducah, Kentucky; worked in a shell-loading plant in nearby Viola; and then moved to a defense plant in Michigan. Th ere, she recalled, “I met all those wonderful Polacks [Polish Americans]. Th ey were the fi rst people I’d ever known that were any diff erent from me. A whole new world just opened up.”

As the center of defense production for the Pacifi c war, California experienced the largest share of wartime migration. Th e state welcomed nearly three million new resi- dents and grew by 53 percent during the war. “Th e Second Gold Rush Hits the West,” announced the San Francisco Chronicle in 1943. One-tenth of all federal dollars fl owed into California, and the state’s factories turned out one-sixth of all war materials. People went where the defense jobs were: to Los Angeles, San Diego, and cities around San Francisco Bay. Some towns grew practically overnight; within two years of the opening of the Kaiser Corporation shipyard in Richmond, California, the town’s pop- ulation had quadrupled. Other industrial states — notably New York, Illinois, Michi- gan, and Ohio — also attracted both federal dollars and migrants on a large scale.

712 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

Th e growth of war industries accelerated patterns of rural-urban migration. Cities grew dramatically, as factories, shipyards, and other defense work drew millions of citizens from small towns and rural areas. Th is new mobility, coupled with people’s distance from their hometowns, loosened the authority of traditional institutions and made wartime cities vibrant and exciting. Around-the-clock work shift s kept people on the streets night and day, and bars, jazz clubs, dance halls, and movie theaters pro- liferated, fed by the ready cash of war workers.

Racial Confl ict Migration and more fl uid social boundaries meant that people of dif- ferent races and ethnicities mixed in the booming cities. Over one

million African Americans left the rural South for California, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania — a continuation of the Great Migration earlier in the century (Chapter 21). As blacks and whites competed for jobs and housing, racial confl icts broke out in more than a hundred cities in 1943. Detroit saw the worst violence. In June 1943, a riot incited by southern-born whites and Polish Americans against Afri- can Americans left thirty-four people dead and hundreds injured.

Racial confl ict struck the West as well. In Los Angeles, male Hispanic teenagers formed pachuco (youth) gangs. Many dressed in “zoot suits” — broad-brimmed felt hats, thigh-length jackets with wide lapels and padded shoulders, pegged trousers, and clunky shoes. Pachucas (young women) favored long coats, huarache sandals, and pompadour hairdos. Other working-class teenagers in Los Angeles and elsewhere took up the zoot-suit style to underline their rejection of middle-class values. To many adults, the zoot suit symbolized juvenile delinquency. Rumors circulating in Los Angeles in June 1943 that a pachuco gang had beaten an Anglo (white) sailor set off a four-day riot in which hundreds of Anglo servicemen roamed through Mexican American neighborhoods and attacked zoot-suiters, taking special pleasure in slash- ing their pegged pants. In a stinging display of bias, Los Angeles police offi cers arrested only Mexican American youth, and the City Council passed an ordinance outlawing the wearing of the zoot suit.

Gay and Lesbian Communities

Wartime migration to urban centers created new opportunities for gay men and women to establish communities. Religious morality and social conventions against gays and lesbians kept the majority

of them silent and their sexuality hidden. During the war, however, cities such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and even Kansas City, Buff alo, and Dallas developed vibrant gay neighborhoods, sustained in part by a sudden infl ux of migrants and the relatively open wartime atmosphere. Th ese communities became centers of the gay rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s (Chapter 29).

Th e military tried to screen out homosexuals but had limited success. Once in the services, homosexuals found opportunities to participate in a gay culture oft en more extensive than that in civilian life. In the last twenty years, historians have documented thriving communities of gay and lesbian soldiers in the World War II military. Some “came out under fi re,” as one historian put it, but most kept their sexuality hidden from authorities, because army offi cers, doctors, and psychiatrists treated homosexuality as a psychological disorder that was grounds for dishonorable discharge.

C H A P T E R 2 4 The World at War, 1937–1945 713

Japanese Removal Unlike World War I, which evoked widespread harassment of German Americans, World War II produced relatively little condemnation of European Americans. Federal offi cials held about 5,000 potentially dangerous German and Italian aliens during the war. Despite the presence of small but vocal groups of Nazi sympathizers and Mussolini supporters, German American and Italian American communities were largely left in peace during the war. Th e relocation and temporary imprisonment of Japanese immi- grants and Japanese American citizens was a glaring exception to this otherwise toler- ant policy. Immediately aft er the attack on Pearl Harbor, the West Coast remained calm. Th en, as residents began to fear spies, sabotage, and further attacks, California’s long history of racial animosity toward Asian immigrants surfaced. Local politicians

[[P24.09]]

Zoot-Suit Youth in Los Angeles During a four-day riot in June 1943, servicemen in Los Angeles attacked young Latino men wearing distinctive zoot suits, which were widely viewed as emblems of gang membership and a delinquent youth culture. The police response was to arrest scores of zoot-suiters. Here, a group of handcuff ed young Latino men is about to board a Los Angeles County sheriff ’s bus to make a court appearance. Note the wide-legged pants that taper at the ankle, a hallmark of the zoot suit. The so-called zoot-suit riot was evidence of cracks in wartime unity on the home front. Library of Congress.

714 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

and newspapers whipped up hysteria against Japanese Americans, who numbered only about 112,000, had no political power, and lived primarily in small enclaves in the Pacifi c coast states.

Early in 1942, President Roosevelt responded to anti-Japanese fears by issuing Executive Order 9066, which authorized the War Department to force Japanese Amer- icans from their West Coast homes and hold them in relocation camps for the rest of the war. Although there was no disloyal or seditious activity among the evacuees, few public leaders opposed the plan. “A Jap’s a Jap,” snapped General John DeWitt, the offi cer charged with defense of the West Coast. “It makes no diff erence whether he is an American citizen or not.”

Th e relocation plan shocked Japanese Americans, more than two-thirds of whom were Nisei; that is, their parents were immigrants, but they were native-born Ameri- can citizens. Army offi cials gave families only a few days to dispose of their property. Businesses that had taken a lifetime to build were liquidated overnight. Th e War Relocation Authority moved the prisoners to hastily built camps in desolate areas in California, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Arkansas. Ironically, the Japanese Americans who made up one-third of the population of Hawaii, and presum- ably posed a greater threat because of their numbers and proximity to Japan, were not imprisoned. Th ey provided much of the unskilled labor in the island territory, and the Hawaiian economy could not have functioned without them.

Cracks soon appeared in the relocation policy. An agricultural labor shortage led the government to furlough seasonal farmworkers from the camps as early as 1942. About 4,300 students were allowed to attend colleges outside the West Coast military zone. Other internees were permitted to join the armed services. Th e 442nd Regimen- tal Combat Team, a unit composed almost entirely of Nisei volunteers, served with distinction in Europe.

Gordon Hirabayashi was among the Nisei who actively resisted incarceration. A student at the University of Washington, Hirabayashi was a religious pacifi st who had registered with his draft board as a conscientious objector. He refused to report for evac- uation and turned himself in to the FBI. “I wanted to uphold the principles of the Con- stitution,” Hirabayashi later stated, “and the curfew and evacuation orders which singled out a group on the basis of ethnicity violated them.” Tried and convicted in 1942, he appealed his case to the Supreme Court in Hirabayashi v. United States (1943). In that case and in Korematsu v. United States (1944), the Court allowed the removal of Japanese

Americans from the West Coast on the basis of “military necessity” but avoided ruling on the constitutionality of the incarceration program. Th e Court’s decision underscored the fragility of civil liberties in wartime. Congress issued a pub- lic apology in 1988 and awarded $20,000 to each of the eighty thousand surviving Japanese Amer- icans who had once been internees.

What eff ects did wartime migra- tion have on the United States?

Why were Japanese Americans treated diff erently than German and Italian Americans during the war?

C H A P T E R 2 4 The World at War, 1937–1945 715

Fighting and Winning the War World War II was a war for control of the world. Had the Axis powers triumphed, Germany would have dominated, either directly or indirectly, all of Europe and much of Africa and the Middle East; Japan would have controlled most of East and South- east Asia. To prevent this outcome, which would have crippled democracy in Europe and restricted American power to the Western Hemisphere, the Roosevelt administra- tion took the United States to war. Th e combination of American intervention, the perseverance of Britain, and the profound civilian and military sacrifi ces of the Soviet Union decided the outcome of the confl ict and shaped the character of the postwar world.

Wartime Aims and Tensions Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union were the key actors in the Allied coalition. China, France, and other nations played crucial but smaller roles. Th e lead- ers who became known as the Big Th ree — President Franklin Roosevelt, Prime Min- ister Winston Churchill of Great Britain, and Premier Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union — set military strategy. However, Stalin was not a party to the Atlantic Charter, which Churchill and Roosevelt had signed in August 1941, and disagreed fundamen- tally with some of its precepts, such as a capitalist-run international trading system. Th e Allies also disagreed about military strategy and timing. Th e Big Th ree made defeating Germany (rather than Japan) the top military priority, but they diff ered over how best to do it. In 1941, a massive German force had invaded the Soviet Union and reached the outskirts of Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad before being halted in early 1942 by hard-pressed Russian troops. To relieve pressure on the Soviet army, Stalin wanted the British and Americans to open a second front with a major invasion of Germany through France.

Roosevelt informally assured Stalin that the Allies would comply in 1942, but Churchill opposed an early invasion, and American war production was not yet suffi - cient to support it. For eighteen months, Stalin’s pleas went unanswered, and the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the fi ghting; in the 1943 Battle of Kursk alone, the Soviet army suff ered 860,000 casualties, several times what the Allies would suff er for the fi rst two months of the European campaign aft er D-Day. Th en, at a conference of the Big Th ree in Tehran, Iran, in November 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to open a second front in France within six months in return for Stalin’s promise to join the fi ght against Japan. Both sides adhered to this agreement, but the long delay angered Stalin, who became increasingly suspicious of American and British intentions.

The War in Europe Th roughout 1942, the Allies suff ered one defeat aft er another. German armies pushed deep into Soviet territory, advancing through the wheat farms of the Ukraine and the rich oil region of the Caucasus. Simultaneously, German forces began an off ensive in North Africa aimed at seizing the Suez Canal. In the Atlantic, U-boats devastated American convoys carrying oil and other vital supplies to Britain and the Soviet Union.

716 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

Over the winter of 1942–1943, however, the tide began to turn in favor of the Allies. In the epic Battle of Stalingrad, Soviet forces not only halted the German advance but also allowed the Russian army to push westward (Map 24.1). By early 1944, Stalin’s troops had driven the German army out of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, as Churchill’s temporary substitute for a second front in France, the Allies launched a major counteroff ensive in North Africa. Between November 1942 and May 1943, Allied troops under the leadership of General Dwight D. Eisenhower and General George S. Patton defeated the German Afrika Korps, led by General Erwin Rommel.

From Africa, the Allied command followed Churchill’s strategy of attacking the Axis through its “soft underbelly”: Sicily and the Italian peninsula. Faced with an Allied invasion, the Italian king ousted Mussolini’s fascist regime in July 1943. But German troops, who far outmatched the Allies in skill and organization, took control

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El Alamein Oct. 23–Nov. 5

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MAP 24.1 World War II in Europe, 1941–1943 Hitler’s Germany reached its greatest extent in 1942, by which time Nazi forces had occupied Norway, France, North Africa, central Europe, and much of western Russia. The tide of battle turned in late 1942 when the German advance stalled at Leningrad and Stalingrad. By early 1943, the Soviet army had launched a massive counterattack at Stalingrad, and Allied forces had driven the Germans from North Africa and launched an invasion of Sicily and the Italian mainland.

C H A P T E R 2 4 The World at War, 1937–1945 717

of Italy and strenuously resisted the Allied invasion. American and British divisions took Rome only in June 1944 and were still fi ghting German forces in northern Italy when the European war ended in May 1945 (Map 24.2). Churchill’s southern strategy proved a time-consuming and costly mistake.

D-Day Th e long-promised invasion of France came on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Th at morning, the largest armada ever assembled moved across the English Chan-

nel under the command of General Eisenhower. When American, British, and Cana- dian soldiers hit the beaches of Normandy, they suff ered terrible casualties but secured a beachhead. Over the next few days, more than 1.5 million soldiers and thousands of tons of military supplies and equipment fl owed into France. Much to the Allies’ advan- tage, they never faced more than one-third of Hitler’s Wehrmacht (armed forces),

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MAP 24.2 World War II in Europe, 1944–1945 By the end of 1943, the Russian army had nearly pushed the Germans out of the Soviet Union, and by June 1944, when the British and Americans fi nally invaded France, the Russians had liberated eastern Poland and most of southeastern Europe. By the end of 1944, British and American forces were ready to invade Germany from the west, and the Russians were poised to do the same from the east. Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945.

718 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

because the Soviet Union continued to hold down the Germans on the eastern front. In August, Allied troops liberated Paris; by September, they had driven the Germans out of most of France and Belgium. Meanwhile, long-range Allied bombers attacked German cities such as Hamburg and Dresden as well as military and industrial targets. Th e air campaign killed some 305,000 civilians and soldiers and injured another 780,000 — a grisly reminder of the war’s human brutality.

Th e Germans were not yet ready to give up, however. In December 1944, they mounted a fi nal off ensive in Belgium, the so-called Battle of the Bulge, before being pushed back across the Rhine River into Germany. American and British troops drove toward Berlin from the west, while Soviet troops advanced east through Poland. On April 30, 1945, as Russian troops massed outside Berlin, Hitler committed suicide; on May 7, Germany formally surrendered.

The Holocaust When Allied troops advanced into Poland and Germany in the spring of 1945, they came face-to-face with Hitler’s “fi nal solution” for the

Jewish population of Germany and the German-occupied countries: the extermina- tion camps in which 6 million Jews had been put to death, along with another 6 mil- lion Poles, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, and other “undesirables.” Photographs of the Nazi death camps at Buchenwald, Dachau, and Auschwitz showed bodies stacked like cordwood and survivors so emaciated that they were barely alive. Published in Life and other mass-circulation magazines, the photographs of the Holocaust horrifi ed the American public and the world.

Th e Nazi persecution of German Jews in the 1930s was widely known in the United States. But when Jews had begun to fl ee Europe, the United States refused to relax its strict immigration laws to take them in. In 1939, when the SS St. Louis, a German ocean liner carrying nearly a thousand Jewish refugees, sought permission from President Roosevelt to dock at an American port, FDR had refused. Its passengers’ futures uncer- tain, the St. Louis was forced to return to Europe, where many would later be deported to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. American offi cials, along with those of most other nations, continued this exclusionist policy during World War II as the Nazi regime extended its control over millions of Eastern European Jews.

Various factors inhibited American action, but the most important was wide- spread anti-Semitism: in the State Department, Christian churches, and the public at large. Th e legacy of the immigration restriction legislation of the 1920s and the isola- tionist attitudes of the 1930s also discouraged policymakers from assuming responsi- bility for the fate of the refugees. Taking a narrow view of the national interest, the State Department allowed only 21,000 Jewish refugees to enter the United States dur- ing the war. But the War Refugee Board, which President Roosevelt established in 1944 at the behest of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, helped move 200,000 European Jews to safe havens in other countries.

The War in the Pacifi c Winning the war against Japan was every bit as arduous as waging the campaign against Germany. Aft er crippling the American battle fl eet at Pearl Harbor, the Japa- nese quickly expanded into the South Pacifi c, with seaborne invasions of Hong Kong,

C H A P T E R 2 4 The World at War, 1937–1945 719

Wake Island, and Guam. Japanese forces then advanced into Southeast Asia, conquer- ing the Solomon Islands, Burma, and Malaya and threatening Australia and India. By May 1942, they had forced the surrender of U.S. forces in the Philippine Islands and, in the Bataan “death march,” caused the deaths of 10,000 American prisoners of war.

At that dire moment, American naval forces scored two crucial victories. Th ese were possible because the attack on Pearl Harbor had destroyed several American battleships but left all aircraft carriers unscathed. In the Battle of the Coral Sea, off southern New Guinea in May 1942, they halted the Japanese off ensive against Austra- lia. Th en, in June, at the Battle of Midway Island, the American navy severely damaged the Japanese fl eet. In both battles, planes launched from American aircraft carriers provided the margin of victory. Th e U.S. military command, led by General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, now took the off ensive in the Pacifi c (Map 24.3). For the next eighteen months, American forces advanced slowly toward Japan, taking one island aft er another in the face of determined Japanese resistance. In October 1944, MacArthur and Nimitz began the reconquest of the Philippines by win- ning the Battle of Leyte Gulf, a massive naval encounter in which the Japanese lost practically their entire fl eet (Map 24.4).

By early 1945, victory over Japan was in sight. Japanese military forces had suff ered devastating losses, and American bombing of the Japanese homeland had killed 330,000 civilians and crippled the nation’s economy. Th e bloodletting on both sides was hor- rendous. On the small islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers fought to the death, killing 13,000 U.S. Marines and wounding 46,000 more. Desperate to halt the American advance and short on ammunition, Japanese pilots fl ew suicidal kamikaze missions, crashing their bomb-laden planes into American ships.

Among the grim realities of war in the Pacifi c was the confl ict’s racial overtones. Th e attack on Pearl Harbor reawakened the long tradition of anti-Asian sentiment in the United States. In the eyes of many Americans, the Japanese were “yellow monkeys,” an inferior race whose humanity deserved minimal respect. Racism was evident among the Japanese as well. Th eir brutal attacks on China (including the rape of Nan- jing), their forcing of Korean “comfort women” to have sex with Japanese soldiers, and their treatment of American prisoners in the Philippines fl owed from their own sense of racial superiority. Anti-Japanese attitudes in the United States would subside in the 1950s as the island nation became a trusted ally. But racism would again play a major role in the U.S. war in Vietnam in the 1960s.

As the American navy advanced on Japan in the late winter of 1945, President Roosevelt returned to the United States from the Yalta Conference, a major meeting of the Big Th ree at Yalta, a resort town on the Black Sea (Chapter 25). Th e sixty-three-year-old president was a sick man, visibly exhausted by his 14,000-mile trip and suff ering from heart failure and high blood pressure. On April 12, 1945, during a short visit to his vaca- tion home in Warm Springs, Georgia, Roosevelt suff ered a cerebral hemorrhage and died.

The Atomic Bomb and the End of the War When Harry Truman assumed the presidency, he learned for the fi rst time about the top-secret Manhattan Project, which was on the verge of testing a new weapon: the atomic bomb. Working at the University of Chicago in December 1942, Enrico Fermi

720 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

and Leo Szilard, refugees from fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, produced the fi rst controlled atomic chain reaction using highly processed uranium. With the aid of German-born refugee Albert Einstein, the greatest theorist of modern physics and a scholar at Princeton, they persuaded Franklin Roosevelt to develop an atomic weapon, warning that German scientists were also working on such nuclear reactions.

Th e Manhattan Project cost $2 billion, employed 120,000 people, and involved the construction of thirty-seven installations in nineteen states — with all of its activity hidden from Congress, the American people, and even Vice President Truman. Directed by General Leslie Graves and scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the nation’s top physicists assembled the fi rst bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and success- fully tested it on July 16, 1945. Overwhelmed by its frightening power, as he witnessed the fi rst mushroom cloud, Oppenheimer recalled the words from the Bhagavad Gita, one of the great texts of Hindu scripture: “I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”

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MAP 24.3 World War II in the Pacifi c, 1941–1942 After the attacks on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Japanese rapidly extended their domination in the Pacifi c. The Japanese fl ag soon fl ew as far east as the Marshall and Gilbert islands and as far south as the Solomon Islands and parts of New Guinea. Japan also controlled the Philippines, much of Southeast Asia, and parts of China, including Hong Kong. By mid-1942, American naval victories at the Coral Sea and Midway stopped further Japanese expansion.

C H A P T E R 2 4 The World at War, 1937–1945 721

Th ree weeks later, President Truman ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on two Japanese cities: Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. Truman’s ratio- nale for this order — and the implications of his decision — have long been the subject of scholarly and popular debate. Th e principal reason was straightforward: Truman and his American advisors, including Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall, believed that Japan’s military leaders would never surrender unless their country faced national ruin. Moreover, at the Potsdam Conference on the outskirts of Berlin in July 1945, the Allies had agreed that only the “unconditional surrender” of Japan was acceptable — the same terms under which Germany and Italy had been defeated. To win such a surrender, an invasion of Japan itself seemed necessary. Stimson and Marshall told Truman that such an invasion would produce between half a million and a million Allied casualties.

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MAP 24.4 World War II in the Pacifi c, 1943–1945 Allied forces retook the islands of the central Pacifi c in 1943 and 1944 and ousted the Japanese from the Philippines early in 1945. Carrier-launched planes had started bombing Japan itself in 1942, but the capture of these islands gave U.S. bombers more bases from which to strike Japanese targets. As the Soviet army invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria in August 1945, U.S. planes took off from one of the newly captured Mariana Islands to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese off ered to surrender on August 10.

722 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

The Big Three at Yalta With victory in Europe at hand, Roosevelt journeyed in February 1945 to Yalta, on the Black Sea, and met for what would be the fi nal time with Churchill and Stalin. The leaders discussed the important and controversial issues of the treatment of Germany, the status of Poland, the creation of the United Nations, and Russian entry into the war against Japan. The Yalta agreements mirrored a new balance of power and set the stage for the Cold War. Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.

Before giving the order to drop the atomic bomb, Truman considered other options. His military advisors rejected the most obvious alternative: a nonlethal dem- onstration of the bomb’s awesome power, perhaps on a remote Pacifi c island. If the demonstration failed — not out of the question, as the bomb had been tested only once — it would embolden Japan further. A detailed advance warning designed to scare Japan into surrender was also rejected. Given Japan’s tenacious fi ghting in the Pacifi c, the Americans believed that only massive devastation or a successful invasion would lead Japan’s military leadership to surrender. Aft er all, the deaths of more than 100,000 Japanese civilians in the U.S. fi rebombing of Tokyo and other cities in the spring of 1945 had brought Japan no closer to surrender.

In any event, the atomic bombs achieved the immediate goal. Th e deaths of 100,000 people at Hiroshima and 60,000 at Nagasaki prompted the Japanese govern- ment to surrender unconditionally on August 10 and to sign a formal agreement on

C H A P T E R 2 4 The World at War, 1937–1945 723

September 2, 1945. Fascism had been defeated, thanks to a fragile alliance between the capitalist nations of the West and the communist government of the Soviet Union. Th e coming of peace would strain and then destroy the victorious coalition. Even as the global war came to an end, the early signs of the coming Cold War were apparent, as were the stirrings of independence in the European colonies.

The Toll of the War Aft er the battle of Iwo Jima, one of the fi ercest and bloodiest of the Pacifi c war, a rabbi chaplain in the Marine Corps delivered the eulogy for the fallen. “Th is shall not be in vain,” he said, surveying a battlefi eld that witnessed the deaths of nearly 30,000 Ameri- can and Japanese soldiers. Speaking of American losses, he said, “from the suff ering and sorrow of those who mourn this, will come — we promise — the birth of a new freedom for the sons of man everywhere.” Th e toll of “suff ering and sorrow” from World War II was enormous. Worldwide, more than 50 million soldiers and civilians were killed, nearly 2.5 percent of the globe’s population. Th e Holocaust took the lives of 6 million European Jews, 2.6 million from Poland alone. Nearly 100 million addi- tional soldiers and civilians were wounded, and 30 million people across the globe were rendered homeless. It was one of the most wrenching, disruptive, and terrible wars in human history.

Alongside the human toll stood profound economic and political transforma- tions. Hundreds of cities in Europe and Asia had been bombed. Some of them, like Dresden, Warsaw, Hamburg, and Hiroshima, had been simply obliterated. Much of the industrial infrastructure of Germany and Japan, two of the world’s most important industrial economies before the war, lay in ruins. Moreover, despite emerging as one of the victors, Britain was no longer a global power. Th e independence movement in India was only the most obvious sign of its waning infl uence. Indeed, throughout the colonized world in Asia and Africa, people had taken the Atlantic Charter, and FDR’s insistence that this was a war for democracy, seriously. For them, resumption of Euro- pean imperialism was unacceptable, and the war represented a step toward national self-determination.

In the United States, too, the toll of war was great. More than 400,000 lives were lost, and nearly 300,000 American soldiers were wounded. Yet millions returned home, and in the coming decades veterans would play a central role in national life. Incredibly, in 1950 World War II veterans made up one-third of all American men over the age of nineteen. Only the Civil War involved a comparable commitment of mili- tary service from a generation. Americans paid dearly for that commitment — though not, it must be noted, as dearly as other peoples in Europe and Asia — and the legacies of the war shaped families, politics, and foreign policy for the remainder of the century.

How did the Allies disagree over military strategy?

What factors infl uenced Truman’s decision to use atomic weapons against Japan?

724 PA R T S E V E N Domestic and Global Challenges, 1890–1945

S U M M A RY Th e rise of fascism in Germany, Italy, and Japan led to the outbreak of World War II. Initially, the American public opposed U.S. intervention. But by 1940, President Roosevelt was mobilizing support for the military and preparing the country for war. Th e Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought the nation fully into the confl ict. War mobilization dramatically expanded the federal government and led to substantial economic growth. It also boosted geographical and social mobility as women, rural whites, and southern blacks found employment in new defense plants across the country. Government rules assisted both the labor movement and the Afri- can American campaign for civil rights. However, religious and racial animosity caused the exclusion of Jewish refugees and the internment of 112,000 Japanese Americans.

By 1942, Germany and Japan seemed to be winning the war. But in 1943, the Allies took the off ensive — with advances by the Soviet army in Europe and the Ameri- can navy in the Pacifi c — and by the end of 1944, Allied victory was all but certain. Germany fi nally surrendered in May 1945, and Japan surrendered in August, aft er the atomic bombing of the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Th e United States emerged from the war with an undamaged homeland, sole possession of the atomic bomb, and a set of unresolved diplomatic disputes with the Soviet Union that would soon lead to the four-decade-long Cold War. Federal laws and practices established during the war — the universal income tax, a huge military establishment, and multi- billion-dollar budgets, to name but a few — became part of American life. So, too, did the active participation of the United States in international politics and alliances, an engagement intensifi ed by the unresolved issues of the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union and the postwar fate of colonized nations.

Fo r Fu r t h e r E x p l o rat i o n Ronald A. Goldberg, America in the Forties (2012). An engaging account of the home front

during World War II. David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: Th e American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945

(1999). A fascinating exploration of both the domestic and military experience of World War II.

Elizabeth Mullener, War Stories: Remembering World War II (2002). Fift y-three personal sto- ries of war.

Emily Yellin, Our Mothers’ War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II (2004). Th e war seen from the point of view of women.

For documents and images related to the war, see “A People at War” and “Powers of Persua- sion: Poster Art from World War II” (archives.gov/exhibits/exhibits-list.html); “Women Come to the Front: Journalists, Photographers, and Broadcasters During World War II” (lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/wcf/wcf0001.html); “Th e Japanese American Legacy Project” (densho.org/densho.asp); and “Ansel Adams’s Photographs of Japanese-American Intern- ment at Manzanar” (memory.loc.gov/ammem/aamhtml).

“Th e Enola Gay Controversy: How Do We Remember a War Th at We Won?” at lehigh .edu/~ineng/enola. Lehigh University professor Edward J. Gallagher’s site on the decision to drop the atomic bomb.

C H A P T E R 2 4 The World at War, 1937–1945 725

T I M E L I N E

1933 Adolf Hitler becomes chancel- lor of Germany

1935 Italy invades Ethiopia 1935– U.S. Neutrality Acts 1937

1936 Germany reoccupies Rhineland demilitarized zone

Rome-Berlin Axis established 1937 Japan invades China 1938 Munich conference 1939 German-Soviet nonaggression

pact Germany invades Poland Britain and France declare war

on Germany 1940 Germany, Italy, and Japan form

alliance 1941 Germany invades Soviet Union Lend-Lease Act and Atlantic

Charter established Japanese attack Pearl Harbor

(December 7)

1942 Executive Order 9066 leads to Japanese internment camps

Battles of Coral Sea and Midway halt Japanese advance

1942– Rationing of scarce goods 1945

1943 Race riots in Detroit and Los Angeles

1944 D-Day: Allied landing in France (June 6)

1945 Yalta Conference (February) Germany surrenders (May 7) United Nations founded Potsdam Conference

(July–August) United States drops atomic

bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6 and 9)

Japan surrenders (August 10)

M AK E IT S T I C K

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PART 8 The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism 1945–1980

Between 1945 and 1980, the United States became the world’s leading eco-nomic and military power. Th at devel- opment defi nes these decades as a distinct period of American history. Internationally, a prolonged period of tension and confl ict known as the Cold War drew the United States into an engagement in world aff airs unprecedented in the nation’s history. Domes- tically, three decades of sustained economic growth, whose benefi ts were widely, though imperfectly, distributed, expanded the middle class and brought into being a mass consumer society. Th ese international and domestic developments were intertwined with the pre- dominance of liberalism in American politics and public policy. One might think of an “age of liberalism” in this era, encompassing the social-welfare liberalism that was a legacy of the New Deal and the rights liberalism of the 1960s, both of which fell under the larger umbrella of Cold War liberalism.

Global leadership abroad and economic prosperity at home were conditioned on further expansions in government power. How that power was used proved controver- sial. Immediately following World War II, a national security state emerged to investigate so-called subversives in the United States and, through the clandestine Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to destabilize foreign govern- ments abroad. Meanwhile, American troops went to war in Korea and Vietnam. At home, African Americans, women, the poor, and other social groups called for greater equality in American life and sought new laws and government initiatives to make that equality a reality. Here, in brief, are the three key dimen- sions of this convulsive, turbulent era.

Global Leadership and the Cold War

When the United States offi cially joined the combatants of World War II, it entered into an alliance with England and the Soviet Union. That alliance proved impos- sible to sustain after 1945, as the United States and the Soviet Union became competitors to shape postwar Europe, East Asia, and the developing world. The resulting Cold War lasted four decades, during which the United States extended its political and military reach onto every continent. Under the presidency of Harry S. Truman, American offi cials developed the policy of containment — a combi- nation of economic, diplomatic, and military actions to limit the expansion of communism — that subsequent presi- dents embraced and expanded.

Diplomatic and military intervention abroad was a hallmark of the Cold War. Most American interventions took place in developing countries, in recently indepen- dent, decolonized nations, and in countries where nationalist movements pressed for independence. In the name of preventing the spread of communism, the United States intervened directly or indirectly in China, Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Indonesia, and the Dominican Republic, among many other nations, and fought major wars in Korea and Vietnam. This new global role for the United States inspired support but also spurred detractors. The latter eventually included the antiwar movement during the war in Vietnam. Chapter 25 focuses on the Cold War, and Vietnam is addressed in Chapter 28.

727

The Age of Liberalism

In response to the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal expanded federal responsibility for the social welfare of ordinary citizens, sweeping away much of the laissez-faire individualism of earlier eras (see Chap- ter 23). Legislators from both parties embraced liberal ideas about the role of government and undertook such measures as the GI Bill, subsidies for suburban home ownership, and invest- ment in infrastructure and education. Poverty, however, aff ected nearly one-third of Americans in the 1960s, and racial discrimination denied millions of nonwhites full citizenship. Lack of opportu- nity became a driving force in the civil rights movement and in the Great Society under President Lyndon Johnson.

Inspired by African American civil rights, other social movements sought equality based on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and other identities. If “New Deal liberalism” had focused on social welfare, this “rights liberalism” focused on protecting people from discrimination and ensuring equal citizenship. These struggles resulted in new laws, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and transfor- mative Supreme Court decisions. Conser- vative opponents, however, mobilized in the 1960s against what they saw as the excesses of liberal activism. The resulting confl ict began to reshape politics in the 1970s and laid the groundwork for a new conservative resurgence. These develop- ments are discussed in Chapters 27 and 28.

Mass Consumption and the Middle Class

More than ever, the postwar American economy was driven by mass consump- tion and the accompanying process of suburbanization. Rising wages, increas- ing access to higher education, and the availability of suburban home ownership raised living standards and allowed more Americans than ever to aff ord consumer goods. Suburbanization transformed the nation’s cities, and the Sunbelt led the nation in population growth. But the new prosperity had mixed results. Cities declined and new racial and ethnic ghettos formed. Suburbanization and mass consumption raised concerns that the nation’s rivers, streams, air, and open land were being damaged, and an environmental movement arose in response. And prosperity itself proved short-lived. By the 1970s, deindustrializa- tion had eroded much of the nation’s once prosperous industrial base.

A defi ning characteristic of the postwar decades was the growth of the American middle class. That growth was predicated on numerous demographic changes. Home ownership increased, as did college enrollments. Women worked more outside the home and spurred a new feminism. Children enjoyed more purchasing power, and a “teen culture” arose on television, in popular music, and in fi lm. The family became politicized, too, and by the late 1970s, liberals and conservatives were divided over how best to address the nation’s family life. All these developments are discussed in Chapters 25 and 29.

728

Thematic Understanding:

This timeline arranges some of the important events of this period into themes. Consider the entries under “America in the World” and “Politics and Power” across all four decades. What connections were there between international developments and domestic politics in this era of the Cold War?

AMERICA IN THE WORLD

POLITICS & POWER 19

40 • Truman Doctrine

• Israel created (1947)

• Marshall Plan (1948)

• Containment strategy emerges

• NATO created; West Germany created (1949)

• GI Bill (1944)

• Loyalty-Security Program

• Taft-Hartley Act (1947)

• Truman reelected (1948)

• Truman’s Fair Deal (1949)

19 50 • Permanent mobilization as a

result of NSC-68

• Korean War (1950–1953)

• Geneva Accords regarding Vietnam (1954)

• Cold War liberalism

• McCarthyism and Red Scare

• Eisenhower’s presidency (1953–1961)

19 60 • Cuban missile crisis (1962)

• Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964)

• Johnson sends ground troops to Vietnam; war escalates (1965)

• Tet off ensive (1968); peace talks begin

• John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier

• John F. Kennedy assassinated (1963)

• Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide victory (1964)

• War on Poverty; Great Society

• Riots at Democratic National Convention (1968)

19 70 • Nixon invades Cambodia (1971)

• Paris Accords end Vietnam War (1973)

• Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel (1978)

• Iranian Revolution (1979) and hostage crisis (1979–1981)

• Richard Nixon’s landslide victory (1972)

• Watergate scandal; Nixon resigns (1974)

• Jimmy Carter elected president (1976)

• Moral Majority founded (1979)

729

IDENTITY ENVIRONMENT & GEOGRPAHY

WORK, EXCHANGE, & TECHNOLOGY

19 40 • To Secure These Rights (1947)

• Desegregation of armed services (1948)

• Shelley v. Kraemer (1948)

• Continued South-North migration of African Americans

• First Levittown opens (1947)

• FHA and VA subsidize suburbanization

• Bretton Woods system established: World Bank, International Monetary Fund

• Baby boom establishes new consumer generation

19 50 • Brown v. Board of Education

(1954)

• Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955)

• Little Rock — Central High School desegregation battle

• Southern Christian Leadership Conference founded (1957)

• Disneyland opens (1955)

• National Highway Act (1956)

• Growth of suburbia and Sunbelt

• Atomic bomb testing in Nevada and Pacifi c Ocean

• Treaty of Detroit (1950)

• Military-industrial complex begins to rise

• National Defense Education Act (1958) spurs development of technology

19 60 • Greensboro sit-ins

• The Feminine Mystique (1963)

• Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts (1964–1965)

• National Organization for Women founded (1966)

• Alcatraz occupation (1969)

• Black Power

• Student and antiwar activism

• Great Society environmental initiatives

• Urban riots (1964–1968)

• Kerner Commission Report (1968)

• Economic boom

• Government spending on Vietnam and Great Society

• Medicare and Medicaid created (1965)

19 70 • Equal Rights Amendment

(1972)

• Roe v. Wade (1973)

• Bakke v. University of California (1978)

• Harvey Milk assassinated (1978)

• First Earth Day (1970)

• Environmental Protection Agency established (1970)

• Endangered Species Act (1973)

• Three Mile Island accident (1979)

• Energy crisis (1973)

• Infl ation surges, while economy stagnates (stagfl ation)

• Deindustrialization

• Tax revolt in California (1978)

730

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25 Cold War America1945–1963 In the autumn of 1950, a little-known California congressman running for the Senate named Richard M. Nixon stood before reporters in Los Angeles. His opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, was a Hollywood actress and a New Deal Demo- crat. Nixon told the gathered reporters that Douglas had cast “Communist-leaning” votes and that she was “pink right down to her underwear.” Gahagan’s voting record was not much diff erent from Nixon’s. But

tarring her with communism made her seem un-American, and Nixon defeated the “pink lady” with nearly 60 percent of the vote.

A few months earlier, U.S. tanks, planes, and artillery supplies had arrived in French Indochina. A French colony since the nineteenth century, Indochina (present- day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) was home to an independence movement led by Ho Chi Minh and supported by the Soviet Union and China. In the summer of 1950, President Harry S. Truman authorized $15 million worth of military supplies to aid France, which was fi ghting Ho’s army to keep possession of its Indochinese empire. “Neither national independence nor democratic evolution exists in any area domi- nated by Soviet imperialism,” Secretary of State Dean Acheson warned ominously as he announced U.S. support for French imperialism.

Connecting these coincidental historical moments, one domestic and the other international, was a decades-old force in American life that gained renewed strength aft er World War II: anticommunism. Th e events in Los Angeles and Vietnam, however diff erent on the surface, were part of the global geopolitical struggle between the dem- ocratic United States and the communist, authoritarian Soviet Union known as the Cold War. Beginning in Europe as World War II ended and extending to Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa by the mid-1950s, the Cold War reshaped inter- national relations and dominated global politics for more than forty years.

In the United States, the Cold War fostered suspicion of “subversives” in government, education, and the media. Th e arms race that developed between the two superpowers prompted Congress to boost military expenditures. Th e resulting military-industrial complex enhanced the power of the corporations that built planes, munitions, and

IDENTIFY THE BIG IDEA In the fi rst two decades of the Cold War, how did competition on the international stage and a climate of fear at home aff ect politics, society, and culture in the United States?

C H A P T E R 2 5 Cold War America, 1945–1963 731

electronic devices. In politics, the Cold War stifl ed liberal initiatives as the New Deal coalition tried to advance its domestic agenda in the shadow of anticommunism. In these ways, the line between the international and the domestic blurred — and that blurred line was another enduring legacy of the Cold War.

Containment and a Divided Global Order Th e Cold War began on the heels of World War II and ended in 1991 with the dissolu- tion of the Soviet Union. While it lasted, this confl ict raised two critical questions at the center of global history: What conditions, and whose interests, would determine the balance of power in Europe and Asia? And how would the developing nations (the European colonies in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa) gain their independence and take their places on the world stage? Cold War rivalry framed the possible answers to both questions as it drew the United States into a prolonged engagement with world aff airs, unprecedented in the nation’s history, that continues to the present day.

Origins of the Cold War World War II set the basic conditions for the Cold War. With Germany and Japan defeated and Britain and France weakened by years of war, only two geopolitical pow- ers remained standing in 1945. Even had nothing divided them, the United States and the Soviet Union would have jostled each other as they moved to fi ll the postwar power vacuum. But, of course, the two countries were divided — by geography, history, ideol- ogy, and strategic interest. Little united them other than their commitment to defeat- ing the Axis powers. President Franklin Roosevelt understood that maintaining the U.S.-Soviet alliance was essential for postwar global stability. But he also believed that permanent peace and long-term U.S. interests depended on the Wilsonian principles of collective security, self-determination, and free trade (Chapter 21).

Yalta At the Yalta Conference of February 1945, Wilsonian principles yielded to U.S.- Soviet power realities. As Allied forces neared victory in Europe and advanced

toward Japan in the Pacifi c, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in Yalta, a resort in southern Ukraine on the Black Sea. Roosevelt focused on maintaining Allied unity and securing Stalin’s commitment to enter the war against Japan. But the fates of the nations of Eastern Europe divided the Big Th ree. Stalin insisted that Russian national security required pro-Soviet governments in Eastern Europe. Roosevelt pressed for an agree- ment, the “Declaration on Liberated Europe,” that guaranteed self-determination and democratic elections in Poland and neighboring countries, such as Romania and Hun- gary. However, given the presence of Soviet troops in those nations, FDR had to accept a pledge from Stalin to hold “free and unfettered elections” at a future time. Th e three leaders also formalized their commitment to divide Germany into four administrative zones, each controlled by one of the four Allied powers, and to similarly partition the capital city, Berlin, which was located in the middle of the Soviet zone.

At Yalta, the Big Th ree also agreed to establish an international body to replace the discredited League of Nations. Based on plans drawn up at the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks

732 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

conference in Washington, D.C., the new organization, to be known as the United Nations, would have both a General Assembly, in which all nations would be repre- sented, and a Security Council composed of the fi ve major Allied powers — the United States, Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union — and seven other nations elected on a rotating basis. Th e Big Th ree determined that the fi ve permanent members of the Security Council should have veto power over decisions of the General Assembly. Th ey announced that the United Nations would convene for the fi rst time in San Fran- cisco on April 25, 1945.

Potsdam Following the Yalta Conference, developments over the ensuing year fur- ther hardened relations between the Soviets on one side and the Ameri-

cans and British on the other. At the Potsdam Conference outside Berlin in July 1945, Harry Truman replaced the deceased Roosevelt. Inexperienced in world aff airs and

East Meets West With an “East Meets West” placard providing inspiration, Private Frank B. Huff of Virginia (on the left) and a Russian soldier shake hands. Huff was one of the fi rst four Americans to contact the Russians when the two armies met at the River Elbe (seen in the background of this photo) in eastern Germany, on April 25, 1945. The good will in evidence in the spring of 1945, as Americans and Russians alike celebrated the defeat of Nazi Germany, would within two short years be replaced by Cold War suspicion and hostility. © Bettmann/Corbis.

C H A P T E R 2 5 Cold War America, 1945–1963 733

thrown into enormously complicated negotiations, Truman’s instinct was to stand up to Stalin. “Unless Russia is faced with an iron fi st and strong language,” he said, “another war is in the making.” But Truman was in no position to realign events in Eastern Europe, where Soviet-imposed governments in Poland, Hungary, and Roma- nia were backed by the Red Army and could not be eliminated by Truman’s bluster. In Poland and Romania, in particular, Stalin was determined to establish communist governments, punish wartime Nazi collaborators, and win boundary concessions that augmented Soviet territory (the Soviet leader sought eastern Polish lands for the Soviet Union and sought to make far northeastern Germany part of Poland).

Yalta and Potsdam thus set the stage for communist rule to descend over Eastern Europe. Th e elections called for at Yalta eventually took place in Finland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia, with varying degrees of democratic openness. Never- theless, Stalin got the client regimes he desired in those countries and would soon exert near-complete control over their governments. Stalin’s unwillingness to honor self-determination for nations in Eastern Europe was, from the American point of view, the precipitating event of the Cold War.

Germany represented the biggest challenge of all. American offi cials at Potsdam believed that a revived German economy was essential to ensuring the prosperity of democratic regimes throughout Western Europe — and to keeping ordinary Germans from turning again to Nazism. In contrast, Stalin hoped merely to extract reparations from Germany in the form of industrial machines and goods. In exchange for recog- nizing the new German-Polish border, Truman and Secretary of State James Byrnes convinced the Soviet leader to accept German reparations only from the Soviet zone, which lay in the far eastern, and largely rural, portion of Germany and promised little wealth or German industry to plunder. As they had done for Europe as a whole, the Yalta and Potsdam agreements paved the way for the division of Germany into East and West (Map 25.1).

Yalta and Potsdam had demonstrated that in private negotiations the United States and the Soviet Union had starkly diff erent objectives. Subsequent public utter- ances only intensifi ed those diff erences. In February 1946, Stalin delivered a speech in which he insisted that, according to Marxist-Leninist principles, “the unevenness of development of the capitalist countries” was likely to produce “violent disturbance” and even another war. He seemed to blame any future war on the capitalist West. Churchill responded in kind a month later. While visiting Truman in Missouri to be honored for his wartime leadership, Churchill accused Stalin of raising an “iron cur- tain” around Eastern Europe and allowing “police government” to rule its people. He went further, claiming that “a fraternal association of English-speaking peoples,” and not Russians, ought to set the terms of the postwar world.

Th e cities and fi elds of Europe had barely ceased to run with the blood of World War II before they were menaced again by the tense standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States. With Stalin intent on establishing client states in Eastern Europe and the United States equally intent on reviving Germany and ensuring collective security throughout Europe, the points of agreement were few and far between. Among the Allies, anxiety about a Nazi victory in World War II had been quickly replaced by fear of a potentially more cataclysmic war with the Soviet Union.

734 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

The Containment Strategy In the late 1940s, American offi cials developed a clear strategy toward the Soviet Union that would become known as containment. Convinced that the USSR was methodi- cally expanding its reach, the United States would counter by limiting Stalin’s infl uence to Eastern Europe while reconstituting democratic governments in Western Europe. In 1946–1947, three specifi c issues worried Truman and his advisors. First, the Soviet Union was pressing Iran for access to oil and Turkey for access to the Mediterranean. Second, a civil war was roiling in Greece, between monarchists backed by England and insurgents supported by the Greek and Yugoslavian Communist parties. Th ird, as European nations suff ered through terrible privation in 1946 and 1947, Communist parties gained strength, particularly in France and Italy. All three developments, as seen from the United States, threatened to expand the infl uence of the Soviet Union outside of Eastern Europe.

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Berlin Divided

In 1947, America, Britain, and France merged their zones of occupation as West Berlin.

MAP 25.1 Cold War in Europe, 1955 This map vividly shows the Cold War division of Europe. The NATO countries (colored green) are allies of the United States; the Warsaw Pact countries (in purple) are allied to the USSR. At that point, West Germany had just been admitted to NATO, completing Europe’s stabilization into two rival camps. But Berlin remained divided, and one can see from its location deep in East Germany why the former capital was always a fl ash point in Cold War controversies.

C H A P T E R 2 5 Cold War America, 1945–1963 735

Toward an Uneasy Peace

In this anxious context, the strategy of containment emerged in a series of incremental steps between 1946 and 1949. In February 1946, American diplomat George F. Kennan fi rst proposed the idea in an

8,000-word cable — a confi dential message to the U.S. State Department — from his post at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Kennan argued that the Soviet Union was an “Oriental despotism” and that communism was merely the “fi g leaf ” justifying Soviet aggression. A year aft er writing this cable (dubbed the Long Tele- gram), he published an infl uential Foreign Aff airs article, arguing that the West’s only recourse was to meet the Soviets “with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.” Kennan called for “long-term, patient but fi rm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” Containment, the key word, came to defi ne Ameri- ca’s evolving strategic stance toward the Soviet Union.

Kennan believed that the Soviet system was inherently unstable and would even- tually collapse. Containment would work, he reasoned, as long as the United States and its allies opposed Soviet expansion in all parts of the world. Kennan’s attentive readers included Stalin himself, who quickly obtained a copy of the classifi ed Long Telegram. Th e Soviet leader saw the United States as an imperialist aggressor deter- mined to replace Great Britain as the world’s dominant capitalist power. Just as Kennan thought that the Soviet system was despotic and unsustainable, Stalin believed that the West suff ered from its own fatal weaknesses. Neither side completely understood or trusted the other, and each projected its worst fears onto the other.

In fact, Britain’s infl uence in the world was declining. Exhausted by the war, facing enormous budget defi cits and a collapsing economy at home, and confronted with a determined independence movement in India led by Mohandas Gandhi and growing nationalist movements throughout its empire, Britain was waning as a global power. “Th e reins of world leadership are fast slipping from Britain’s competent but now very weak hands,” read a U.S. State Department report. “Th ese reins will be picked up either by the United States or by Russia.” Th e United States was wedded to the notion — dating to the Wilson administration — that communism and capitalism were incom- patible on the world stage. With Britain faltering, American offi cials saw little choice but to fi ll its shoes.

It did not take long for the reality of Britain’s decline to resonate across the Atlan- tic. In February 1947, London informed Truman that it could no longer aff ord to sup- port the anticommunists in the Greek civil war. Truman worried that a communist victory in Greece would lead to Soviet domination of the eastern Mediterranean and embolden Communist parties in France and Italy. In response, the president announced what became known as the Truman Doctrine. In a speech on March 12, he asserted an American responsibility “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” To that end, Truman proposed large-scale assistance for Greece and Turkey (then involved in a dispute with the Soviet Union over the Dardanelles, a strait connecting the Aegean Sea and the Sea of Marmara). “If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world,” Truman declared. Despite the open-endedness of this military commitment,

To see a longer excerpt of the Long Telegram, along with other primary sources from this period, see Sources for America’s History.

736 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

Congress quickly approved Truman’s request for $300 million in aid to Greece and $100 million for Turkey.

Soviet expansionism was part of a larger story. Europe was sliding into economic chaos. Already devastated by the war, in 1947 the continent suff ered the worst winter in memory. People were starving, credit was nonexistent, wages were stagnant, and the consumer market had collapsed. For both humanitarian and practical reasons, Truman’s advisors believed something had to be done. A global depression might ensue if the European economy, the largest foreign market for American goods, did not recover. Worse, unemployed and dispirited Western Europeans might fi ll the ranks of the Communist Party, threatening political stability and the legitimacy of the United States. Secretary of State George C. Marshall came up with a remarkable proposal: a massive infusion of American capital to rebuild the European economy. Speaking at the Harvard University commencement in June 1947, Marshall urged the nations of Europe to work out a comprehensive recovery program based on U.S. aid.

Th is pledge of fi nancial assistance required congressional approval, but the plan ran into opposition in Washington. Republicans castigated the Marshall Plan as a huge “international WPA.” But in the midst of the congressional stalemate, on February 25, 1948, Stalin supported a communist-led coup in Czechoslovakia. Congress rallied and voted overwhelmingly in 1948 to approve the Marshall Plan. Over the next four years, the United States contributed nearly $13 billion to a highly successful recovery eff ort that benefi tted both Western Europe and the United States. European industrial pro- duction increased by 64 percent, and the appeal of Communist parties waned in the West. Markets for American goods grew stronger and fostered economic interdepen- dence between Europe and the United States. Notably, however, the Marshall Plan intensifi ed Cold War tensions. U.S. offi cials invited the Soviets to participate but insisted on certain restrictions that would virtually guarantee Stalin’s refusal. When Stalin refused, ordering Soviet client states to do so as well, the onus of dividing Europe appeared to fall on the Soviet leader and deprived his threadbare partners of assistance they sorely needed.

East and West in the New Europe

Th e fl ash point for a hot war remained Germany, the most impor- tant industrial economy and the key strategic landmass in Europe. When no agreement could be reached to unify the four zones of

occupation into a single state, the Western allies consolidated their three zones in 1947. Th ey then prepared to establish an independent federal German republic. Mar- shall Plan funds would jump-start economic recovery. Some of those funds were slated for West Berlin, in hopes of making the city a capitalist showplace 100 miles deep inside the Soviet zone.

Stung by the West’s intention to create a German republic, in June 1948 Stalin blockaded all traffi c to West Berlin. Instead of yielding, as Stalin had expected, Truman and the British were resolute. “We are going to stay, period,” Truman said plainly. Over the next year, American and British pilots, who had been dropping bombs on Berlin only four years earlier, improvised the Berlin Airlift , which fl ew 2.5 million tons of food and fuel into the Western zones of the city — nearly a ton for each resident. Mili- tary offi cials reported to Truman that General Lucius D. Clay, the American com-

C H A P T E R 2 5 Cold War America, 1945–1963 737

mander in Berlin, was nervous and on edge, “drawn as tight as a steel spring.” But aft er a prolonged stalemate, Stalin backed down: on May 12, 1949, he lift ed the blockade. Until the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the Berlin crisis was the closest the two sides came to actual war, and West Berlin became a symbol of resistance to communism.

Th e crisis in Berlin persuaded Western European nations to forge a collective security pact with the United States. In April 1949, for the fi rst time since the end of the American Revolution, the United States entered into a peacetime military alli- ance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Under the NATO pact, twelve nations — Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Iceland, Italy, Luxem- bourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United States — agreed that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be con- sidered an attack against them all.” In May 1949, those nations also agreed to the cre- ation of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), which eventually joined NATO in 1955. In response, the Soviet Union established the German Democratic Republic (East Germany); the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON); and, in 1955, the Warsaw Pact, a military alliance for Eastern Europe that included Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union. In these parallel steps, the two superpowers had institutionalized the Cold War through a massive division of the continent.

By the early 1950s, West and East were the stark markers of the new Europe. As Churchill had observed in 1946, the line dividing the two stretched “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” cutting off tens of millions of Eastern Europeans from the rest of the continent. Stalin’s tactics had oft en been ruthless, but they were not without reason. Th e Soviet Union acted out of the sort of self-interest that had long defi ned powerful nations — ensuring a defensive perimeter of allies, seeking access to raw materials, and pressing the advantage that victory in war allowed.

NSC-68 Atomic developments, too, played a critical role in the emergence of the Cold War. As the sole nuclear power at the end of World War II, the United

States entertained the possibility of international control of nuclear technology but did not wish to lose its advantage over the Soviet Union. When the American Bernard Baruch proposed United Nations oversight of atomic energy in 1946, for instance, the plan assured the United States of near-total control of the technology, which further increased Cold War tensions. America’s brief tenure as sole nuclear power ended in September 1949, however, when the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb. Truman then turned to the U.S. National Security Council (NSC), established by the National Security Act of 1947, for a strategic reassessment.

In April 1950, the NSC delivered its report, known as NSC-68. Bristling with alarmist rhetoric, the document marked a decisive turning point in the U.S. approach to the Cold War. Th e report’s authors described the Soviet Union not as a typical great power but as one with a “fanatic faith” that seeks to “impose its absolute authority.” Going beyond even the stern language used by George Kennan, NSC-68 cast Soviet ambitions as nothing short of “the domination of the Eurasian landmass.”

To prevent that outcome, the report proposed “a bold and massive program of rebuilding the West’s defensive potential to surpass that of the Soviet world” (America

738 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

Compared, p. 739). Th is included the development of a hydrogen bomb, a thermo- nuclear device that would be a thousand times more destructive than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, as well as dramatic increases in conventional military forces. Criti- cally, NSC-68 called for Americans to pay higher taxes to support the new military program and to accept whatever sacrifi ces were necessary to achieve national unity of

The Perils of the Cold War Americans, like much of the world, lived under the threat of nuclear warfare during the tense years of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. This 1951 civil defense poster, with the message “It can happen here,” suggests that Americans should be prepared for such a dire out- come. © Bettmann/Corbis.

A M E R I C A C O M PA R E D

739

A r m i n g f o r t h e C o l d Wa r To fi ght the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union increased overall military spending and assembled massive arsenals of nuclear weapons. In what ways does the data in this table suggest the emergence of two “superpowers” aft er World War II?

purpose against the Soviet enemy. Many historians see the report as having “milita- rized” the American approach to the Cold War, which had to that point relied largely on economic measures such as aid to Greece and the Marshall Plan. Truman was reluctant to commit to a major defense buildup, fearing that it would overburden the national budget. But shortly aft er NSC-68 was completed, events in Asia led him to reverse course.

Containment in Asia As with Germany, American offi cials believed that restoring Japan’s economy, while limiting its military infl uence, would ensure prosperity and contain communism in East Asia. Aft er dismantling Japan’s military, American occupation forces under General Douglas MacArthur draft ed a democratic constitution and paved the way for the restoration of Japanese sovereignty in 1951. Considering the scorched-earth war that had just ended, this was a remarkable achievement, thanks partly to the imperious

TABLE 25.1 Worldwide Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–1975

Country 1945 1955 1965 1975

United States 2 3,057 32,135 27,235 USSR 0 200 6,129 19,443 United Kingdom 0 10 310 350 France 0 0 32 188 China 0 0 5 185 Israel 0 0 0 20*

*Estimated SOURCES: Adapted from Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, National Resources Defense Council, and Nuclear Weapons and Nonproliferation (2007).

740 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

MacArthur but mainly to the Japanese, who embraced peace and accepted U.S. mili- tary protection. However, events on the mainland of Asia proved much more diffi cult for the United States to shape to its advantage.

Civil War in China A civil war had been raging in China since the 1930s as Commu- nist forces led by Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) fought Nationalist

forces under Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek). Fearing a Communist victory, between 1945 and 1949 the United States provided $2 billion to Jiang’s army. Pressing Truman to “save” China, conservative Republican Ohio senator Robert A. Taft predicted that “the Far East is ultimately even more important to our future peace than is Europe.” By 1949, Mao’s forces held the advantage. Truman reasoned that to save Jiang, the United States would have to intervene militarily. Unwilling to do so, he cut off aid and left the Nationalists to their fate. Th e People’s Republic of China was formally established under Mao on October 1, 1949, and the remnants of Jiang’s forces fl ed to Taiwan.

Both Stalin and Truman expected Mao to take an independent line, as the Com- munist leader Tito had just done in Yugoslavia. Mao, however, aligned himself with the Soviet Union, partly out of fear that the United States would re-arm the Nationalists and invade the mainland. As attitudes hardened, many Americans viewed Mao’s suc- cess as a defeat for the United States. Th e pro-Nationalist “China lobby” accused Tru- man’s State Department of being responsible for the “loss” of China. Sensitive to these charges, the Truman administration refused to recognize “Red China” and blocked China’s admission to the United Nations. But the United States pointedly declined to guarantee Taiwan’s independence, and in fact accepted the outcome on the mainland. (Since 1982, however, the United States has recognized Taiwanese sovereignty.)

The Korean War Th e United States took a stronger stance in Korea. Th e United States and the Soviet Union had agreed at the close of World War II to

occupy the Korean peninsula jointly, temporarily dividing the former Japanese colony at the 38th parallel. As tensions rose in Europe, the 38th parallel hardened into a permanent demarcation line. Th e Soviets supported a Communist government, led by Kim Il Sung, in North Korea; the United States backed a right-wing Nationalist, Syngman Rhee, in South Korea. Th e two sides had waged low-level war since 1945, and both leaders were spoiling for a more defi nitive fi ght. However, neither Kim nor Rhee could launch an all-out off ensive without the backing of his sponsor. Washington repeatedly said no, and so did Moscow. But Kim continued to press Stalin to permit him to reunify the nation. Convinced by the North Koreans that victory would be swift , the Soviet leader fi nally relented in the late spring of 1950.

On June 25, 1950, the North Koreans launched a surprise attack across the 38th parallel (Map 25.2). Truman immediately asked the UN Security Council to authorize a “police action” against the invaders. Th e Soviet Union was boycotting the Security Council to protest China’s exclusion from the United Nations and could not veto Truman’s request. With the Security Council’s approval of a “peacekeeping force,” Truman ordered U.S. troops to Korea. Th e rapidly assembled UN army in Korea was overwhelmingly American, with General Douglas MacArthur in command. At fi rst, the North Koreans held a distinct advantage, but MacArthur’s surprise amphibious

C H A P T E R 2 5 Cold War America, 1945–1963 741

attack at Inchon gave the UN forces control of Seoul, the South Korean capital, and almost all the territory up to the 38th parallel.

Th e impetuous MacArthur then ordered his troops across the 38th parallel and led them all the way to the Chinese border at the Yalu River. It was a major blunder, certain to draw China into the war. Sure enough, a massive Chinese counterattack forced MacArthur’s forces into headlong retreat back down the Korean peninsula. Th en stalemate set in. With weak public support for the war in the United States, Truman and his advisors decided to work for a negotiated peace. MacArthur disagreed and denounced the Korean stalemate, declaring, “Th ere is no substitute for victory.” On April 11, 1951, Truman relieved MacArthur of his command. Truman’s decision was highly unpopular, especially among conservative Republicans, but he had likely saved the nation from years of costly warfare with China.

Notwithstanding MacArthur’s dismissal, the war dragged on for more than two years. An armistice in July 1953, pushed by the newly elected president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, left Korea divided at the original demarcation line. North Korea remained fi rmly allied with the Soviet Union; South Korea signed a mutual defense treaty with the United States. It had been the fi rst major proxy battle of the Cold War, in which the Soviet Union and United States took sides in a civil confl ict. It would not be the last.

The Korean War As a result of President Truman’s 1948 Executive Order 9981, for the fi rst time in the nation’s history all troops in the Korean War served in racially integrated combat units. This photo taken during the Battle of Ch’ongch’on in 1950 shows a sergeant and his men of the 2nd Infantry Division. National Archives.

742 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

Th e Korean War had far-reaching consequences. Truman’s decision to commit troops without congressional approval set a precedent for future undeclared wars. His refusal to unleash atomic bombs, even when American forces were reeling under a massive Chinese attack, set ground rules for Cold War confl ict. Th e war also expanded American involvement in Asia, transforming containment into a truly global policy — and signifi cantly boosting Japan’s struggling postwar economy. Finally, the Korean War ended Truman’s resistance to a major military buildup. Defense expenditures grew from $13 billion in 1950, roughly one-third of the federal budget, to $50 billion in 1953, nearly two-thirds of the budget. American foreign policy had become more global, more militarized, and more expensive. Even in times of peace, the United States now functioned in a state of permanent military mobilization.

Sporadic fighting turned into full-scale war when North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel (1), the post–World War II boundary between occupation zones. Northern forces pushed until stopped at the defense perimeter around the port of Pusan on the southern tip of the Korean peninsula (2).

Chinese troops entered the conflict (4), pushing battle lines back into South Korea (5). United States, United Nations, and South Korean forces quickly regained most of the territory to the 38th parallel. The armistice of July 1953 created a demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the two armies, making the 38th parallel the border separating the two Koreas, a boundary that remains heavily militarized on both sides.

In a surprise move, United States forces under General Douglas MacArthur landed at Inchon, near Seoul (3), threatening to cut off supply routes of the North Koreans. As North Korean forces retreated, South Korean, United States, and United Nations forces pushed them deep into North Korea.

1

2

3

4

5

0 100 kilometers50

0 100 miles50

N

S

EW

North Korean forces U.S. and UN forces Farthest North Korean advance, Sept. 1950 Farthest U.S. advance, Oct.–Nov. 1950 Chinese intervention, Oct. 1950 Chinese advance, 1951

Yellow Sea

Naktong R.

Sea of

Japan Ya

lu

R.

Armistice line July 7, 1953

U.S. landing Sept. 1950

38th Parallel

CHINA

NORTH KOREA

SOUTH KOREA

SOVIET UNION

JAPAN

Cheju Do (KOREA)

Tsushima (JAPAN)

Pyongyang

Sinuiju

Chosan

Chongjin

Iwon

Wonsan

Vladivostok

SeoulInchon

Taejon

Kunsan

Taegu

Pohang

Panmunjom

Kaesong Chunchon

Pusan

�

�

MAP 25.2 The Korean War, 1950–1953 The Korean War, which the United Nations offi cially deemed a “police action,” lasted three years and cost the lives of more than 36,000 U.S. troops. South and North Korean deaths were estimated at more than 900,000. Although hostilities ceased in 1953, the South Korean Military (with U.S. military assistance) and the North Korean Army continue to face each other across the demilitarized zone, more than fi fty years later.

C H A P T E R 2 5 Cold War America, 1945–1963 743

The Munich Analogy Behind much of U.S. foreign policy in the fi rst two decades of the Cold War lay the memory of appeasement (Chapter 24). Th e gen-

eration of politicians and offi cials who designed the containment strategy had come of age in the shadow of Munich, the conference in 1938 at which the Western democracies had appeased Hitler by off ering him part of Czechoslovakia, paving the road to World War II. Applying the lessons of Munich, American presidents believed that “appeasing” Stalin (and subsequent Soviet rulers Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev) would have the same result: wider war. Th us in Germany, Greece, and Korea, and later in Iran, Guate- mala, and Vietnam, the United States staunchly resisted the Soviets — or what it perceived as Soviet infl uence. Th e Munich analogy strength- ened the U.S. position in a number of strategic confl icts, particularly over the fate of Germany. But it also drew Americans into armed confl icts — and convinced them to support repressive, right- wing regimes — that compromised, as much as supported, stated American principles.

Cold War Liberalism Harry Truman cast himself in the mold of his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt, and hoped to seize the possibilities aff orded by victory in World War II to expand the New Deal at home. But the crises in postwar Europe and Asia, combined with the spectacu- lar rise of anticommunism in the United States, forced him to take a diff erent path. In the end, Truman went down in history not as a New Dealer, but as a Cold Warrior. Th e Cold War consensus that he ultimately embraced — the notion that resisting commu- nism at home and abroad represented America’s most important postwar objective — shaped the nation’s life and politics for decades to come.

Truman and the End of Reform Truman and the Democratic Party of the late 1940s and early 1950s forged what histo- rians call Cold War liberalism. Th ey preserved the core programs of the New Deal welfare state, developed the containment policy to oppose Soviet infl uence throughout the world, and fought so-called subversives at home. But there would be no second act for the New Deal. Th e Democrats adopted this combination of moderate liberal poli- cies and anticommunism — Cold War liberalism — partly by choice and partly out of necessity. A few high-level espionage scandals and the Communist victories in Eastern Europe and China reenergized the Republican Party, which forced Truman and the Democrats to retreat to what historian Arthur Schlesinger called the “vital center” of American politics. However, Americans on both the progressive left and the conserva- tive right remained dissatisfi ed with this development. Cold War liberalism was a practical centrist policy for a turbulent era. But it would not last.

Organized labor remained a key force in the Democratic Party and played a cen- tral role in championing Cold War liberalism. Stronger than ever, union membership

Why did the United States enact the Marshall Plan, and how did the program illustrate America’s new role in the world?

How did U.S. containment strategy in Asia compare to con- tainment in Europe?

744 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

swelled to more than 14 million by 1945. Determined to make up for their wartime sacrifi ces, unionized workers made aggressive demands and mounted major strikes in the automobile, steel, and coal industries aft er the war. Republicans responded. Th ey gained control of the House in a sweeping repudiation of Democrats in 1946 and promptly passed — over Truman’s veto — the Taft -Hartley Act (1947), an overhaul of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act.

Taft -Hartley craft ed changes in procedures and language that, over time, weak- ened the right of workers to organize and engage in collective bargaining. Unions especially disliked Section 14b, which allowed states to pass “right-to-work” laws pro- hibiting the union shop. Additionally, the law forced unions to purge communists, who had been among the most successful labor organizers in the 1930s, from their ranks. Taft -Hartley eff ectively “contained” the labor movement. Trade unions would continue to support the Democratic Party, but the labor movement would not move into the largely non-union South and would not extend into the many American industries that remained unorganized.

The 1948 Election Democrats would have dumped Truman in 1948 had they found a better candidate. But the party fell into disarray. Th e left wing

split off and formed the Progressive Party, nominating Henry A. Wallace, an avid New Dealer whom Truman had fi red as secretary of commerce in 1946 because Wallace opposed America’s actions in the Cold War. A right-wing challenge came from the South. When northern liberals such as Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey of Min- neapolis pushed through a strong civil rights platform at the Democratic convention, the southern delegations bolted and, calling themselves Dixiecrats, nominated for president South Carolina governor Strom Th urmond, an ardent supporter of racial segregation. Th e Republicans meanwhile renominated Th omas E. Dewey, the politi- cally moderate governor of New York who had run a strong campaign against FDR in 1944.

Truman surprised everyone. He launched a strenuous cross-country speaking tour and hammered away at the Republicans for opposing progressive legislation and, in general, for running a “do-nothing” Congress. By combining these issues with attacks on the Soviet menace abroad, Truman began to salvage his troubled campaign. At his rallies, enthusiastic listeners shouted, “Give ’em hell, Harry!” Truman won, receiving 49.6 percent of the vote to Dewey’s 45.1 percent.

Th is remarkable election foreshadowed coming political turmoil. Truman occu- pied the center of FDR’s sprawling New Deal coalition. On his left were progressives, civil rights advocates, and anti–Cold War peace activists. On his right were segrega- tionist southerners, who opposed civil rights and were allied with Republicans on many economic and foreign policy issues. In 1948, Truman performed a delicate balancing act, largely retaining the support of Jewish and Catholic voters in the big cities, black voters in the North, and organized labor voters across the country. But Th urmond’s strong showing — he carried four states in the Deep South — demonstrated the fragile nature of the Democratic coalition and prefi gured the revolt of the party’s southern wing in the 1960s. As he tried to manage contending forces in his own party, Truman faced mounting pressure from Republicans to denounce radicals at home and to take a tough stand against the Soviet Union.

C H A P T E R 2 5 Cold War America, 1945–1963 745

The Fair Deal Despite having to perform a balancing act, Truman and progressive Democrats forged ahead. In 1949, reaching ambitiously to extend the

New Deal, Truman proposed the Fair Deal: national health insurance, aid to educa- tion, a housing program, expansion of Social Security, a higher minimum wage, and a new agricultural program. In its attention to civil rights, the Fair Deal also refl ected the growing role of African Americans in the Democratic Party. Congress, however, remained a huge stumbling block, and the Fair Deal fared poorly. Th e same conserva- tive coalition that had blocked Roosevelt’s initiatives in his second term continued the fi ght against Truman’s. Cold War pressure shaped political arguments about domestic social programs, while the nation’s growing paranoia over internal subversion weak- ened support for bold extensions of the welfare state. Truman’s proposal for national health insurance, for instance, was a popular idea, with strong backing from organized labor. But it was denounced as “socialized medicine” by the American Medical Asso- ciation and the insurance industry. In the end, the Fair Deal’s only signifi cant break- through, other than improvements to the minimum wage and Social Security, was the National Housing Act of 1949, which authorized the construction of 810,000 low- income units.

Red Scare: The Hunt for Communists Cold War liberalism was premised on the grave domestic threat posed, many believed, by Communists and Communist sympathizers. Was there any signifi cant Soviet pen- etration of the American government? Records opened aft er the 1991 disintegration of the Soviet Union indicate that there was, although it was largely confi ned to the 1930s. Among American suppliers of information to Moscow were FDR’s assistant secretary of the treasury, Harry Dexter White; FDR’s administrative aide Laughlin Currie; a stra- tegically placed midlevel group in the State Department; and several hundred more, some identifi ed only by code name, working in a range of government departments and agencies.

How are we to explain this? Many of these enlistees in the Soviet cause had been bright young New Dealers in the mid-1930s, when the Soviet-backed Popular Front suggested that the lines separating liberalism, progressivism, and communism were permeable (Chapter 24). At that time, the United States was not at war and never expected to be. And when war did come, the Soviet Union was an American ally. For critics of the informants, however, there remained the time between the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the German invasion of the Soviet Union, a nearly two-year period during which cooperation with the Soviet Union could be seen in a less positive light. More- over, passing secrets to another country, even a wartime ally, was simply indefensible to many Americans. Th e lines between U.S. and Soviet interests blurred for some; for others, they remained clear and defi nite.

Aft er World War II, however, most suppliers of information to the Soviets appar- ently ceased spying. For one thing, the professional apparatus of Soviet spying in the United States was dismantled or disrupted by American counterintelligence work. For another, most of the well-connected amateur spies moved on to other careers. Histo- rians have thus developed a healthy skepticism that there was much Soviet espionage in the United States aft er 1947, but this was not how many Americans saw it at the

746 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

time. Legitimate suspicions and real fears, along with political opportunism, com- bined to fuel the national Red Scare, which was longer and more far-reaching than the one that followed World War I (Chapter 22).

Loyalty-Security Program

To insulate his administration against charges of Communist infi l- tration, Truman issued Executive Order 9835 on March 21, 1947, which created the Loyalty-Security Program. Th e order permitted

offi cials to investigate any employee of the federal government (some 2.5 million people) for “subversive” activities. Representing a profound centralization of power, the order sent shock waves through every federal agency. Truman intended the order to apply principally to actions designed to harm the United States (sabotage, treason, etc.), but it was broad enough to allow anyone to be accused of subversion for the slightest reason — for marching in a Communist-led demonstration in the 1930s, for instance, or signing a petition calling for public housing. Along with suspected politi- cal subversives, more than a thousand gay men and lesbians were dismissed from fed- eral employment in the 1950s, victims of an obsessive search for anyone deemed “unfi t” for government work.

Following Truman’s lead, many state and local governments, universities, political organizations, churches, and businesses undertook their own antisubversion cam- paigns, which oft en included loyalty oaths. In the labor movement, charges of Com- munist domination led to the expulsion of a number of unions by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1949. Civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League also expelled Communists and “fellow travelers,” or Communist sympathizers. Th us the Red Scare spread from the federal government to the farthest reaches of American organizational, economic, and cultural life (American Voices, p. 747).

HUAC Th e Truman administration had legitimized the vague and malleable concept of “disloyalty.” Others proved willing to stretch the concept even further, begin-

ning with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which Congress- man Martin Dies of Texas and other conservatives had launched in 1938. Aft er the war, HUAC helped spark the Red Scare by holding widely publicized hearings in 1947 on alleged Communist infi ltration in the movie industry. A group of writers and directors dubbed the Hollywood Ten went to jail for contempt of Congress aft er they refused to testify about their past associations. Hundreds of other actors, directors, and writers whose names had been mentioned in the HUAC investigation were unable to get work, victims of an unacknowledged but very real blacklist honored by industry executives.

Other HUAC investigations had greater legitimacy. One that intensifi ed the anti- communist crusade in 1948 involved Alger Hiss, a former New Dealer and State Department offi cial who had accompanied Franklin Roosevelt to Yalta. A former Communist, Whitaker Chambers, claimed that Hiss was a member of a secret Com- munist cell operating in the government and had passed him classifi ed documents in the 1930s. Hiss denied the allegations, but California Republican congressman Richard Nixon doggedly pursued the case against him. In early 1950, Hiss was found guilty not of spying but of lying to Congress about his Communist affi liations and was sentenced to fi ve years in federal prison. Many Americans doubted at the time that Hiss was a

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S

747

R e d H u n t i n g o n t h e Q u i z S h o w s M A R K G O O D S O N Active in the television industry from its earliest days, Mark Goodson was a highly successful producer whose game shows included What’s My Line?, To Tell the Truth, and Family Feud. In this interview, Goodson recalls his experience in the industry in the early 1950s at the height of the McCarthy period.

I’m not sure when it began, but I believe it was early 1950. At that point I had no connection with the blacklisting that was going on, although I heard about it in the motion picture business and heard rumors about things that had happened on other shows, like Th e Aldrich Family. . . .

Soon aft erwards, CBS installed a clearance division. Th ere wasn’t any discussion. We would just get the word — “drop that person” — and that was supposed to be it. Whenever I booked a guest or a panelist on What’s My Line? or I’ve Got a Secret, one of our assistants would phone up and say, “We’re going to use so-and-so.” We’d either get the okay, or they’d call back and say, “Not clear,” or “Sorry, we can’t use them.” . . . You were never supposed to tell the person what it was about; you’d just unbook them. Th ey never admitted there was a blacklist. It just wasn’t done. . . .

Anna Lee was an English actress on a later show of ours called It’s News to Me. Th e sponsor was Sanka Coff ee, a product of General Foods. Th e advertising agency was Young & Rubicam. One day, I received a call telling me we had to drop one of our panelists, Anna Lee, immediately. Th ey said she was a radical, that she wrote a column for the Daily Worker. Th ey couldn’t allow that kind of stuff on the air. Th ey claimed they were getting all kinds of mail. It seemed incongruous to me that this little English girl, someone who seemed very conservative, would be writing for a Commu- nist newspaper. It just didn’t sound right.

I took her out to lunch. Aft er a little social conversation, I asked her about her politics. She told me that she wasn’t political, except she voted Conservative in England. Her husband was a Republican from Texas.

I went to the agency and said, “You guys are really off your rocker. Anna Lee is nothing close to a liberal.” Th ey told me, “Oh, you’re right. We checked on that. It’s a diff erent Anna Lee who writes for the Daily Worker.” I remember being relieved and saying, “Well, that’s good. You just made a mistake. Now we can forget this.” But that wasn’t the case. Th ey told me, “We’ve still got to get rid of her, because the illusion is just as good as the reality. If our client continues to get the mail, no one is going to believe him when he says there’s a second Anna Lee.” At that point I lost it. I told them their demand was outrageous. Th ey could cancel the show if they wanted to, but I would not drop somebody whose only crime was sharing a name. When I got back to my offi ce, there was a phone call waiting for me. It was from a friend of mine at the agency. He said, “If I were you, I would not lose my temper like that. If you want to argue, do it quietly. Aft er you left , somebody said, ‘Is Goodson a pinko?’ ”

SOURCE: From Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition, An Oral History by Griffi n Fariello. Copyright © 1995 by Griffi n Fariello. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company.

748 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

spy. But the Venona transcripts in the 1990s corroborated a great deal of Chambers’s testimony, and though no defi nitive proof has emerged, many historians now recog- nize the strong circumstantial evidence against Hiss.

McCarthyism Th e meteoric career of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin marked fi rst the apex and then the fi nale of the Red Scare. In February 1950,

McCarthy delivered a bombshell during a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia: “I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” McCarthy later reduced his numbers, gave diff erent fi gures in diff erent speeches, and never released any names or proof. But he had gained the attention he sought.

For the next four years, from his position as chair of the Senate Permanent Sub- committee on Investigations, McCarthy waged a virulent smear campaign. Critics who disagreed with him exposed themselves to charges of being “soft ” on commu- nism. Truman called McCarthy’s charges “slander, lies, [and] character assassination” but could do nothing to curb him. Republicans, for their part, refrained from publicly challenging their most outspoken senator and, on the whole, were content to reap the political benefi ts. McCarthy’s charges almost always targeted Democrats.

Despite McCarthy’s failure to identify a single Communist in government, several national developments gave his charges credibility with the public. Th e dramatic 1951 espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, followed around the world, fueled McCarthy’s allegations. Convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, the Rosenbergs were executed in 1953. As in the Hiss case, documents released decades later provided some evidence of Julius Rosenberg’s guilt, though not Ethel’s. Th eir execution nevertheless remains controversial — in part because some felt that anti- Semitism played a role in their sentencing. Also fueling McCarthy’s charges were a series of trials of American Communists between 1949 and 1955 for violation of the 1940 Smith Act, which prohibited Americans from advocating the violent overthrow of the government. Th ough civil libertarians and two Supreme Court justices vigor- ously objected, dozens of Communist Party members were convicted. McCarthy was not involved in either the Rosenberg trial or the Smith Act convictions, but these sen- sational events gave his wild charges some credence.

In early 1954, McCarthy overreached by launching an investigation into subver- sive activities in the U.S. Army. When lengthy hearings — the fi rst of their kind broad- cast on the new medium of television — brought McCarthy’s tactics into the nation’s living rooms, support for him plummeted. In December 1954, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to censure McCarthy for unbecoming conduct. He died from an alcohol-related illness three years later at the age of forty-eight, his name forever attached to a period of political repression of which he was only the most fl agrant manifestation.

The Politics of Cold War Liberalism As election day 1952 approached, the nation was embroiled in the tense Cold War with the Soviet Union and fi ghting a “hot” war in Korea. Th ough Americans gave the Republicans victory, radical change was not in the offi ng. Th e new president, Dwight D.

C H A P T E R 2 5 Cold War America, 1945–1963 749

Eisenhower, set the tone for what his supporters called modern Republicanism, an updated GOP approach that aimed at moderating, not dismantling, the New Deal state. Eisenhower and his supporters were more successors of FDR than of Herbert Hoover. Foreign policy revealed a similar continuity. Like their predecessors, Republi- cans saw the world in Cold War polarities.

Republicans rallied around Eisenhower, the popular former commander of Allied forces in Europe, but divisions in the party persisted. More conservative party activists preferred Robert A. Taft of Ohio, the Republican leader in the Senate who was a vehe- ment opponent of the New Deal. A close friend of business, he particularly detested labor unions. Th ough an ardent anticommunist, the isolationist-minded Taft criti- cized Truman’s aggressive containment policy and opposed U.S. participation in NATO. Taft ran for president three times, and though he was never the Republican

The Army-McCarthy Hearings These 1954 hearings contributed to the downfall of Senator Joseph McCarthy by exposing his reckless accusations and bullying tactics to the huge television audience that tuned in each day. Some of the most heated exchanges took place between McCarthy (center) and Joseph Welch (seated, left), the lawyer representing the army. When the gentlemanly Welch fi nally asked, “Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” he fatally punctured McCarthy’s armor. The audience broke into applause because someone had fi nally had the courage to stand up to the senator from Wisconsin. © Bettmann/Corbis.

750 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

nominee, he won the loyalty of conservative Americans who saw the welfare state as a waste and international aff airs as dangerous foreign entanglements.

In contrast, moderate Republicans looked to Eisenhower and even to more liberal-minded leaders like Nelson Rockefeller, who supported international initia- tives such as the Marshall Plan and NATO and were willing to tolerate labor unions and the welfare state. Eisenhower was a man without a political past. Believing that democracy required the military to stand aside, he had never voted. Rockefeller, the scion of one of the richest families in America, was a Cold War internationalist. He served in a variety of capacities under Eisenhower, including as an advisor on foreign aff airs. Having made his political name, Rockefeller was elected the governor of New York in 1959 and became the de facto leader of the liberal wing of the Republican Party.

For eight years, between 1952 and 1960, Eisenhower steered a precarious course from the middle of the party, with conservative Taft Republicans on one side and lib- eral Rockefeller Republicans on the other. His popularity temporarily kept the two sides at bay, though more ardent conservatives considered him a closet New Dealer. “Ike,” as he was widely known, proved willing to work with the mostly Democratic- controlled Congresses of those years. Eisenhower signed bills increasing federal out- lays for veterans’ benefi ts, housing, highway construction (Chapter 26), and Social Security, and he increased the minimum wage from 75 cents an hour to $1. Like Truman, Eisenhower accepted some government responsibility for the economic security of individuals, part of a broad consensus in American politics in these years.

America Under Eisenhower

Th e global power realities that had called forth containment guided Eisenhower’s foreign policy. New developments, however, altered the tone of the Cold War. Stalin’s death in March 1953 precipitated an

intraparty struggle in the Soviet Union that lasted until 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev emerged as Stalin’s successor. Khrushchev soon startled communists around the world by denouncing Stalin and detailing his crimes and blunders. He also surprised many Americans by calling for “peaceful coexistence” with the West and by dealing more fl exibly with dissent in the Communist world. But the new Soviet leader had his limits, and when Hungarians rose up in 1956 to demand independence from Moscow, Khrushchev crushed the incipient revolution.

With no end to the Cold War in sight, Eisenhower focused on limiting the cost of containment. Th e president hoped to economize by relying on a nuclear arsenal and deemphasizing expensive conventional forces. Under this “New Look” defense policy, the Eisenhower administration stepped up production of the hydrogen bomb and developed long-range bombing capabilities. Th e Soviets, however, matched the United States weapon for weapon. By 1958, both nations had intercontinental ballistic mis- siles. When an American nuclear submarine launched an atomic-tipped Polaris mis- sile in 1960, Soviet engineers raced to produce an equivalent weapon. Th is arms race

was another critical feature of the Cold War. Ameri- can offi cials believed the best deterrent to Soviet aggression was the threat of an all-out nuclear response by the United States, which was dubbed “massive retaliation” by Secretary of State Dulles.

To see a longer excerpt of the Dulles document, along with other primary sources from this period, see Sources for America’s History.

C H A P T E R 2 5 Cold War America, 1945–1963 751

Although confi dent in the international arena, Eisenhower started out as a novice in domestic aff airs. Doing his best to set a less confrontational tone aft er the rancorous Truman years, he was reluctant to speak out against Joe McCarthy, and he was not a leader on civil rights. Democrats meanwhile maintained a strong presence in Con- gress but proved weak in presidential elections in the 1950s. In the two presidential contests of the decade, 1952 and 1956, Eisenhower defeated the admired but politically ineff ectual liberal Adlai Stevenson. In the 1952 election, Stevenson was hampered by the unpopularity of the Truman administration. Th e deadlocked Korean War and a series of scandals that Republicans dubbed “the mess in Washington” combined to give the war-hero general an easy victory. In 1956, Ike won an even more impressive victory over Stevenson, an eloquent and sophisticated spokesman for liberalism but no match for Eisenhower’s popularity with the public.

During Eisenhower’s presidency, new political forces on both the right and the left had begun to stir. But they had not yet fully transformed the party system itself. Par- ticularly at the national level, Democrats and Republicans seemed in broad agreement about the realities of the Cold War and the demands of a modern, industrial economy and welfare state. Indeed, respected commentators in the 1950s declared “the end of ideology” and wondered if the great political clashes that had wracked the 1930s were gone forever. Below the apparent calm of national party politics, however, lay profound diff erences among Americans over the direc- tion of the nation. Th ose diff erences were most pronounced regarding the civil rights of Afri- can Americans. But a host of other issues had begun to emerge as controversial subjects that would soon starkly divide the country and, in the 1960s, bring an end to the brief and fragile Cold War consensus.

Containment in the Postcolonial World As the Cold War took shape, the world scene was changing at a furious pace. New nations were emerging across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, created in the wake of powerful anticolonial movements whose origins dated to before World War II. Between 1947 and 1962, the British, French, Dutch, and Belgian empires all but disin- tegrated in a momentous collapse of European global reach. FDR had favored the idea of national self-determination, oft en to the fury of his British and French allies. He expected emerging democracies to be new partners in an American-led, free-market world system. But colonial revolts produced many independent- or socialist-minded regimes in the so-called Th ird World, as well. Th ird World was a term that came into usage aft er World War II to describe developing or ex-colonial nations in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East that were not aligned with the Western capitalist countries led by the United States or the socialist states of Eastern Europe led by the Soviet Union. Th e Truman and Eisenhower administrations oft en treated Th ird World countries as pawns of the Soviet Union to be opposed at all costs.

What factors led to the postwar Red Scare, and what were its ramifi cations for civil liberties in the United States?

What were the components of Cold War liberalism, and why did the Democratic Party embrace them?

752 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

The Cold War and Colonial Independence Insisting that all nations had to choose sides, the United States drew as many countries as possible into collective security agreements, with the NATO alliance in Europe as a model. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles orchestrated the creation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), which in 1954 linked the United States and its major European allies with Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Th ailand. An extensive system of defense alliances eventually tied the United States to more than forty other countries (Map 25.3). Th e United States also sponsored a strate- gically valuable defensive alliance between Iraq and Iran, on the southern fl ank of the Soviet Union.

Despite American rhetoric, the United States was oft en concerned less about democracy than about stability. Th e Truman and Eisenhower administrations tended

0 1,000 2,000 kilometers

0 1,000 2,000 miles

N

S

EW

Rio Treaty: Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, signed 1947

Argentina, Bahamas, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican

Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua,

Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, Venezuela

NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organization, signed in 1949

Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg,

Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom,

United States, West Germany

ANZUS: Australia, New Zealand, U.S. signed 1951

SEATO: Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, signed 1954;

disbanded in 1977

Australia, France, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States

CENTO: Central Treaty Organization, signed 1959;

disbanded, 1979 Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, United

Kingdom, United States (associate member) South Korea Mutual Defense

Treaty: signed 1953

Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty: signed 1951

PACIFIC OCEAN

ATLANTIC OCEAN

INDIAN OCEAN

PACIFIC OCEAN

UNITED STATES

BRAZIL

JAPAN

PHILIPPINES

UNITED KINGDOM

AUSTRALIA

MEXICO

COLOMBIA VENEZUELA

CANADA

ICELAND

RUSSIA

IRAN

PERU

ARGENTINA

BOLIVIA

NEW ZEALAND

THAILAND

PAKISTAN

TURKEY

MAP 25.3 American Global Defense Treaties in the Cold War Era The advent of the Cold War led to a major shift in American foreign policy — the signing of mutual defense treaties. Dating back to George Washington’s call “to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world,” the United States had avoided treaty obligations that entailed the defense of other nations. As late as 1919, the U.S. Senate had rejected the principle of “collective security,” the centerpiece of the League of Nations established by the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. But after World War II, in response to fears of Soviet global expansion, the United States entered defense alliances with much of the non-Communist world.

C H A P T E R 2 5 Cold War America, 1945–1963 753

to support governments, no matter how repressive, that were overtly anticommunist. Some of America’s staunchest allies — the Philippines, South Korea, Iran, Cuba, South Vietnam, and Nicaragua — were governed by dictatorships or right-wing regimes that lacked broad-based support. Moreover, Eisenhower’s secretary of state Dulles oft en resorted to covert operations against governments that, in his opinion, were too closely aligned with the Soviets.

For these covert tasks, Dulles used the newly created (1947) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), run by his brother, Allen Dulles. When Iran’s democratically elected nationalist premier, Mohammad Mossadegh, seized British oil properties in 1953, CIA agents helped depose him and installed the young Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as shah of Iran. Iranian resentment of the coup, followed by twenty-fi ve years of U.S. support for the shah, eventually led to the 1979 Iranian Revolution (Chapter 30). In 1954, the CIA also engineered a coup in Guatemala against the democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, who had seized land owned by the American-owned United Fruit Company. Arbenz off ered to pay United Fruit the declared value of the land, but the company rejected the off er and turned to the U.S. government. Eisenhower specifi - cally approved those CIA eff orts and expanded the agency’s mandate from gathering intelligence to intervening in the aff airs of sovereign states.

Vietnam But when covert operations and coups failed or proved impractical, the American approach to emerging nations could entangle the United States

in deeper, more intractable confl icts. One example was already unfolding on a distant stage, in a small country unknown to most Americans: Vietnam. In August 1945, at the close of World War II, the Japanese occupiers of Vietnam surrendered to China in the north and Britain in the south. Th e Vietminh, the nationalist movement that had led the resistance against the Japanese (and the French, prior to 1940), seized control in the north. But their leader, Ho Chi Minh, was a Communist, and this single fact outweighed American and British commitment to self-determination. When France moved to restore its control over the country, the United States and Britain sided with their European ally. President Truman rejected Ho’s plea to support the Vietnamese struggle for nationhood, and France rejected Ho’s off er of a negotiated independence. Shortly aft er France returned, in late 1946, the Vietminh resumed their war of national liberation.

Eisenhower picked up where Truman left off . If the French failed, Eisenhower argued, all non-Communist governments in the region would fall like dominoes. Th is so-called domino theory — which represented an extension of the containment doctrine — guided U.S. policy in Southeast Asia for the next twenty years. Th e United States eventually provided most of the fi nancing for the French war, but money was not enough to defeat the determined Vietminh, who were fi ghting for the liberation of their country. Aft er a fi fty-six-day siege in early 1954, the French were defeated at the huge fortress of Dien Bien Phu. Th e result was the 1954 Geneva Accords, which parti- tioned Vietnam temporarily at the 17th parallel and called for elections within two years to unify the strife-torn nation.

Th e United States rejected the Geneva Accords and set about undermining them. With the help of the CIA, a pro-American government took power in South Vietnam in June 1954. Ngo Dinh Diem, an anticommunist Catholic who had been residing in

754 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

the United States, returned to Vietnam as premier. Th e next year, in a rigged election, Diem became president of an independent South Vietnam. Facing certain defeat by the popular Ho Chi Minh, Diem called off the scheduled reunifi cation elections. As the last French soldiers left in March 1956, the Eisenhower administration propped up Diem with an average of $200 million a year in aid and a contingent of 675 American military advisors. Th is support was just the beginning.

The Middle East If Vietnam was still of minor concern, the same could not be said of the Middle East, an area rich in oil and political complexity. Th e

most volatile area was Palestine, populated by Arabs but also historically the ancient land of Israel and coveted by the Zionist movement as a Jewish national homeland. Aft er World War II, many survivors of the Nazi extermination camps resettled in Palestine, which was still controlled by Britain under a World War I mandate. On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine between Jewish and Arab sectors. When the British mandate ended in 1948, Zionist leaders proclaimed the state of Israel. A coalition of Arab nations known as the Arab League invaded, but Israel survived. Many Palestinians fl ed or were driven from their homes during the fi ghting. Th e Arab defeat left these people permanently stranded in refu- gee camps. President Truman recognized the new state immediately, which won him crucial support from Jewish voters in the 1948 election but alienated the Arab world.

Southeast of Palestine, Egypt began to assert its presence in the region. Having gained independence from Britain several decades earlier, Egypt remained a monar- chy until 1952, when Gamal Abdel Nasser led a military coup that established a con- stitutional republic. Caught between the Soviet Union and the United States, Nasser sought an independent route: a pan-Arab socialism designed to end the Middle East’s colonial relationship with the West. When negotiations with the United States over Nasser’s plan to build a massive hydroelectric dam on the Nile broke down in 1956, he nationalized the Suez Canal, which was the lifeline for Western Europe’s oil. Britain and France, in alliance with Israel, attacked Egypt and seized the canal. Concerned that the invasion would encourage Egypt to turn to the Soviets for help, Eisenhower urged France and Britain to pull back. He applied additional pressure through the UN General Assembly, which called for a truce and troop withdrawal. When the Western nations backed down, however, Egypt reclaimed the Suez Canal and built the Aswan Dam on the Nile with Soviet support. Eisenhower had likely avoided a larger war, but the West lost a potential ally in Nasser.

In early 1957, concerned about Soviet infl uence in the Middle East, the president announced the Eisenhower Doctrine, which stated that American forces would assist any nation in the region that required aid “against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by International Communism.” Invoking the doctrine later that year, Eisenhower helped King Hussein of Jordan put down a Nasser-backed revolt and propped up a pro-American government in Lebanon. Th e Eisenhower Doctrine was further evidence that the United States had extended the global reach of containment, in this instance accentuated by the strategic need to protect the West’s access to steady supplies of oil.

C H A P T E R 2 5 Cold War America, 1945–1963 755

John F. Kennedy and the Cold War Charisma, style, and personality — these, more than platforms and issues, defi ned a new brand of politics in the early 1960s. Th is was John F. Kennedy’s natural environment. Kennedy, a Harvard alumnus, World War II hero, and senator from Massachusetts, had inherited his love of politics from his grandfathers — colorful, and oft en ruthless, Irish Catholic politicians in Boston. Ambitious and deeply aware of style, the forty-three-year- old Kennedy made use of his many advantages to become, as novelist Norman Mailer put it, “our leading man.” His one disadvantage — that he was Catholic in a country that had never elected a Catholic president — he masterfully neutralized. And thanks to both media advisors and his youthful attractiveness, Kennedy projected a superb television image.

At heart, however, Kennedy was a Cold Warrior who had come of age in the shadow of Munich, Yalta, and McCarthyism. He projected an air of idealism, but his years in the Senate (1953–1960) had proved him to be a conventional Cold War politi- cian. Once elected president, Kennedy would shape the nation’s foreign policy by drawing both on his ingenuity and on old-style Cold War power politics.

The Election of 1960 and the New Frontier

Kennedy’s Republican opponent in the 1960 presidential elec- tion, Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, was a seasoned politician and Cold Warrior himself. Th e great innovation of the

1960 campaign was a series of four nationally televised debates. Nixon, less photogenic than Kennedy, looked sallow and unshaven under the intense studio lights. Voters who heard the fi rst debate on the radio concluded that Nixon had won, but those who viewed it on television favored Kennedy. Despite the edge Kennedy enjoyed in the debates, he won only the narrowest of electoral victories, receiving 49.7 percent of the popular vote to Nixon’s 49.5 percent. Kennedy attracted Catholics, African Americans, and the labor vote; his vice-presidential running mate, Texas senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, helped bring in southern Democrats. Yet only 120,000 votes separated the two candidates, and a shift of a few thousand votes in key states would have reversed the outcome.

Kennedy brought to Washington a cadre of young, ambitious newcomers, includ- ing Robert McNamara, a renowned systems analyst and former head of Ford Motor Company, as secretary of defense. A host of trusted advisors and academics fl ocked to Washington to join the New Frontier — Kennedy’s term for the challenges the country faced. Included on the team as attorney general was Kennedy’s younger brother Robert, who had made a name as a hard-hitting investigator of organized crime. Rely- ing on an old American trope, Kennedy’s New Frontier suggested masculine tough- ness and adventurism and encouraged Americans to again think of themselves as exploring uncharted terrain. Th at terrain proved treacherous, however, as the new administration immediately faced a crisis.

Crises in Cuba and Berlin

In January 1961, the Soviet Union announced that it intended to sup- port “wars of national liberation” wherever in the world they occurred. Kennedy took Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s words as a chal-

lenge, especially as they applied to Cuba, where in 1959 Fidel Castro had overthrown the right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista and declared a revolution. Determined to

756 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

keep Cuba out of the Soviet orbit, Kennedy followed through on Eisenhower adminis- tration plans to dispatch Cuban exiles to foment an anti-Castro uprising. Th e invad- ers, trained by the Central Intelligence Agency, were ill-prepared for their task. On landing at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961, the force of 1,400 was crushed by Castro’s troops. Kennedy prudently rejected CIA pleas for a U.S. air strike. Accepting defeat, Kennedy went before the American people and took full responsibility for the fi asco.

Already strained by the Bay of Pigs incident, U.S.-Soviet relations deteriorated further in June 1961 when Khrushchev stopped movement between Communist- controlled East Berlin and the city’s Western sector. Kennedy responded by dispatch- ing 40,000 more troops to Europe. In mid-August, to stop the exodus of East Germans, the Communist regime began constructing the Berlin Wall, policed by border guards under shoot-to-kill orders. Until the 12-foot-high concrete barrier came down in 1989, it served as the supreme symbol of the Cold War.

A perilous Cold War confrontation came next, in October 1962. In a somber tele- vised address on October 22, Kennedy revealed that U.S. reconnaissance planes had spotted Soviet-built bases for intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. Some of those weapons had already been installed, and more were on the way. Kennedy announced that the United States would impose a “quarantine on all off ensive military equipment” on its way to Cuba. As the world held its breath waiting to see if the con- fl ict would escalate into war, on October 25, ships carrying Soviet missiles turned back. Aft er a week of tense negotiations, both sides made concessions: Kennedy pledged not to invade Cuba, and Khrushchev promised to dismantle the missile bases. Kennedy also secretly ordered U.S. missiles to be removed from Turkey, at Khrushchev’s insistence. Th e risk of nuclear war, greater during the Cuban missile crisis than at any other time in the Cold War, prompted a slight thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations. As National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy put it, both sides were chastened by “having come so close to the edge.”

Kennedy and the World

Kennedy also launched a series of bold nonmilitary initiatives. One was the Peace Corps, which embodied a call to public service put forth in his inaugural address (“Ask not what your country can do for you,

but what you can do for your country”). Th ousands of men and women agreed to devote two or more years as volunteers for projects such as teaching English to Filipino schoolchildren or helping African villagers obtain clean water. Exhibiting the idealism of the early 1960s, the Peace Corps was also a low-cost Cold War weapon intended to show the developing world that there was an alternative to communism. Kennedy championed space exploration, as well. In a 1962 speech, he proposed that the nation commit itself to landing a man on the moon within the decade. Th e Soviets had already beaten the United States into space with the 1957 Sputnik satellite and the 1961 fl ight of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Capitalizing on America’s fascination with space, Kennedy persuaded Congress to increase funding for the government’s space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), enabling the United States to pull ahead of the Soviet Union. Kennedy’s ambition was realized when U.S. astro- nauts arrived on the moon in 1969.

C H A P T E R 2 5 Cold War America, 1945–1963 757

Making a Commitment in Vietnam Despite slight improvements, U.S.-Soviet relations stayed tense and containment remained the cornerstone of U.S. policy. When Kennedy became president, he inher- ited Eisenhower’s commitment in Vietnam. Kennedy saw Vietnam in Cold War terms, but rather than practicing brinksmanship — threatening nuclear war to stop communism — Kennedy sought what at the time seemed a more intelligent and real- istic approach. In 1961, he increased military aid to the South Vietnamese and expanded the role of U.S. Special Forces (“Green Berets”), who would train the South Vietnamese army in unconventional, small-group warfare tactics.

South Vietnam’s corrupt and repressive Diem regime, propped up by Eisenhower since 1954, was losing ground in spite of American aid. By 1961, Diem’s opponents, with backing from North Vietnam, had formed a revolutionary movement known as the National Liberation Front (NLF). NLF guerrilla forces — the Vietcong — found allies among peasants alienated by Diem’s “strategic hamlet” program, which had uprooted entire villages and moved villagers into barbed-wire compounds. Further- more, Buddhists charged Diem, a Catholic, with religious persecution. Starting in May 1963, militant Buddhists staged dramatic demonstrations, including self-immolations

The Cuban Missile Crisis During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy meets with U.S. Army offi cials. Over two tense weeks, the world watched as the United States and the Soviet Union went to the brink of war when it became known that Soviet military offi cials had begun to construct nuclear weapons bases in Cuba, a mere 90 miles from the southern tip of Florida. Kennedy’s threat to intercept Soviet missile shipments with American naval vessels forced the Cold War adversary to back down. © Corbis.

758 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

recorded by reporters covering the activities of the 16,000 U.S. military personnel then in Vietnam.

Th ese self-immolations, shown on television to an uneasy global audience, power- fully illustrated the dilemmas of American policy in Vietnam. To ensure a stable southern govern- ment and prevent victory for Ho Chi Minh and the North, the United States had to support Diem’s authoritarian regime. But the regime’s political repression of its opponents made Diem more unpopular. He was assassinated on Novem- ber 3, 1963. Whether one supported U.S. involve- ment in Vietnam or not, the elemental paradox remained unchanged: in its eff orts to win, the United States brought defeat ever closer.

S U M M A RY Th e Cold War began as a confl ict between the United States and the Soviet Union over Eastern Europe and the fate of post–World War II Germany. Early in the confl ict, the United States adopted a strategy of containment, which quickly expanded to Asia aft er China became a communist state under Mao Zedong. Th e fi rst eff ect of that expansion was the Korean War, aft er which, under Dwight D. Eisenhower, containment of com- munism became America’s guiding principle across the developing world — oft en called the Th ird World. Cold War tensions relaxed in the late 1950s but erupted again under John F. Kennedy with the Cuban missile crisis, the building of the Berlin Wall, and major increases in American military assistance to South Vietnam. Cold War imperatives between 1945 and the early 1960s meant a major military buildup, a mas- sive nuclear arms race, and unprecedented entanglements across the globe.

On the domestic front, Harry S. Truman started out with high hopes for an expanded New Deal, only to be confounded by resistance from Congress and the com- peting demands of the Cold War. Th e greatest Cold War–inspired development was a climate of fear over internal subversion by Communists that gave rise to McCarthy- ism. Truman’s successor, Eisenhower, brought the Republicans back into power. Although personally conservative, Eisenhower actually proved a New Dealer in dis- guise. When Eisenhower left offi ce and Kennedy became president, it seemed that a “liberal consensus” prevailed, with old-fashioned, laissez-faire conservatism mostly marginalized in American political life.

Fo r Fu r t h e r E x p l o rat i o n John Lewis Gaddis, Th e Cold War: A New History (2005), and Walter LaFeber, America, Russia,

and the Cold War, 1945–2006, 10th ed. (2008). Excellent overviews of the Cold War from distinct perspectives.

John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (1999). A thoughtful analysis of Soviet espionage.

How did the Cold War between the United Sates and the Soviet Union aff ect disparate regions such as the Middle East and Southeast Asia?

How was Kennedy’s approach to the Cold War similar to and diff erent from Eisenhower’s and Truman’s?

C H A P T E R 2 5 Cold War America, 1945–1963 759

W. J. Rorabaugh, Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties (2002). A good starting point for Kennedy’s presidency.

Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998). An excellent, de- tailed account of the McCarthy period.

Th e Center for the Study of the Pacifi c Northwest’s site, “Th e Cold War and Red Scare in Wash- ington State,” at washington.edu/uwired/outreach/cspn/Website/ClassroomMaterials /CurriculumPackets/ColdWar&RedScare/ColdWarandRedScare.html, provides detailed information on how the Red Scare operated in one state.

Th e Woodrow Wilson International Center has established the Cold War International His- tory Project at wilsoncenter.org/cwihp.

T I M E L I N E

1945 End of World War II; Yalta and Potsdam conferences

Senate approves U.S. participa- tion in United Nations

1946 George F. Kennan outlines containment policy

U.S. sides with French in war between French and Vietminh over control of Vietnam

1947 Truman Doctrine House Un-American Activities

Committee (HUAC) investi- gates fi lm industry

1948 Communist coup in Czechoslovakia

Marshall Plan aids economic recovery in Europe

State of Israel created Stalin blockades West Berlin;

Berlin Airlift begins 1949 North Atlantic Treaty Organiza-

tion (NATO) founded Soviet Union detonates atomic

bomb Mao Zedong establishes

People’s Republic of China

1950– Korean War 1953

1950 NSC-68 leads to nuclear buildup

Joseph McCarthy announces “list” of Communists in government

1952 Dwight D. Eisenhower elected president

1954 Army-McCarthy hearings on army subversion

Geneva Accords partition Vietnam

1956 Nikita Khrushchev emerges as Stalin’s successor

Suez Canal crisis 1960 John F. Kennedy elected

president 1961 Kennedy orders the fi rst

contingent of Special Forces (“Green Berets”) to Vietnam

1963 Diem assassinated in South Vietnam

M AK E IT S T I C K

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26 Triumph of the Middle Class 1945–1963 At the height of the Cold War, in 1959, U.S. vice president Richard Nixon debated Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev on the merits of Pepsi- Cola, TV dinners, and electric ovens. Face-to-face at the opening of an Ameri- can exhibition in Moscow, Nixon and Khrushchev strolled through a model American home, assembled to demon- strate the consumer products available to the typical citizen of the United States.

Nixon explained to Khrushchev that although the Soviet Union may have had supe- rior rockets, the United States was ahead in other areas, such as color television.

Th is was Cold War politics by other means — a symbolic contest over which coun- try’s standard of living was higher. What was so striking about the so-called kitchen debate was Nixon’s insistence, to a disbelieving Khrushchev, that a modern home fi lled with shiny new toasters, televisions, and other consumer products was accessible to the average American worker. “Any steelworker could buy this house,” Nixon told the Soviet leader. Th e kitchen debate settled little in the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. But it speaks to us across the decades because it reveals how Americans had come to see themselves by the late 1950s: as home owners and consumers, as a people for whom the middle-class American Dream was a commercial aspiration.

Th e real story of the postwar period was the growing number of Americans who embraced that aspiration. In the two decades following the end of World War II, a new middle class was born in the United States. Fortune magazine estimated that in the 1950s, the middle class — which Fortune defi ned as families with more than $5,000 in annual earnings aft er taxes (about $40,000 today) — was increasing at the rate of 1.1 million people per year. Riding a wave of rising incomes, American dominance in the global economy, and Cold War federal spending, the postwar middle class enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world.

However, the success of the middle class could not hide deeper troubles. Th is was an era of neither universal conformity nor diminishing social strife. Jim Crow laws, contradictions in women’s lives, a rebellious youth culture, and changing sexual mores were only the most obvious sources of social tension. Suburban growth came at the

IDENTIFY THE BIG IDEA Why did consumer culture become such a fi xture of American life in the postwar decades, and how did it aff ect politics and society?

C H A P T E R 2 6 Triumph of the Middle Class, 1945–1963 761

expense of cities, hastening urban decay and exacerbating racial segregation. Nor was prosperity ever as widespread as the Moscow exhibit implied. Th e suburban lifestyle was beyond the reach of the working poor, the elderly, immigrants, Mexican Ameri- cans, and most African Americans — indeed, the majority of the country.

Postwar Prosperity and the Affl uent Society Th e United States enjoyed enormous economic advantages at the close of World War II. While the Europeans and Japanese were still clearing the war’s rubble, America stood poised to enter a postwar boom. As the only major industrial nation not devas- tated by war, the United States held an unprecedented global position. Th e American economy also benefi tted from an expanding internal market and heavy investment in research and development. Two additional developments stood out: First, for the fi rst time in the nation’s history, employers generally accepted collective bargaining, which for workers translated into rising wages, expanding benefi ts, and an increasing rate of home ownership. Second, the federal government’s outlays for military and domestic programs gave a huge boost to the economy.

The Kitchen Debate At the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959, the United States put on display the tech- nological wonders of American home life. When Vice President Richard Nixon visited, he and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev got into a heated debate over the relative merits of their rival systems, with the up-to-date American kitchen as a case in point. This photograph shows the debate in progress. Khrushchev is the bald man pointing his fi nger at Nixon. To Nixon’s left stands Leonid Brezhnev, who would be Khrushchev’s successor. Getty Images.

762 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

Economy: From Recovery to Dominance U.S. corporations, banks, and manufacturers so dominated the global economy that the postwar period has been called the Pax Americana (a Latin term meaning “Ameri- can Peace” and harking back to the Pax Romana of the fi rst and second centuries a.d.). Life magazine publisher Henry Luce was so confi dent in the nation’s growing power that during World War II he had predicted the dawning of the “American century.” Th e preponderance of American economic power in the postwar decades, however, was not simply an artifact of the world war — it was not an inevitable development. Several key elements came together, internationally and at home, to propel three decades of unprecedented economic growth.

The Bretton Woods System

American global supremacy rested partly on the economic institu- tions created at an international conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944. Th e fi rst of those institutions was the World

Bank, created to provide loans for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe as well as for the development of former colonized nations — the so-called Th ird World or develop- ing world. A second institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), was set up to stabilize currencies and provide a predictable monetary environment for trade, with the U.S. dollar serving as the benchmark. Th e World Bank and the IMF formed the cornerstones of the Bretton Woods system, which guided the global economy aft er the war.

Th e Bretton Woods system was joined in 1947 by the fi rst General Agreement on Tariff s and Trade (GATT), which established an international framework for oversee- ing trade rules and practices. Together, the Bretton Woods system and GATT served America’s conception of an open-market global economy and complemented the nation’s ambitious diplomatic aims in the Cold War. Th e chief idea of the Bretton Woods system was to make American capital available, on cheap terms, to nations that adopted free-trade capitalist economies. Critics charged, rightly, that Bretton Woods and GATT favored the United States at the expense of recently independent countries, because the United States could dictate lending terms and stood to benefi t as nations purchased more American goods. But the system provided needed economic stability.

The Military- Industrial Complex

A second engine of postwar prosperity was defense spending. In his fi nal address to the nation in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke about the power of what he called the military-

industrial complex, which by then employed 3.5 million Americans. Even though his administration had fostered this defense establishment, Eisenhower feared its implica- tions: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted infl uence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” he said. Th is complex had its roots in the business-government partnerships of World War II. Aft er 1945, though the country was nominally at peace, the economy and the government operated in a state of perpetual readiness for war.

Based at the sprawling Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, the Defense Department evolved into a massive bureaucracy. In the name of national security, defense-related industries entered into long-term relationships with the Pentagon. Some companies

C H A P T E R 2 6 Triumph of the Middle Class, 1945–1963 763

did so much business with the government that they in eff ect became private divisions of the Defense Department. Over 60 percent of the income of Boeing, General Dynam- ics, and Raytheon, for instance, came from military contracts, and the percentages were even higher for Lockheed and Republic Aviation. In previous peacetime years, military spending had constituted only 1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP); now it represented 10 percent. Economic growth was increasingly dependent on a robust defense sector.

As permanent mobilization took hold, science, industry, and government became intertwined. Cold War competition for military supremacy spawned both an arms race and a space race as the United States and the Soviet Union each sought to develop more explosive bombs and more powerful rockets. Federal spending underwrote 90 percent of the cost of research for aviation and space, 65 percent for electricity and electronics, 42 percent for scientifi c instruments, and even 24 percent for automobiles. With the government footing the bill, corporations lost little time in transforming new technology into useful products. Backed by the Pentagon, for instance, IBM and Sperry Rand pressed ahead with research on integrated circuits, which later spawned the computer revolution.

When the Soviet Union launched the world’s fi rst satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, the startled United States went into high gear to catch up in the Cold War space competi- tion. Alarmed that the United States was falling behind in science and technology, Eisenhower persuaded Congress to appropriate additional money for college scholar- ships and university research. Th e National Defense Education Act of 1958 funneled millions of dollars into American universities, helping institutions such as the Univer- sity of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- nology, and the University of Michigan become the leading research centers in the world.

Corporate Power Despite its massive size, the military-corporate partnership was only one part of the nation’s economy. For over half a century, the

consolidation of economic power into large corporate fi rms had characterized Ameri- can capitalism. In the postwar decades, that tendency accelerated. By 1970, the top four U.S. automakers produced 91 percent of all motor vehicles sold in the country; the top four fi rms in tires produced 72 percent; those in cigarettes, 84 percent; and those in detergents, 70 percent. Eric Johnston, former president of the American Chamber of Commerce, declared that “we have entered a period of accelerating big- ness in all aspects of American life.” Expansion into foreign markets also spurred cor- porate growth. During the 1950s, U.S. exports nearly doubled, giving the nation a trade surplus of close to $5 billion in 1960. By the 1970s, such fi rms as Coca-Cola, Gillette, IBM, and Mobil made more than half their profi ts abroad.

To staff their bureaucracies, the postwar corporate giants required a huge white- collar army. A new generation of corporate chieft ains emerged, operating in a complex environment that demanded long-range forecasting. Companies turned to the univer- sities, which grew explosively aft er 1945. Postwar corporate culture inspired numerous critics, who argued that the obedience demanded of white-collar workers was stifl ing creativity and blighting lives. In Th e Lonely Crowd (1950), the sociologist David Riesman mourned a lost masculinity and contrasted the independent businessmen

764 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

and professionals of earlier years with the managerial class of the postwar world. Th e sociologist William Whyte painted a somber picture of “organization men” who left the home “spiritually as well as physically to take the vows of organization life.” Andrew Hacker, in Th e Corporation Take-Over (1964), warned that a small handful of such organization men “can draw up an investment program calling for the expenditure of several billions of dollars” and thereby “determine the quality of life for substantial segments of society.”

Many of these “investment programs” relied on mechanization, or automation — another important factor in the postwar boom. From 1947 to 1975, worker productiv- ity more than doubled across the whole of the economy. American factories replaced manpower with machines, substituting cheap fossil energy for human muscle. As industries mechanized, they could turn out products more effi ciently and at lower cost. Mechanization did not come without social costs, however. Over the course of the postwar decades, millions of high-wage manufacturing jobs were lost as machines replaced workers, aff ecting entire cities and regions. Corporate leaders approved, but workers and their union representatives were less enthusiastic. “How are you going to sell cars to all of these machines?” wondered Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW).

The Economic Record Th e American economy produced an extraordinary postwar record. Annual GDP jumped from $213 billion in 1945 to more

than $500 billion in 1960; by 1970, it exceeded $1 trillion. Th is sustained economic growth meant a 25 percent rise in real income for ordinary Americans between 1946 and 1959. Even better, the new prosperity featured low infl ation. Aft er a burst of high prices in the immediate postwar period, infl ation slowed to 2 to 3 percent annually, and it stayed low until the escalation of the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s. Feeling secure about the future, Americans were eager to spend and rightly felt that they were better off than ever before. In 1940, 43 percent of American families owned their homes; by 1960, 62 percent did. In that period, moreover, income inequality dropped sharply. Th e share of total income going to the top tenth — the richest Americans — declined by nearly one-third from the 45 percent it had been in 1940. American soci- ety had become not only more prosperous but also more egalitarian.

However, the picture was not as rosy at the bottom, where tenacious poverty accompanied the economic boom. In Th e Affl uent Society (1958), which analyzed the nation’s successful, “affl uent” middle class, economist John Kenneth Galbraith argued that the poor were only an “aft erthought” in the minds of economists and politicians, who largely celebrated the new growth. As Galbraith noted, one in thirteen families at the time earned less than $1,000 a year (about $7,500 in today’s dollars). Four years later, in Th e Other America (1962), the left -wing social critic Michael Harrington chronicled “the economic underworld of American life,” and a U.S. government study, echoing a well-known sentence from Franklin Roosevelt’s second inaugural address (“I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished”), declared “one-third of the nation” to be poorly paid, poorly educated, and poorly housed. It appeared that in economic terms, as the top and the middle converged, the bottom remained far behind.

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A Nation of Consumers Th e most breathtaking development in the postwar American economy was the dra- matic expansion of the domestic consumer market. Th e sheer quantity of consumer goods available to the average person was without precedent. In some respects, the postwar decades seemed like the 1920s all over again, with an abundance of new gad- gets and appliances, a craze for automobiles, and new types of mass media. Yet there was a signifi cant diff erence: in the 1950s, consumption became associated with citi- zenship. Buying things, once a sign of personal indulgence, now meant participating fully in American society and, moreover, fulfi lling a social responsibility. What the suburban family consumed, asserted Life magazine in a photo essay, would help to ensure “full employment and improved living standards for the rest of the nation.”

The GI Bill Th e new ethic of consumption appealed to the postwar middle class, the driving force behind the expanding domestic market. Middle-class status

was more accessible than ever before because of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, popularly known as the GI Bill. In the immediate postwar years, more than half of all U.S. college students were veterans attending class on the government’s dime. By the middle of the 1950s, 2.2 million veterans had attended college and another 5.6 mil- lion had attended trade school with government fi nancing. Before the GI Bill, com- mented one veteran, “I looked upon college education as likely as my owning a Rolls-Royce with a chauff eur.”

Government fi nancing of education helped make the U.S. workforce the best edu- cated in the world in the 1950s and 1960s. American colleges, universities, and trade schools grew by leaps and bounds to accommodate the fl ood of students — and expanded again when the children of those students, the baby boomers, reached col- lege age in the 1960s. At Rutgers University, enrollment went from 7,000 before the war to 16,000 in 1947; at the University of Minnesota, from 15,000 to more than 27,000. Th e GI Bill trained nearly half a million engineers; 200,000 doctors, dentists, and nurses; and 150,000 scientists (among many other professions). Better education meant higher earning power, and higher earning power translated into the consumer spending that drove the postwar economy. One observer of the GI Bill was so impressed with its achievements that he declared it responsible for “the most important educa- tional and social transformation in American history.”

Th e GI Bill stimulated the economy and expanded the middle class in another way: by increasing home ownership. Between the end of World War II and 1966, one of every fi ve single-family homes built in the United States was fi nanced through a GI Bill mortgage — 2.5 million new homes in all. In cities and suburbs across the country, the Veterans Administration (VA), which helped former soldiers purchase new homes with no down payment, sparked a building boom that created jobs in the construction industry and fueled consumer spending in home appliances and automobiles. Educa- tion and home ownership were more than personal triumphs for the families of World War II veterans (and Korean and Vietnam War veterans, aft er a new GI Bill was passed in 1952). Th ey were concrete fi nancial assets that helped lift more Americans than ever before into a mass-consumption-oriented middle class.

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Trade Unions Organized labor also expanded the ranks of the middle class. For the fi rst time ever, trade unions and collective bargaining became major

factors in the nation’s economic life. In the past, organized labor had been confi ned to a narrow band of craft trades and a few industries, primarily coal mining, railroading, and the building and metal trades. Th e power balance shift ed during the Great Depres- sion, and by the time the dust settled aft er World War II, labor unions overwhelmingly represented America’s industrial workforce. By the beginning of the 1950s, the nation’s major industries, including auto, steel, clothing, chemicals, and virtually all consumer product manufacturing, were operating with union contracts.

Th at outcome did not arrive without a fi ght. Unions staged major strikes in nearly all American industries in 1945 and 1946, and employers fought back. Head of the UAW Walter Reuther and CIO president Philip Murray declared that employers could aff ord a 30 percent wage increase, which would fuel postwar consumption. When employers, led by the giant General Motors, balked at that demand, the two sides seemed set for a long struggle. Between 1947 and 1950, however, a broad “labor- management accord” gradually emerged across most industries. Th is was not indus-

College on the GI Bill In 1947 — the year this photo was taken of a crowded lecture hall at the University of Iowa — more than 6,000 of this university’s 10,000 students (60 percent) were veterans whose education was fi nanced by the GI Bill. Across the country, American universities were bursting at the seams from the massive enrollment of World War II veterans. Government fi nancing of college education for these vets made the U.S. workforce one of the best educated in the world in the 1950s and 1960s. Margaret Bourke-White/ Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.

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trial peace, because the country still experienced many strikes, but a general acceptance of collective bargaining as the method for setting the terms of employment. Th e result was rising real income. Th e average worker with three dependents gained 18 percent in spendable real income in the 1950s.

In addition, unions delivered greater leisure (more paid holidays and longer vaca- tions) and, in a startling departure, a social safety net. In postwar Europe, America’s allies were constructing welfare states. But having lost the bruising battle in Washing- ton for national health care during Truman’s presidency, American unions turned to the bargaining table. By the end of the 1950s, union contracts commonly provided pension plans and company-paid health insurance. Collective bargaining, the process of trade unions and employers negotiating workplace contracts, had become, in eff ect, the American alternative to the European welfare state and, as Reuther boasted, the passport into the middle class.

Th e labor-management accord, though impressive, was never as durable or uni- versal as it seemed. Vulnerabilities lurked. For one thing, the sheltered domestic markets — the essential condition for generous contracts — were quite fragile. In cer- tain industries, the lead fi rms were already losing market share. Second, generally overlooked were the many unorganized workers with no middle-class passport — those consigned to unorganized industries, casual labor, or low-wage jobs in the ser- vice sector. A fi nal vulnerability was the most basic: the abiding antiunionism of American employers. At heart, managers regarded the labor-management accord as a negotiated truce, not a permanent peace. Th e postwar labor-management accord turned out to be a transitory event, not a permanent condition of American economic life.

Houses, Cars, and Children

Increased educational levels, growing home ownership, and higher wages all enabled more Americans than ever before to become mem- bers of what one historian has called a “consumer republic.” But what

did they buy? Th e postwar emphasis on nuclear families and suburbs provides the answer. In the emerging suburban nation, three elements came together to create pat- terns of consumption that would endure for decades: houses, cars, and children.

A feature in a 1949 issue of McCall’s, a magazine targeting middle-class women, illustrates the connections. “I now have three working centers,” a typical housewife explains. “Th e baby center, a baking center and a cleaning center.” Accompanying illustrations reveal the interior of the brand-new house, stocked with the latest con- sumer products: accessories for the baby’s room; a new stove, oven, and refrigerator; and a washer and dryer, along with cleaning products and other household goods. Th e article does not mention automobiles, but the photo of the house’s exterior makes the point clear: father drives home from work in a new car.

Consumption for the home, including automobiles, drove the postwar American economy as much as, or more than, the military-industrial complex did. If we think like advertisers and manufacturers, we can see why. Between 1945 and 1970, more than 25 million new houses were built in the United States. Each required its own sup- ply of new appliances, from refrigerators to lawn mowers. In 1955 alone, Americans purchased 4 million new refrigerators, and between 1940 and 1951 the sale of power mowers increased from 35,000 per year to more than 1 million. Moreover, as Ameri- can industry discovered planned obsolescence — the encouragement of consumers to

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replace appliances and cars every few years — the home became a site of perpetual consumer desire.

Children also encouraged consumption. Th e baby boomers born between World War II and the late 1950s have consistently, throughout every phase of their lives, been the darlings of American advertising and consumption. When they were infants, com- panies focused on developing new baby products, from disposable diapers to instant formula. When they were toddlers and young children, new television programs, board games, fast food, TV dinners, and thousands of diff erent kinds of toys came to market to supply the rambunctious youth. When they were teenagers, rock music, Hollywood fi lms, and a constantly marketed “teen culture” — with its appropriate clothing, music, hairstyles, and other accessories — bombarded them. Remarkably, in 1956, middle-class American teenagers on average had a weekly income of more than $10, close to the weekly disposable income of an entire family a generation earlier.

Television Th e emergence of commercial television in the United States was swift and overwhelming. In the realm of technology, only the automobile and

the personal computer were its equal in transforming everyday life in the twentieth century. In 1947, there were 7,000 TV sets in American homes. A year later, the CBS and NBC radio networks began off ering regular programming, and by 1950 Ameri- cans owned 7.3 million sets. Ten years later, 87 percent of American homes had at least one television set. Having conquered the home, television would soon become the principal mediator between the consumer and the marketplace.

Television advertisers mastered the art of manufacturing consumer desire. TV stations, like radio stations before them, depended entirely on advertising for profi ts. Th e fi rst television executives understood that as long as they sold viewers to advertis- ers they would stay on the air. Early corporate-sponsored shows (such as General Elec- tric Th eater and U.S. Steel Hour) and simple product jingles (such as “No matter what the time or place, let’s keep up with that happy pace. 7-Up your thirst away!”) gave way by the early 1960s to slick advertising campaigns that used popular music, movie stars, sports fi gures, and stimulating graphics to captivate viewers.

By creating powerful visual narratives of comfort and plenty, television revolu- tionized advertising and changed forever the ways products were sold to American, and global, consumers. On Queen for a Day, a show popular in the mid-1950s, women competed to see who could tell the most heartrending story of tragedy and loss. Th e winner was lavished with household products: refrigerators, toasters, ovens, and the like. In a groundbreaking advertisement for Anacin aspirin, a tiny hammer pounded inside the skull of a headache suff erer. Almost overnight, sales of Anacin increased by 50 percent.

By the late 1950s, what Americans saw on television, both in the omnipresent commercials and in the programming, was an overwhelmingly white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant world of nuclear families, suburban homes, and middle-class life. A typical show was Father Knows Best, starring Robert Young and Jane Wyatt. Father left home each morning wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. Mother was a full-time house- wife and stereotypical female, prone to bad driving and tears. Leave It to Beaver, another immensely popular series about suburban family life, embodied similar late- fi ft ies themes. Earlier in the decade, however, television featured grittier realities. Th e

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Honeymooners, starring Jackie Gleason as a Brooklyn bus driver, and Th e Life of Riley, a situation comedy featuring a California aircraft worker, treated working-class lives. Two other early-fi ft ies television series, Beulah, starring Ethel Waters and then Louise Beavers as an African American maid, and the comedic Amos ’n’ Andy, were the only shows featuring black actors in major roles. Television was never a showcase for the breadth of American society, but in the second half of the 1950s broadcasting lost much of its ethnic, racial, and class diversity and became a vehicle for the transmission of a narrow range of middle-class tastes and values.

Youth Culture One of the most striking developments in American life in the postwar decades was the emergence of the teenager as a cultural phenomenon. In 1956, only partly in jest, the CBS radio commentator Eric Sevareid questioned “whether the teenagers will take over the United States lock, stock, living room, and garage.” Sevareid was grumbling about American youth culture, a phenomenon fi rst noticed in the 1920s and with its roots in the lengthening years of education, the role of peer groups, and the consumer tastes of young people. Market research revealed a distinct teen market to be exploited. Newsweek noted with awe in 1951 that the aggregate of the weekly spending money of teenagers was enough to buy 190 million candy bars, 130 million soft drinks, and 230 million sticks of gum. Increasingly, advertisers targeted the young, both to capture their spending money and to exploit their infl uence on family purchases.

Hollywood movies played a large role in fostering a teenage culture. Young people made up the largest audience for motion pictures, and Hollywood studios learned over the course of the 1950s to cater to them. Th e success of fi lms such as Th e Wild One (1953), starring Marlon Brando; Blackboard Jungle (1955), with Sidney Poitier; and Rebel Without a Cause (1955), starring James Dean, convinced movie executives that fi lms directed at teenagers were worthy investments. “What are you rebelling against?” Brando is asked in Th e Wild One. “Whattaya got?” he replies. By the early 1960s, Hol- lywood had retooled its business model, shift ing emphasis away from adults and fami- lies to teenagers. Th e “teenpic” soon included multiple genres: horror, rock ’n’ roll, dangerous youth, and beach party, among others.

Rock ’n’ Roll What really defi ned the youth culture, however, was its music. Rejecting the romantic ballads of the 1940s, teenagers discovered rock ’n’ roll,

which originated in African American rhythm and blues. Th e Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed took the lead in introducing white America to the black-created sound by playing what were called “race” records. “If I could fi nd a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars,” a record company owner is quoted as saying. Th e performer who fi t that bill was Elvis Presley, who rock- eted into instant celebrity in 1956 with his hit records “Hound Dog” and “Heartbreak Hotel,” covers of songs originally recorded by black artists such as Big Mama Th ornton. Between 1953 and 1959, record sales increased from $213 million to $603 million, with rock ’n’ roll as the driving force.

Many unhappy adults saw in rock ’n’ roll music an invitation to interracial dating, rebellion, and a more fl agrant sexuality. Th e media featured hundreds of stories on

770 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

problem teens, and denunciations of the new music poured forth from many corners. Such condemnation only defl ected off the new youth culture or, if anything, increased its popularity. Both Hollywood and the music industry had learned that youth rebel- lion sold tickets.

Cultural Dissenters Youth rebellion was only one aspect of a broader discontent with the sometimes saccharine consumer culture of the 1950s. Many

artists, writers, and jazz musicians embarked on powerful new experimental projects in a remarkable fl owering of intensely personal, introspective art forms. Black musi- cians developed a hard-driving improvisational style known as bebop. Whether the “hot” bebop of saxophonist Charlie Parker or the more subdued “cool” sound of the infl uential trumpeter Miles Davis, postwar jazz was cerebral, intimate, and individual- istic. As such, it stood in stark contrast to the commercialized, dance-oriented “swing” bands of the 1930s and 1940s.

Black jazz musicians found eager fans not only in the African American commu- nity but also among young white Beats, a group of writers and poets centered in New York and San Francisco who disdained middle-class materialism. In his poem “Howl” (1956), which became a manifesto of the Beat generation, Allen Ginsberg lamented: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fi x.” In

Motown Mary Wilson, Diana Ross, and Florence Ballard (from left to right) were the founding mem- bers of the Motown singing group the Supremes (shown here in concert in 1964), which produced twelve number-one singles. Motown, a record label owned by African American entrepreneur Berry Gordy, specialized in so-called cross- over acts: black singers who sold records to white audi- ences. In the era of Jim Crow, Motown represented a small but noteworthy step toward a less racially segregated Ameri- can culture. Photo by RB/Redferns/ Getty Images.

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works such as Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road (1957), the Beats glorifi ed spontaneity, sexual adventurism, drug use, and spirituality. Th e Beats were apolitical, but their cul- tural rebellion would, in the 1960s, inspire a new generation of young rebels disen- chanted with both the political and cultural status quo.

Religion and the Middle Class In an age of anxiety about nuclear annihilation and the spread of “godless commu- nism,” Americans yearned for a reaffi rmation of faith. Church membership jumped from 49 percent of the population in 1940 to 70 percent in 1960. People fl ocked to the evangelical Protestant denominations, benefi ciaries of a remarkable new crop of preachers. Most eloquent was the young Reverend Billy Graham, who made brilliant use of television, radio, and advertising. His massive 1949 revival in Los Angeles and his 1957 crusade at Madison Square Garden in New York, attended or viewed by hundreds of thousands of Americans, established Graham as the nation’s leading evangelical.

Rather than clashing with the new middle-class ethic of consumption, the reli- gious reawakening was designed to mesh with it. Preachers such as Graham and the California-based Robert Schuller told Americans that so long as they lived moral lives, they deserved the material blessings of modern life. No one was more infl uential in this regard than the minister and author Norman Vincent Peale, whose best-selling book Th e Power of Positive Th inking (1952) embodied the therapeutic use of religion as an antidote to life’s trials and tribulations. Peale taught that with faith in God and “positive thinking,” anyone could overcome obstacles and become a success. Graham, Schuller, Peale, and other 1950s evangelicals laid the foundation for the rise of the televangelists, who created popular television ministries in the 1970s.

Th e postwar purveyors of religious faith cast Americans as a righteous people opposed to communist atheism. When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death in 1953, the judge criticized them for “devoting themselves to the Russian ideol- ogy of denial of God.” Cold War imperatives drew Catholics, Protestants, and Jews into an infl uential ecumenical movement that downplayed doctrinal diff erences. Th e phrase “under God” was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and U.S. coins carried the words “In God We Trust” aft er 1956. Th ese reli- gious initiatives struck a distinctly moderate tone, however, in comparison with the politi- cized evangelism that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapter 29).

The American Family in the Era of Containment Marriage, family structure, and gender roles had been undergoing signifi cant changes since the turn of the twentieth century (Chapter 18). Beginning in the nineteenth cen- tury, middle-class Americans increasingly saw marriage as “companionate,” that is,

What primary factors led to the growth of the American economy after World War II?

How did the tastes and values of the postwar middle class aff ect the country?

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based on romantic love and a lifetime of shared friendship. Companionate did not mean equal. In the mid-twentieth century, family life remained governed by notions of paternalism, in which men provided economic support and controlled the family’s fi nancial resources, while women cared for children and occupied a secondary posi- tion in public life.

Th e resurgent postwar American middle class was preoccupied with the virtues of paternalism. Everyone from professional psychologists to television advertisers and every organization from schools to the popular press celebrated nuclear families. Chil- dren were prized, and women’s caregiving roles were valorized. Th is view of family life, and especially its emphasis on female “domesticity,” was bolstered by Cold War poli- tics. Americans who deviated from prevailing gender and familial norms were not only viewed with scorn but were also sometimes thought to be subversive and politi- cally dangerous. Th e word containment could apply to the home as easily as to foreign policy. Th e family had become politicized by the Cold War.

Th e model of domesticity so highly esteemed in postwar middle-class morality hid deeper, longer-term changes in the way marriage, gender roles, women’s work, and even sex were understood. To comprehend the postwar decades, we have to keep in mind both the value placed on domesticity and the tumultuous changes surging beneath its prescriptions.

The Baby Boom A popular 1945 song was called “Gotta Make Up for Lost Time,” and Americans did just that. Two things were noteworthy about the families they formed aft er World War II: First, marriages were remarkably stable. Not until the mid-1960s did the divorce rate begin to rise sharply. Second, married couples were intent on having babies. Everyone expected to have several children — it was part of adulthood, almost a citi- zen’s responsibility. Aft er a century and a half of decline, the birthrate shot up. More babies were born in the six years between 1948 and 1953 than in the previous thirty years.

One of the reasons for this baby boom was that people were having children at the same time. A second was a drop in the average marriage age — down to twenty-two for men and twenty for women. Younger parents meant a bumper crop of children. Women who came of age in the 1930s averaged 2.4 children; their counterparts in the 1950s averaged 3.2 children. Such a dramatic turnaround refl ected couples’ decisions during the Great Depression to limit childbearing and couples’ contrasting decisions in the postwar years to have more children. Th e baby boom peaked in 1957 and remained at a high level until the early 1960s. Far from “normal,” all of these develop- ments were anomalies, temporary reversals of long-standing demographic trends. From the perspective of the whole of the twentieth century, the 1950s and early 1960s stand out as exceptions to declining birthrates, rising divorce rates, and the steadily rising marriage age.

Th e passage of time revealed the ever-widening impact of the baby boom. When baby boomers competed for jobs during the 1970s, the labor market became tight. When career-oriented baby boomers belatedly began having children in the 1980s, the

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birthrate jumped. And in our own time, as baby boomers begin retiring, huge funding problems threaten to engulf Social Security and Medicare. Th e intimate decisions of so many couples aft er World War II continued to shape American life well into the twenty-fi rst century.

Improving Health and Education

Baby boom children benefi tted from a host of important advances in public health and medical practice in the postwar years. For- merly serious illnesses became merely routine aft er the introduc-

tion of such “miracle drugs” as penicillin (introduced in 1943), streptomycin (1945), and cortisone (1946). When Dr. Jonas Salk perfected a polio vaccine in 1954, he became a national hero. Th e free distribution of Salk’s vaccine in the nation’s schools, followed in 1961 by Dr. Albert Sabin’s oral polio vaccine, demonstrated the potential of government-sponsored public health programs.

Th e baby boom also gave the nation’s educational system a boost. Postwar middle- class parents, America’s fi rst college-educated generation, placed a high value on education. Suburban parents approved 90 percent of school bond issues during the 1950s. By 1970, school expenditures accounted for 7.2 percent of the gross national product, double the 1950 level. In the 1960s, the baby boom generation swelled col- lege enrollments. State university systems grew in tandem: the pioneering University of California, University of Wisconsin, and State University of New York systems added dozens of new campuses and off ered students in their states a low-cost college education.

Dr. Benjamin Spock To keep baby boom children healthy and happy, middle-class parents increasingly relied on the advice of experts. Dr. Benjamin

Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care sold 1 million copies every year aft er its publication in 1946. Spock urged mothers to abandon the rigid feeding and baby-care schedules of an earlier generation. New mothers found Spock’s common- sense approach liberating. “Your little paperback is still in my cupboard, with loose pages, rather worn from use because I brought up two babies using it as my ‘Bible,’ ” a California housewife wrote to Spock.

Despite his commonsense approach to child rearing, Spock was part of a genera- tion of psychological experts whose advice oft en failed to reassure women. If mothers were too protective, Spock and others argued, they might hamper their children’s preparation for adult life. On the other hand, mothers who wanted to work outside the home felt guilty because Spock recommended that they be constantly available for their children. As American mothers aimed for the perfection demanded of them seemingly at every turn, many began to question these mixed messages. Some of them would be inspired by the resurgence of feminism in the 1960s.

Women, Work, and Family Two powerful forces shaped women’s relationships to work and family life in the post- war decades. One was the middle-class domestic ideal, in which women were expected to raise children, attend to other duties in the home, and devote themselves to their

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husbands’ happiness. So powerful was this ideal that in 1965 the Ladies’ Home Jour- nal entitled an article, “Is College Education Wasted on Women?” Th e second force was the job market. Most working-class women had to earn a paycheck to help their family. And despite their education, middle-class women found that jobs in the profes- sions and business were dominated by men and oft en closed to them. For both groups, the market off ered mostly “women’s jobs” — in teaching, nursing, and other areas of the growing service sector — and little room for advancement (American Voices, p. 775).

Th e idea that a woman’s place was in the home was, of course, not new. Th e post- war obsession with femininity and motherhood bore a remarkable similarity to the nineteenth century’s notion of domesticity. Th e updated version drew on new ele- ments of twentieth-century science and culture. Psychologists equated motherhood with “normal” female identity and suggested that career-minded mothers needed therapy. “A mother who runs out on her children to work — except in cases of absolute necessity — betrays a deep dissatisfaction with motherhood or with her marriage,” wrote one leading psychiatrist. Television shows and movies depicted career women as social misfi ts. Th e postwar consumer culture also emphasized women’s domestic role as purchasing agents for home and family. “Can a woman ever feel right cooking on a dirty range?” asked one advertisement.

Th e postwar domestic ideal held that women’s principal economic contribution came through consumption — women shopped for the family. In reality, their contri- butions increasingly took them outside their homes and into the workforce. In 1954, married women made up half of all women workers. Six years later, the 1960 census reported a stunning fact: the number of mothers who worked had increased four times, and over one-third of these women had children between the ages of six and seventeen. In that same year, 30 percent of wives worked, and by 1970, it was 40 per- cent. For working-class women, in particular, the economic needs of their families demanded that they work outside the home.

Despite rising employment rates, occupational segmentation still haunted women. Until 1964, the classifi ed sections of newspapers separated employment ads into “Help Wanted Male” and “Help Wanted Female.” More than 80 percent of all employed women did stereotypical women’s work as salesclerks, health-care technicians, wait- resses, stewardesses, domestic servants, receptionists, telephone operators, and secre- taries. In 1960, only 3 percent of lawyers and 6 percent of physicians were women; on the fl ip side, 97 percent of nurses and 85 percent of librarians were women. Along with women’s jobs went women’s pay, which averaged 60 percent of men’s pay in 1963.

Contrary to stereotype, however, women’s paid work was not merely supplemen- tary. It helped lift families into the middle class. Even in the prosperous 1950s, many men found that their wages could not pay for what middle-class life demanded: cars, houses, vacations, and college education for the children. Many families needed more than one wage earner just to get by. Among married women, the highest rates of labor-force participation in the 1950s were found in families at the lower end of the middle class. Over the course of the postwar decades, from 1945 to 1965, more and more women, including married women, from all class backgrounds, entered the paid workforce.

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S

C o m i n g o f A g e i n t h e P o s t w a r Ye a r s At the dawn of the postwar era, Americans faced new opportunities and new anxieties. Many former soldiers attended college and purchased new homes on the GI Bill, which forever changed their lives, and women faced new pressures to realize the ideal role of housewife and mother.

Art Buchwald

Studying on the GI Bill

Art Buchwald was one of the best-known humorists in American journalism. But in 1946, he was an ordinary ex-serviceman using the GI Bill to go to college.

It was time to face up to whether I was serious about attending school. My decision was to go down to the University of Southern California and fi nd out what I should study at night to get into the place. Th ere were at least 4,000 ex-GIs waiting to register. I stood in line with them. Hours later, I arrived at the counter and said, “I would like to . . .” Th e clerk said, “Fill this out.”

Having been accepted as a full-time student under the G.I. Bill, I was entitled to seventy-fi ve dollars a month plus tuition, books, and supplies. Meanwhile, I found a boardinghouse a few blocks from campus, run by a cheery woman who was like a mother to her thirteen boarders. . . . At the time, just aft er the Second World War had ended, an undeclared class war was going on at USC. Th e G.I.s returning home had little use for the fraternity men, since most of the frat boys were not only much younger, but considered very immature.

Th e G.I.s were intent on getting their educations and starting new lives.

SOURCE: From Leaving Home: A Memoir by Art Buchwald (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993). Used by permission of Joel Buchwald.

Betty Friedan

Living the Feminine Mystique

Friedan would one day become author of one of the most widely read books of the 1960s, Th e Feminine Mystique. In the late 1940s, Friedan was not yet a feminist, but she was deeply engaged in the politics of the era.

And then the boys our age had come back from the war. I was bumped from my job on a small labor news service by a returning veteran, and it wasn’t so easy to fi nd another job I really liked. I fi lled out the applications for Time-Life researcher, which I’d always scorned before. All the girls I knew had jobs like that, but it was offi cial policy that no matter how good, researchers, who were women, could never become writers or editors. Th ey could write the whole article, but the men they were working with would always get the by-line as writer. I was certainly not a feminist then — none of us were a bit interested in women’s rights. But I could never bring myself to take that kind of job.

Aft er the war, I had been very political, very involved, consciously radical. Not about women, for heaven’s sake! If you were a radical in 1949, you were concerned about the Negroes, and the working class, and World War III, and the Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthy and loyalty oaths, and Communist splits and schisms, Russia, China and the UN, but you certainly didn’t think about being a woman, politically.

SOURCE: From “It Changed My Life”: Writings on the Women’s Movement by Betty Friedan (Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). Copyright © 1963 by Betty Friedan. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

776 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

How could American society steadfastly uphold the domestic ideal when so many wives and mothers were out of the house and at work? In many ways, the contradiction was hidden by the women themselves. Fearing public disapproval, women would explain their work in family-oriented terms — as a way to save money for the children’s college education, for instance. Moreover, when women took jobs outside the home, they still bore full responsibility for child care and household management, contribut- ing to the “double day” of paid work and family work. As one overburdened woman noted, she now had “two full-time jobs instead of just one — underpaid clerical worker and unpaid housekeeper.” Finally, the pressures of the Cold War made strong nuclear families with breadwinning fathers and domesticated mothers symbols of a healthy nation. Americans wanted to believe this even if it did not perfectly describe the reality of their lives.

Challenging Middle-Class Morality In many ways, the two decades between 1945 and 1965 were a period of cultural con- servatism that refl ected the values of domesticity. At the dawn of the 1960s, going steady as a prelude to marriage was the fad in high school. College women had curfews and needed permission to see a male visitor. Americans married young; more than half of those who married in 1963 were under the age of twenty-one. Aft er the birth control pill came on the market in 1960, few doctors prescribed it to unmarried women, and even married women did not enjoy unfettered access to contraception until the Supreme Court ruled it a “privacy” right in the 1965 decision Griswold v. Connecticut.

Alfred Kinsey Yet beneath the surface of middle-class morality, Americans were less repressed than confused. Th ey struggled to reconcile new freedoms

with older moral traditions. Th is was especially true with regard to sex. Two contro- versial studies by an unassuming Indiana University zoologist named Alfred Kinsey forced questions about sexuality into the open. Kinsey and his research team published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and followed it up in 1953 with Sexual Behavior in the Human Female — an 842-page book that sold 270,000 copies in the fi rst month aft er its publication. Taking a scientifi c, rather than moralistic, approach, Kinsey, who became known as “the sex doctor,” documented the full range of sexual experiences of thousands of Americans. He broke numerous taboos, discussing such topics as homosexuality and marital infi delity in the detached language of science.

Both studies confi rmed that a sexual revolution, although a largely hidden one, had already begun to transform American society by the early 1950s. Kinsey estimated that 85 percent of men had had sex prior to marriage and that more than 25 percent of married women had had sex outside of marriage by the age of forty. Th ese were shock- ing public admissions in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and “hotter than the Kinsey report” became a national fi gure of speech. Kinsey was criticized by statisticians — because his samples were not randomly selected — and condemned even more fer- vently by religious leaders, who charged him with encouraging promiscuity and adultery. But his research opened a national conversation with profound implications for the future. Even if Kinsey’s numbers were off , he helped Americans learn to talk more openly about sex.

C H A P T E R 2 6 Triumph of the Middle Class, 1945–1963 777

The Homophile Movement

Among the most controversial of Kinsey’s claims was that homo- sexuality was far more prevalent than most Americans believed. Although the American Psychiatric Association would offi cially

defi ne homosexuality as a mental illness in 1952, Kinsey’s research found that 37 per- cent of men had engaged in some form of homosexual activity by early adulthood, as had 13 percent of women. Even more important, Kinsey claimed that 10 percent of American men were exclusively homosexual. Th ese claims came as little surprise, but great encouragement, to a group of gay and lesbian activists who called themselves “homophiles.” Organized primarily in the Mattachine Society (the fi rst gay rights organization in the country, founded in 1951) and the Daughters of Bilitis (a lesbian organization founded in 1955), homophiles were a small but determined collection of activists who sought equal rights for gays and lesbians. “Th e lesbian is a woman endowed with all the attributes of any other woman,” wrote the pioneer lesbian activist Del Martin in 1956. “Th e salvation of the lesbian lies in her acceptance of herself with- out guilt or anxiety.”

Building on the urban gay and lesbian communities that had coalesced during World War II, homophiles sought to change American attitudes about same-sex love. Th ey faced daunting obstacles, since same-sex sexual relations were illegal in every state and scorned, or feared, by most Americans. To combat prejudice and change the laws, homophile organizations cultivated a respectable, middle-class image. Members were encouraged to avoid bars and nightclubs, to dress in conservative shirts and ties (for men) and modest skirts and blouses (for women), and to seek out professional psychologists who would attest to their “normalcy.” Only in the 1960s did homophiles begin to talk about the “homophile vote” and their “rights as citizens,” laying the groundwork for the gay rights movement of the 1970s.

Media and Morality

Th e homophile movement remained unknown to most Americans. But other challenges to traditional morality received national media atten- tion, and the media themselves became a controversial source of these

challenges. Concerned that excessive crime, violence, and sex in comic books were encouraging juvenile delinquency, the U.S. Senate held nationally televised hearings in 1954. Th e Sen- ate’s fi nal report, written largely by the Tennessee Democrat Estes Kefauver, complained of the “scant- ily clad women” and “penchant for violent death” common in comic books aimed at teenagers. Kefau- ver’s report forced the comics industry to tame its wildest practices but did little to slow the growing frankness about both sex and violence in the nation’s printed media and fi lms.

A magazine entrepreneur from Chicago named Hugh Hefner played a leading role in that growing frankness. Hefner founded Playboy magazine in 1953, in which he created a countermorality to domesticity: a fi ctional world populated by “hip” bache- lor men and sexually available women. Hefner’s imagined bachelors condemned mar- riage and lived in sophisticated apartments fi lled with the latest stereo equipment and other consumer products. While domesticated fathers bought lawn mowers and patio furniture, Hefner’s magazine encouraged men to spend money on clothing and jazz

To see a longer excerpt from the Senate hearing on juvenile delinquency, along with other primary sources from this period, see Sources for America’s History.

778 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

albums for themselves, and for the “scantily clad women” that fi lled its pages. Hefner and his numerous imitators became powerful purveyors of sex in the media. But Hefner was the excep- tion that proved the rule: marriage, not swing- ing bachelorhood, remained the destination for the vast majority of men. Millions of men read Playboy, but few adopted its fantasy lifestyle.

A Suburban Nation Prosperity — how much an economy produces, how much people earn — is more eas- ily measured than is quality of life. During the 1950s, however, the American defi nition of the good life emerged with exceptional distinctness: a high value on consumption, a devotion to family and domesticity, and preference for suburban living. In this sec- tion, we consider the third dimension of that defi nition: suburbanization. What drove the nation to abandon its cities for the suburbs, and what social and political conse- quences did this shift have?

The Postwar Housing Boom Migration to the suburbs had been going on for a hundred years, but never before on the scale that the coun- try experienced aft er World War II. Within a decade, farmland on the out- skirts of cities fi lled up with tract housing and shopping malls. Entire counties that had once been rural — such as San Mateo, south of San Francisco, or Passaic and Bergen in New Jersey, west of Manhattan — went suburban. By 1960, one-third of Americans lived in suburbs. Home construction, having ground to a halt during the Great Depression, surged

What transformations in women’s economic role took place in the 1950s and 1960s?

What were the contradictions in postwar domesticity and middle- class morality?

The Middle-Class Family Ideal A family eats breakfast at a campground in Zion National Park, Utah. Americans embraced a middle-class, nuclear family ideal in the postwar decades. Photo by Justin Locke/National Geographic/Getty Images.

C H A P T E R 2 6 Triumph of the Middle Class, 1945–1963 779

aft er the war. One-fourth of the country’s entire housing stock in 1960 had not even existed a decade earlier.

William J. Levitt and the FHA

Two unique postwar developments remade the national housing market and gave it a distinctly suburban shape. First, an innovative Long Island building contractor, William J. Levitt, revolutionized

suburban housing by applying mass-production techniques and turning out new homes at a dizzying speed. Levitt’s basic four-room house, complete with kitchen appliances, was priced at $7,990 when homes in the fi rst Levittown went on sale in 1947 (about $76,000 today). Levitt did not need to advertise; word of mouth brought buyers fl ocking to his developments (all called Levittown) in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Dozens of other developers were soon snapping up cheap farmland and building subdivisions around the country.

Even at $7,990, Levitt’s homes would have been beyond the means of most young families had the traditional home-fi nancing standard — a down payment of half the full price and ten years to pay off the balance — still prevailed. Th at is where the second postwar development came in. Th e Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Veterans Administration (VA) — that is, the federal government — brought the home mortgage market within the reach of a broader range of Americans than ever before. Aft er the war, the FHA insured thirty-year mortgages with as little as 5 percent down and interest at 2 or 3 percent. Th e VA was even more generous, requiring only a token $1 down for qualifi ed ex-GIs. FHA and VA mortgages best explain why, aft er hovering around 45 percent for the previous half century, home ownership jumped to 60 per- cent by 1960.

What purchasers of suburban houses got, in addition to a good deal, were homo- geneous communities. Th e developments contained few elderly people or unmarried adults. Even the trees were young. Levitt’s company enforced regulations about main- taining lawns and not hanging out laundry on the weekends. Th en there was the mat- ter of race. Levitt’s houses came with restrictive covenants prohibiting occupancy “by members of other than the Caucasian Race.” (Restrictive covenants oft en applied to Jews and, in California, Asian Americans as well.) Levittowns were hardly alone. Sub- urban developments from coast to coast exhibited the same age, class, and racial homogeneity.

In Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the Supreme Court outlawed restrictive covenants, but racial discrimination in housing changed little. Th e practice persisted long aft er Shelley, because the FHA and VA continued the policy of redlining: refusing mort- gages to African Americans and members of other minority groups seeking to buy in white neighborhoods. Indeed, no federal law — or even Court decisions like Shelley — actually prohibited racial discrimination in housing until Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968.

Interstate Highways Without automobiles, suburban growth on such a massive scale would have been impossible. Planners laid out subdivisions on

the assumption that everybody would drive. And they did — to get to work, to take the children to Little League, to shop. With gas plentiful and cheap (15 cents a gallon), no one cared about the fuel effi ciency of their V-8 engines or seemed to mind the elaborate

780 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

tail fi ns and chrome that weighed down their cars. In 1945, Americans owned twenty- fi ve million cars; by 1965, just two decades later, the number had tripled to seventy- fi ve million (America Compared, p. 781). American oil consumption followed course, tripl ing as well between 1949 and 1972.

More cars required more highways, and the federal government obliged. In 1956, in a move that drastically altered America’s landscape and driving habits, the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act authorized $26 billion over a ten-year period for the construction of a nationally integrated highway system — 42,500 miles (Map 26.1). Cast as a Cold War necessity because broad highways made evacuating crowded cities easier in the event of a nuclear attack, the law changed American cities forever. An enormous public works program surpassing anything undertaken during the New Deal, and enthusiastically endorsed by the Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, federal highways made possible the massive suburbanization of the nation in the 1960s. Interstate highways rerouted traffi c away from small towns, bypassed well-traveled main roads such as the cross-country Route 66, and cut wide swaths through old neighborhoods in the cities.

Fast Food and Shopping Malls

Americans did not simply fi ll their new suburban homes with the latest appliances and gadgets; they also pioneered entirely new forms of consumption. Th rough World War II, downtowns had remained

the center of retail sales and restaurant dining with their grand department stores, elegant eateries, and low-cost diners. As suburbanites abandoned big-city centers in the 1950s, ambitious entrepreneurs invented two new commercial forms that would profoundly shape the rest of the century: the shopping mall and the fast-food restaurant.

By the late 1950s, the suburban shopping center had become as much a part of the American landscape as the Levittowns and their imitators. A major developer of shop-

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MAP 26.1 Connecting the Nation: The Interstate Highway System, 1930 and 1970 The 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act paved the way for an extensive network of federal highways throughout the nation. The act not only pleased American drivers and enhanced their love aff air with the automobile but also benefi tted the petroleum, construction, trucking, real estate, and tourist industries. The new highway system promoted the nation’s economic integration, facilitated the growth of suburbs, and contributed to the erosion of America’s distinct regional identities.

A M E R I C A C O M PA R E D

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H a n o c h B a r t o v : E v e r y o n e H a s a C a r One of Israel’s foremost writers and journalists, Hanoch Bartov spent two years in the United States working as a correspondent for the newspaper Lamerchav. As a newcomer to Los Angeles in the early 1960s, he was both fascinated and appalled by Americans’ love aff air with the automobile.

Our immediate decision to buy a car sprang from healthy instincts. Only later did I learn from bitter experience that in California, death was preferable to living without one. Neither the views from the plane nor the weird excursion that fi rst evening hinted at what I would go through that fi rst week.

Very simple — the nearest supermarket was about half a kilometer south of our apartment, the regional primary school two kilometers east, and my son’s kinder- garten even farther away. A trip to the post offi ce — an undertaking, to the bank — an ordeal, to work — an impossibility. . . .

Th ere are no tramways. No one thought of a subway. Railroads — not now and not in the future. Why? Because everyone has a car. A man invited me to his house, saying, “We are neighbors, within ten minutes of each other.” Aft er walking for an hour and a half I realized what he meant — “ten minute drive within the speed limit.” Simply put, he never thought I might interpret his remark to refer to the walking distance. Th e moment a baby sees the light of day in Los Angeles, a car is registered in his name in Detroit. . . .

At fi rst perhaps people relished the freedom and independence a car provided. You get in, sit down, and grab the steering wheel, your mobility exceeding that of any other generation. No wonder people refuse to live downtown, where they can hear their neighbors, smell their cooking, and suff er frayed nerves as trains pass by bedroom windows. Instead, they get a piece of the desert, far from town, at half price, drag a water hose, grow grass, fl owers, and trees, and build their dream house.

Th e result? A widely scattered city, its houses far apart, its streets stretched in all directions. Olympic Boulevard from west to east, forty kilometers. Sepulveda Boulevard, from Long Beach in the south to the edge of the desert, forty kilometers. Altogether covering 1,200 square kilometers. As of now.

SOURCE: “Measures of Affl uence” by Hanoch Bartov (1963) in Chapter 16 from Th e Outer World, edited by Oscar Handlin and Lilian Handlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). © 1997. Reprinted by permission of Oscar and Lilian Handlin.

ping malls in the Northeast called them “crystallization points for suburbia’s commu- nity life.” He romanticized the new structures as “today’s village green,” where “the fountain in the mall has replaced the downtown department clock as the gathering place for young and old alike.” Romanticism aside, suburban shopping centers worked perfectly in the world of suburban consumption; they brought “the market to the people instead of people to the market,” commented the New York Times. In 1939, the suburban share of total metropolitan retail trade in the United States was a paltry 4 percent. By 1961, it was an astonishing 60 percent in the nation’s ten largest metro- politan regions.

782 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

No one was more infl uential in creating suburban patterns of consumption than a Chicago-born son of Czech immigrants named Ray Kroc. A former jazz musician and traveling salesman, Kroc found his calling in 1954 when he acquired a single franchise of the little-known McDonald’s Restaurant, based in San Bernardino, California. In 1956, Kroc invested in twelve more franchises and by 1958 owned seventy-nine. Th ree years later, Kroc bought the company from the McDonald brothers and proceeded to turn it into the largest chain of restaurants in the world. Based on inexpensive, quickly served hamburgers that hungry families could eat in the restaurant, in their cars, or at home, Kroc’s vision transformed the way Americans consumed food. “Drive-in” or “fast” food became a staple of the American diet in the subsequent decades. By the year 2000, fast food was a $100 billion industry, and more children recognized Ronald McDonald, the clown in McDonald’s television commercials, than Santa Claus.

Rise of the Sunbelt Suburban living, although a nationwide phenomenon, was most at home in the Sun- belt (the southern and southwestern states), where taxes were low, the climate was mild, and open space allowed for sprawling subdivisions (Map 26.2). Florida added 3.5 million people, many of them retired, between 1940 and 1970. Texas profi ted from expanding petrochemical and defense industries. Most dramatic was California’s growth, spurred especially by the state’s booming defense-related aircraft and elec- tronics industries. By 1970, California contained one-tenth of the nation’s population and surpassed New York as the most populous state. At the end of the century, Califor- nia’s economy was among the top ten largest in the world — among nations.

A distinctive feature of Sunbelt suburbanization was its close relationship to the military-industrial complex. Building on World War II expansion, military bases pro- liferated in the South and Southwest in the postwar decades, especially in Florida, Texas, and California. In some instances, entire metropolitan regions — such as San Diego County, California, and the Houston area in Texas — expanded in tandem with nearby military outposts. Moreover, the aerospace, defense, and electronics industries were based largely in Sunbelt metropolitan regions. With government contracts fuel- ing the economy and military bases providing thousands of jobs, Sunbelt politicians had every incentive to support vigorous defense spending by the federal government.

Sunbelt suburbanization was best exemplifi ed by Orange County, California. Southwest of Los Angeles, Orange County was until the 1940s mostly just that — a land of oranges, groves of them. But during World War II, boosters attracted new bases and training facilities for the marines, navy, and air force (at the time the army air corps). Cold War militarization and the Korean War kept those bases humming, and Hughes Aircraft , Ford Aeronautics, and other defense-related manufacturers built new plants in the sunny, sprawling groves. So did subdivision developers, who built so many new homes that the population of the county jumped from 130,760 in 1940 to 703,925 in 1960. Casting his eye on all this development in the early 1950s, an entre- preneurial fi lmmaker and cartoonist named Walt Disney chose Anaheim in Orange County as the place for a massive new amusement park. Disneyland was to the new generation of suburbanites what Coney Island had been to an earlier generation of urbanites.

C H A P T E R 2 6 Triumph of the Middle Class, 1945–1963 783

Two Societies: Urban and Suburban While middle-class whites fl ocked to the suburbs, an opposite stream of working-class migrants, many of them southern African Americans, moved into the cities. In the 1950s, the nation’s twelve largest cities lost 3.6 million whites while gaining 4.5 million nonwhites. Th ese urban newcomers inherited a declining economy and a decaying infrastructure. To those enjoying prosperity, the “other America,” as the social critic Michael Harrington called it, remained largely invisible. In 1968, however, a report by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (informally known as the Kerner Commission and formed by the president to investigate the causes of the 1967 urban riots), delivered to President Lyndon Johnson, warned that “our nation is mov- ing toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.”

American cities had long been the home of poverty, slum housing, and the hard- ships and cultural dislocations brought on by immigration from overseas or migration from rural areas. But postwar American cities, especially those in the industrial North- east and Midwest, experienced these problems with new intensity. By the 1950s, the manufacturing sector was contracting, and mechanization was eliminating thousands

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MAP 26.2 Shifting Population Patterns, 1950–1980 This map shows the two major, somewhat overlapping, patterns of population movement between 1950 and 1980. Most striking is the rapid growth of the Sunbelt states. All the states experiencing increases of over 100 percent in that period are in the Southwest, plus Florida. The second pattern involves the growth of metropolitan areas, defi ned as a central city or urban area and its suburbs. The central cities were themselves mostly not growing, however. The metropolitan growth shown in this map was accounted for by the expanding suburbs. And because Sunbelt growth was primarily suburban growth, that’s where we see the most rapid metropolitan growth, with Los Angeles the clear leader.

784 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

upon thousands of unskilled and semiskilled jobs, the kind traditionally taken up by new urban residents. Th e disappearing jobs were the ones “in which [African Ameri- cans] are disproportionately concentrated,” noted the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin.

The Urban Crisis Th e intensifi cation of poverty, the deterioration of older housing stock, and the persistence of racial segregation produced what many

at the time called the urban crisis. Unwelcome in the shiny new suburbs built by men such as William J. Levitt, African Americans found low-paying jobs in the city and lived in aging, slumlike apartment buildings. Despite a thriving black middle class — indeed, larger than ever before — for those without resources, upward mobility remained elusive. Racism in institutional forms frustrated African Americans at every turn: housing restrictions, increasingly segregated schools, and an urban infrastructure that stood underfunded and decaying as whites left for the suburbs.

Housing and job discrimination were compounded by the frenzy of urban renewal that hit black neighborhoods in the 1950s and early 1960s. Seeking to revitalize declin- ing city centers, politicians and real estate developers proposed razing blighted neigh- borhoods to make way for modern construction projects that would appeal to the fl eeing middle class. In Boston, almost one-third of the old city — including the his- toric West End, a long-established Italian neighborhood — was demolished to make way for a new highway, high-rise housing, and government and commercial buildings. In San Francisco, some 4,000 residents of the Western Addition, a predominantly black neighborhood, lost out to an urban renewal program that built luxury housing, a shopping center, and an express boulevard. Between 1949 and 1967, urban renewal nationwide demolished almost 400,000 buildings and displaced 1.4 million people.

Th e urban experts believed they knew what to do with the dislocated: relocate them to federally funded housing projects, an outgrowth of New Deal housing policy, now much expanded. However well intended, these grim projects too oft en took the form of cheap high-rises that isolated their inhabitants from surrounding neighbor- hoods. Th e impact was felt especially strongly among African Americans, who oft en found that public housing increased racial segregation and concentrated the poor. Th e Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, with twenty-eight buildings of sixteen stories each, housed 20,000 residents, almost all of them black. Despite the planners’ wish to build decent aff ordable apartments, the huge complex became a notorious breeding ground for crime and hopelessness.

Urban Immigrants Despite the evident urban crisis, cities continued to attract immi- grants from abroad. Since the passage of the National Origins Act

of 1924 (Chapter 22), U.S. immigration policy had aimed mainly at keeping foreigners out. But World War II and the Cold War began slowly to change American policy. Th e Displaced Persons Act of 1948 permitted the entry of approximately 415,000 Europe- ans, many of them Jewish refugees. In a gesture to an important war ally, the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943. More far-reaching was the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which ended the exclusion of Japanese, Koreans, and Southeast Asians.

Aft er the national-origins quota system went into eff ect in 1924, Mexico replaced Eastern and Southern Europe as the nation’s labor reservoir. During World War II, the federal government introduced the Bracero Program to ease wartime labor shortages

C H A P T E R 2 6 Triumph of the Middle Class, 1945–1963 785

(Chapter 24) and then revived it in 1951, during the Korean War. Th e federal govern- ment’s ability to force workers to return to Mexico, however, was strictly limited. Th e Mexican immigrant population continued to grow, and by the time the Bracero Pro- gram ended in 1964, many of that group — an estimated 350,000 — had settled perma- nently in the United States. Braceros were joined by other Mexicans from small towns and villages, who immigrated to the United States to escape poverty or to earn money to return home and purchase land for farming.

As generations of immigrants had before them, Mexicans gravitated to major cit- ies. Mostly, they settled in Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Jose, El Paso, and other southwestern cities. But many also went north, augmenting well-established Mexican American communities in Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, and Denver. Although still important to American agriculture, Mexican Americans were employed in substantial numbers as industrial and service workers by 1960.

Urban Crisis This Pittsburgh neighborhood, photographed in 1955, typifi ed what many came to call the “urban crisis” of the 1950s and 1960s. As suburbanization drew middle-class residents, investment, and jobs away from the core of older cities, those cities began to rot from the inside. Urban neglect left many working-class neighborhoods, increasingly occupied by the nation’s poor, with few jobs, little industry, and dilapidated housing. W. Eugene Smith/Black Star/Stockphoto.com.

786 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

Another major group of Spanish-speaking migrants came from Puerto Rico. American citizens since 1917, Puerto Ricans enjoyed an unrestricted right to move to the mainland United States. Migration increased dramatically aft er World War II, when mechanization of the island’s sugarcane agriculture left many Puerto Ricans job- less. Airlines began to off er cheap direct fl ights between San Juan and New York City. With the fare at about $50 (two weeks’ wages), Puerto Ricans became America’s fi rst immigrants to arrive en masse by air. Most Puerto Ricans went to New York, where they settled fi rst in East (“Spanish”) Harlem and then scattered in neighborhoods across the city’s fi ve boroughs. Th is massive migration, which increased the Puerto Rican population to 613,000 by 1960, transformed the ethnic composition of the city. More Puerto Ricans now lived in New York City than in San Juan.

Cuban refugees constituted the third-largest group of Spanish-speaking immi- grants. In the six years aft er Fidel Castro’s seizure of power in 1959 (Chapter 25), an estimated 180,000 people fl ed Cuba for the United States. Th e Cuban refugee commu- nity grew so quickly that it turned Miami into a cosmopolitan, bilingual city almost overnight. Unlike other urban migrants, Miami’s Cubans quickly prospered, in large

part because they had arrived with money and middle-class skills.

Spanish-speaking immigrants — whether Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban — created huge barrios in major American cities, where bilin- gualism fl ourished, the Catholic Church shaped religious life, and families sought to join the economic mainstream. Th ough distinct from one another, these Spanish-speaking commu- nities remained largely segregated from white, or Anglo, neighborhoods and suburbs as well as from African American districts.

S U M M A RY We have explored how, at the same time it became mired in the Cold War, the United States entered an unparalleled era of prosperity in which a new middle class came into being. Indeed, the Cold War was one of the engines of prosperity. Th e postwar econ- omy was marked by the dominance of big corporations and defense spending.

Aft er years of depression and war-induced insecurity, Americans turned inward toward religion, home, and family. Postwar couples married young, had several chil- dren, and — if they were white and middle class — raised their children in a climate of suburban comfort and consumerism. Th e profamily orientation of the 1950s cele- brated traditional gender roles, even though millions of women entered the workforce in those years. Not everyone, however, shared in the postwar prosperity. Postwar cities increasingly became places of last resort for the nation’s poor. Black migrants, unlike earlier immigrants, encountered an urban economy that had little use for them. With- out opportunity, and faced with pervasive racism, many of them were on their way to becoming an American underclass, even as sparkling new suburbs emerged outside

Place postwar suburbanization in the context of the growing size and infl uence of the fed- eral government. How did the national government encourage suburbanization?

In what sense was the United States becoming, in the language of the Kerner Commission report, “two societies”?

C H A P T E R 2 6 Triumph of the Middle Class, 1945–1963 787

cities to house the new middle class. Many of the smoldering contradictions of the postwar period — Cold War anxiety in the midst of suburban domesticity, tensions in women’s lives, economic and racial inequality — helped spur the protest movements of the 1960s.

Fo r Fu r t h e r E x p l o rat i o n Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: Th e Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar Amer-

ica (2003). An important interpretation of the United States as a consumer society. James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (2005). An engaging

account of cultural fi gures from the 1950s, including Billy Graham and John Wayne. David Halberstam, Th e Fift ies (1993). An engaging and accessible introduction to postwar

American society. Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV (1996). An insightful explanation of the impact of

television. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound (1988). Th e classic introduction to postwar family life. Th omas J. Sugrue, Th e Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit

(1996). Th e best account of the urban crisis.

M AK E IT S T I C K

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T I M E L I N E

1944 Bretton Woods economic conference

World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) founded

GI Bill (Servicemen’s Readjust- ment Act)

1946 First edition of Dr. Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care

1947 First Levittown built 1948 Beginning of network

television Shelley v. Kraemer Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior

in the Human Male published 1949 Billy Graham revival in Los

Angeles 1951 Bracero Program revived Mattachine Society founded

1952 McCarran-Walter Act 1953 Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior of the

Human Female published 1954 Ray Kroc buys the fi rst

McDonald’s franchise 1955 Daughters of Bilitis founded 1956 National Interstate and Defense

Highways Act Elvis Presley’s breakthrough

records Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl”

published 1957 Peak of postwar baby boom 1961 Eisenhower warns nation

against military-industrial complex

1965 Griswold v. Connecticut

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27 Walking into Freedom Land: The Civil Rights Movement 1941–1973 In June 1945, as World War II was ending, Democratic senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi stood on the fl oor of the U.S. Senate and brashly told his colleagues that “the Negro race is an infe- rior race.” Raising his arms, his tie askew from vigorous gesturing, Eastland ridiculed black troops. “Th e Negro soldier was an utter and dismal failure in combat,” he said.

Eastland’s assertions were untrue. Black soldiers had served honorably; many won

medals for bravery in combat. All-black units, such as the 761st “Black Panther” Tank Battalion and the famous Tuskegee Airmen, were widely praised by military com- manders. But segregationists like Eastland were a nearly unassailable force in Con- gress, able to block civil rights legislation and shape national opinion.

In the 1940s, two generations aft er W. E. B. Du Bois famously wrote that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” few white Ameri- cans believed wholeheartedly in racial equality. Racial segregation remained entrenched across the country. Much of the Deep South, like Eastland’s Mississippi, was a “closed society”: black people had no political rights and lived on the margins of white society, impoverished and exploited. Northern cities proved more hospitable to African Americans, but schools, neighborhoods, and many businesses remained seg- regated and unequal in the North as well.

Across the nation, however, winds of change were gathering. Between World War II and the 1970s, slowly at fi rst, and then with greater urgency in the 1960s, the civil rights movement swept aside systematic racial segregation. It could not sweep away racial inequality completely, but the movement constituted a “second Reconstruction” in which African American activism reshaped the nation’s laws and practices. Civil rights was the paradigmatic social movement of the twentieth century. Its model of nonviolent protest and its calls for self-determination inspired the New Left , femi- nism, the Chicano movement, the gay rights movement, the American Indian move- ment, and many others.

Th e black-led civil rights movement, joined at key moments by Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, redefi ned liberalism. In the 1930s, New Deal liber-

IDENTIFY THE BIG IDEA How did the civil rights movement evolve over time, and how did competing ideas and political alliances aff ect its growth and that of other social movements?

C H A P T E R 2 7 Walking into Freedom Land: The Civil Rights Movement, 1941–1973 789

alism had established a welfare state to protect citizens from economic hardship. Th e civil rights movement forged a new rights liberalism: the notion that individuals require state protection from discrimination. Th is version of liberalism focused on identities — such as race or sex — rather than general social welfare, and as such would prove to be both a necessary expansion of the nation’s ideals and a divisive force that produced political backlash. Indeed, the quest for racial justice would contribute to a crisis of liberalism itself.

The Emerging Civil Rights Struggle, 1941–1957 As it took shape during World War II and the early Cold War, the battle against racial injustice proceeded along two tracks: at the grass roots and in governing institutions — federal courts, state legislatures, and ultimately the U.S. Congress. Labor unions, churches, and protest organizations such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) inspired hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens to join the movement. But grass- roots struggle was not African Americans’ only weapon. Th ey also had the Bill of Rights and the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution. Civil rights lived in those documents — especially in the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed equal protection under the law to all U.S. citizens, and in the Fift eenth, which guaranteed the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” — but had been ignored or violated for nearly a century. Th e task was to restore the Constitution’s legal force. Neither track — grassroots or legal/legislative — was entirely independent of the other. Together, they were the foundation of the fi ght for racial equality in the postwar decades.

Life Under Jim Crow Racial segregation and economic exploitation defi ned the lives of the majority of Afri- can Americans in the postwar decades. Numbering 15 million in 1950, African Amer- icans were approximately 10 percent of the U.S. population. In the South, however, they constituted between 30 and 50 percent of the population of several states, such as South Carolina and Mississippi. Segregation, commonly known as Jim Crow (Chap- ter 18), prevailed in every aspect of life in the southern states, where two-thirds of all African Americans lived in 1950. African Americans could not eat in restaurants patronized by whites or use the same waiting rooms at bus stations. All forms of public transportation were rigidly segregated by custom or by law. Public parks and libraries were segregated. Even drinking fountains were labeled “White” and “Colored.”

Th is system of segregation underlay economic and political structures that further marginalized and disempowered black citizens. Virtually no African American could work for city or state government, and the best jobs in the private sector were reserved for whites. Black workers labored “in the back,” cleaning, cooking, stocking shelves, and loading trucks for the lowest wages. Rural African Americans labored in a share- cropping system that kept them stuck in poverty, oft en prevented them from obtaining an education, and off ered virtually no avenue of escape. Politically, less than 20 percent of eligible black voters were allowed to vote, the result of poll taxes, literacy tests,

790 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

intimidation, fraud, and the “white primary” (elections in which only whites could vote). Th is near-total disenfranchisement gave whites power disproportionate to their numbers — black people were one-third of the residents of Mississippi, South Caro- lina, and Georgia but had virtually no political voice in those states.

In the North, racial segregation in everyday life was less acute but equally tangible. Northern segregation took the form of a spatial system in which whites increasingly lived in suburbs or on the outskirts of cities, while African Americans were concen- trated in declining downtown neighborhoods. Th e result was what many called ghet- tos: all-black districts characterized by high rents, low wages, and inadequate city services. Employment discrimination and lack of adequate training left many African Americans without any means of support. Few jobs other than the most menial were open to African Americans; journalists, accountants, engineers, and other highly edu- cated men from all-black colleges and universities oft en labored as railroad porters or cooks because jobs commensurate with their skills remained for whites only. Th ese conditions produced a self-perpetuating cycle that kept far too many black citizens trapped on the social margins.

Segregation in Mobile, 1956 As the law of the land in most southern states, racial segregation (known as Jim Crow) required the complete separation of blacks and whites in most public spaces. The “white only” drinking fountain shown in this 1956 photograph in Mobile, Alabama, was typical. Everything from waiting areas to libraries, public parks, schools, restrooms, and even cola vending machines was subject to strict racial segregation. Gordon Parks, courtesy of The Gordon Parks Foundation.

C H A P T E R 2 7 Walking into Freedom Land: The Civil Rights Movement, 1941–1973 791

To be certain, African Americans found greater freedom in the North and West than in the South. Th ey could vote, participate in politics, and, at least aft er the early 1960s, enjoy equal access to public accommodations. But we err in thinking that racial segregation was only a southern problem or that poverty and racial discrimination were not also deeply entrenched in the North and West. In northern cities such as Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia, for instance, white home owners in the 1950s used various tactics — from police harassment to thrown bricks, burning crosses, bombs, and mob violence — to keep African Americans from living near them. Moreover, as we saw in Chapter 26, Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and bank redlining excluded African American home buyers from the all-white suburbs emerging around major cities. Racial segregation was a national, not regional, problem.

Origins of the Civil Rights Movement Since racial discrimination had been part of American life for hundreds of years, why did the civil rights movement arise when it did? Aft er all, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, had begun challenging racial segregation in a series of court cases in the 1930s. And other organizations, such as Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s, had attracted signifi cant popular support. Th ese precedents were important, but several factors came together in the middle of the twentieth century to make a broad movement possible.

An important infl uence was World War II. “Th e Jewish people and the Negro people both know the meaning of Nordic supremacy,” wrote the African American poet Langston Hughes in 1945. In the war against fascism, the Allies sought to dis- credit racist Nazi ideology. Committed to fi ghting racism abroad, Americans increas- ingly condemned racism at home. Th e Cold War placed added pressure on U.S. offi cials. “More and more we are learning how closely our democracy is under obser- vation,” President Harry S. Truman commented in 1947. To inspire other nations in the global standoff with the Soviet Union, Truman explained, “we must correct the remaining imperfections in our practice of democracy.”

Among the most consequential factors was the growth of the urban black middle class. Historically small, the black middle class experienced robust growth aft er World War II. Its ranks produced most of the civil rights leaders: ministers, teachers, trade unionists, attorneys, and other professionals. Churches, for centuries a sanctuary for black Americans, were especially important. Moreover, in the 1960s African American college students — part of the largest expansion of college enrollment in U.S. history — joined the movement, adding new energy and fresh ideas (Table 27.1). With access to education, media, and institutions, this new middle class had more resources than ever before. Less dependent on white patronage, and therefore less vulnerable to white retali- ation, middle-class African Americans were in a position to lead a movement for change.

Still other infl uences assisted the movement. White labor leaders were generally more equality-minded than the rank and fi le, but the United Auto Workers, the United Steelworkers, and the Communication Workers of America, among many other trade unions, were reliable allies at the national level. Th e new medium of television, too, played a crucial role. When television networks covered early desegregation struggles, such as the 1957 integration of Little Rock High School, Americans across the country

792 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

saw the violence of white supremacy fi rsthand. None of these factors alone was deci- sive. None ensured an easy path. Th e civil rights movement faced enormous resistance and required dauntless courage and sacrifi ce from thousands upon thousands of activ- ists for more than three decades. Ultimately, however, the movement changed the nation for the better and improved the lives of millions of Americans.

World War II: The Beginnings During the war fought “to make the world safe for democracy,” the United States was far from ready to extend full equality to its own black citizens. Black workers faced discrimination in wartime employment, and the more than one million black troops who served in World War II were placed in segregated units commanded by whites. Both at home and abroad, World War II “immeasurably magnifi ed the Negro’s aware- ness of the disparity between the American profession and practice of democracy,” NAACP president Walter White observed.

Executive Order 8802 On the home front, activists pushed two strategies. First, A. Philip Randolph, whose Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Por-

ters was the most prominent black trade union, called for a march on Washington in early 1941. Randolph planned to bring 100,000 protesters to the nation’s capital if Afri- can Americans were not given equal opportunity in war jobs — then just beginning to expand with President Franklin Roosevelt’s pledge to supply the Allies with materiel. To avoid a divisive protest, FDR issued Executive Order 8802 in June of that year, pro- hibiting racial discrimination in defense industries, and Randolph agreed to cancel the march. Th e resulting Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) had few enforcement powers, but it set an important precedent: federal action. Randolph’s eff orts showed that white leaders and institutions could be swayed by concerted Afri- can American action. It would be a critical lesson for the movement.

The Double V Campaign

A second strategy jumped from the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the foremost African American newspapers of the era. It was the brainchild of an ordinary cafeteria worker from Kansas. In a 1942

letter to the editor, James G. Th ompson urged that “colored Americans adopt the double VV for a double victory” — victory over fascism abroad and victory over rac- ism at home. Edgar Rouzeau, editor of the paper’s New York offi ce, agreed: “Black

TABLE 27.1 African American College Enrollment

Number of African Americans Enrolled Year (rounded to nearest thousand)

1940 60,000 1950 110,000 1960 185,000 1970 430,000 1980 1.4 million 1990 3.6 million

C H A P T E R 2 7 Walking into Freedom Land: The Civil Rights Movement, 1941–1973 793

America must fi ght two wars and win in both.” Instantly dubbed the Double V Cam- paign, Th ompson’s notion, with Rouzeau’s backing, spread like wildfi re through black communities across the country. African Americans would demonstrate their loyalty and citizenship by fi ghting the Axis powers. But they would also demand, peacefully but emphatically, the defeat of racism at home. “Th e suff ering and privation may be great,” Rouzeau told his readers, “but the rewards loom even greater.”

Th e Double V eff orts met considerable resistance. In war industries, factories periodically shut down in Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and other cities because of “hate strikes”: the refusal of white workers to labor alongside black workers. Detroit was especially tense. Referring to the potential for racial strife, Life magazine reported in 1942 that “Detroit is Dynamite. . . . It can either blow up Hitler or blow up Amer- ica.” In 1943, it nearly did the latter. On a hot summer day, whites from the city’s ethnic neighborhoods taunted and beat African Americans in a local park. Th ree days of riot- ing ensued in which thirty-four people were killed, twenty-fi ve of them black. Federal troops were called in to restore order.

Despite and because of such incidents, a generation was spurred into action dur- ing the war years. In New York City, employment discrimination on the city’s transit lines prompted one of the fi rst bus boycotts in the nation’s history, led in 1941 by Har- lem minister Adam Clayton Powell Jr. In Chicago, James Farmer and three other members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a nonviolent peace organization, founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942. FOR and CORE adopted the philosophy of nonviolent direct action espoused by Mahatma Gandhi of India. Another FOR member in New York, Bayard Rustin, was equally instrumental in pro- moting direct action; he led one of the earliest challenges to southern segregation, the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation. Meanwhile, aft er the war, hundreds of thousands of African American veterans used the GI Bill to go to college, trade school, or graduate school, placing themselves in a position to push against segregation. At the war’s end, Powell affi rmed that “the black man . . . is ready to throw himself into the struggle to make the dream of America become fl esh and blood, bread and butter.”

Cold War Civil Rights Demands for justice persisted in the early years of the Cold War. African American eff orts were propelled by symbolic victories — as when Jackie Robinson broke through the color line in major league baseball by joining the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 — but the growing black vote in northern cities proved more decisive. During World War II, more than a million African Americans migrated to northern and western cities, where they joined the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal (Map 27.1). Th is new- found political leverage awakened northern liberals, many of whom became allies of civil rights advocates. Ultimately, the Cold War produced mixed results, as the nation’s com- mitment to anticommunism opened some avenues for civil rights while closing others.

Civil Rights and the New Deal Coalition

African American leaders were uncertain what to expect from President Truman, inheritor of the New Deal coalition but not opposed to using racist language himself. Th ough he did not

immediately support social equality for African Americans, Truman supported civil rights because he believed in equality before the law. Moreover, he understood the

794 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

growing importance of the small but oft en decisive black vote in key northern states such as New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Civil rights activists Randolph and Powell — along with vocal white liberals such as Hubert Humphrey, the mayor of Minneapolis, and members of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a liberal organization — pressed Truman to act.

With no support for civil rights in Congress, Truman turned to executive action. In 1946, he appointed the Presidential Committee on Civil Rights, whose 1947 report, “To Secure Th ese Rights,” called for robust federal action to ensure equality for Afri- can Americans. With the report fresh in his mind, in 1948 Truman issued an execu- tive order desegregating employment in federal agencies and, under pressure from Randolph’s Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service, desegregated the armed forces. Truman then sent a message to Congress asking that all of the report’s recommendations — including the abolition of poll taxes and the restoration of the Fair Employment Practices Commission — be made into law. It was the most aggres- sive, and politically bold, call for racial equality by the leader of a major political party since Reconstruction.

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MAP 27.1 Internal Migrations The migration of African Americans from the South to other regions of the country produced one of the most remarkable demographic shifts of the mid-twentieth century. Between World War I — which marked the start of the Great Migration — and the 1970s, more than 6 million African Americans left the South. Where they settled in the North and West, they helped change the politics of entire cities and even states. Seeking black votes, which had become a key to victory in major cities, liberal Democrats and Republicans alike in New York, Illinois, California, and Pennsylvania, for instance, increasingly made civil rights part of their platform. In this way, migration advanced the political cause of black equality.

C H A P T E R 2 7 Walking into Freedom Land: The Civil Rights Movement, 1941–1973 795

Truman’s boldness was too much for southern Democrats. Under the leadership of Strom Th urmond, governor of South Carolina, white Democrats from the South formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party, known popularly as the Dixiecrats, for the 1948 election (Chapter 25). Th is brought into focus an internal struggle developing within the Democratic Party and its still-formidable New Deal coalition. Would the civil rights aims of the party’s liberal wing alienate southern white Democrats, as well as many suburban whites in the North? It was the fi rst hint of the discord that would eventually divide the Democratic Party in the 1960s.

Race and Anticommunism

Th e Cold War shaped civil rights in both positive and negative terms. In a time of growing fear of communist expansionism, Truman worried about America’s image in the world. He reminded Ameri-

cans that when whites and blacks “fail to live together in peace,” that failure hurt “the cause of democracy itself in the whole world.” Indeed, the Soviet Union used Ameri- can racism as a means of discrediting the United States abroad. “We cannot escape the fact that our civil rights record has been an issue in world politics,” the Committee on Civil Rights wrote. International tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union thus appeared to strengthen the hand of civil rights leaders, because America needed to demonstrate to the rest of the world that its race relations were improving (America Compared, p. 796).

However, the Cold War strengthened one hand while weakening the other. McCarthyism and the hunt for subversives at home held the civil rights movement back. Civil rights opponents charged that racial integration was “communistic,” and the NAACP was banned in many southern states as an “anti-American” organization. Black Americans who spoke favorably of the Soviet Union, such as the actor and singer Paul Robeson, or had been “fellow travelers” in the 1930s, such as the pacifi st Bayard Rustin, were persecuted. Robeson, whose career was destroyed by such accusations, told House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) interrogators, “My father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to . . . have a part of it just like you.” Th e fate of people like Robeson showed that the Cold War could work against the civil rights cause just as easily as for it.

Mexican Americans and Japanese Americans African Americans were the most prominent, but not the only, group in American society to organize against racial injustice in the 1940s. In the Southwest, from Texas to California, Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans endured a “caste” system not unlike the Jim Crow system in the South. In Texas, for instance, poll taxes kept most Mexican American citizens from voting. Decades of discrimination by employ- ers in agriculture and manufacturing — made possible by the constant supply of cheap labor from across the border — suppressed wages and kept the majority of Mexican Americans barely above poverty. Many lived in colonias or barrios, neighborhoods separated from Anglos and oft en lacking sidewalks, reliable electricity and water, and public services.

Developments within the Mexican American community set the stage for fresh challenges to these conditions in the 1940s. Labor activism in the 1930s and 1940s,

A M E R I C A C O M PA R E D

F r e e d o m i n t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d A f r i c a Hailou Wolde-Giorghis

Hailou Wolde-Giorghis was an Ethiopian student who visited the United States at the invitation of the State Department in the early 1960s.

“Negroes are dirty,” say the whites, but in nearly all restaurants I saw Negro waiters and cooks. “Th ey’re lazy”: I noticed that it is the Negro who does the hardest manual work. Th ey are said to be uncultivated and are therefore denied access to culture. As George Bernard Shaw said, “Th e haughty American nation makes the Negro shine its shoes, and then demonstrates his physical and mental inferiority by the fact that he is a shoe-cleaner.” . . .

What is known as integration in the South is the ability of a Negro to enter a shop and buy a record, or the fact that, of ten thousand students enrolled in a university, two of them are Negroes. “A miracle!” they cry. Real integration, however, does not exist, not even in the North, and by real integration I mean interracial communica- tion, complete equality in the strict sense of the word. Still another example drawn from the South: the manager of a television studio told me in frigid terms that he would not hire Negroes; there would be a scandal and all his sponsors would protest.

SOURCE: Hailou Wolde-Giorghis, “My Encounters with Racism in the United States,” in Views of America, ed. Alan F. Westin et al. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966), 228–231.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Here, the American civil rights leader celebrates the independence of the African nation of Ghana in 1957.

And it’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it that . . . [Ghana] is now free and is free without rising up with arms and ammunition. It

is free through nonviolent means. Because of that the British Empire will not have the bitterness for Ghana that she has for China, so to speak. Because of that when the British Empire leaves Ghana she leaves with a dif- ferent attitude than she would have left with if she had been driven out by armies. We’ve got to revolt in such a way that aft er revolt is over we can live with people as their broth- ers and sisters.

SOURCE: Martin Luther King Jr., “Th e Birth of a New Nation,” Liberation 28 (April 1957).

Kwame Nkrumah

Kwame Nkrumah was the fi rst president of the independent nation of Ghana. In the 1930s and 1940s, Nkrumah studied in the United States, earning degrees at Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Th e “wind of change” has become a raging hurricane, sweeping away the old colo- nialist Africa. Th e year 1960 was Africa’s year. In that year alone, seventeen African States emerged as proud and independent sovereign nations. Now the ultimate freedom for the whole of Africa can no more be in doubt.

For centuries, Europeans dominated the African continent. Th e white man arrogated to himself the right to rule and to be obeyed by the non-white. . . .

All this makes a sad story, but now we must be prepared to bury the past with its unpleasant memories and look to the future. All we ask of the former colonial powers is their goodwill and cooperation to remedy past mistakes and injustices and to grant independence to the colonies in Africa.

SOURCE: Kwame Nkrumah, I Speak of Freedom: A Statement of African Ideology (New York: Praeger, 1961), ix.

C H A P T E R 2 7 Walking into Freedom Land: The Civil Rights Movement, 1941–1973 797

especially in Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions with large numbers of Mexican Americans, improved wages and working conditions in some industries and produced a new generation of leaders. More than 400,000 Mexican Americans also served in World War II. Having fought for their country, many returned to the United States determined to challenge their second-class citizenship. Additionally, a new Mexican American middle class began to take shape in major cities such as Los Angeles, San Antonio, El Paso, and Chicago, which, like the African American middle class, gave leaders and resources to the cause.

In Texas and California, Mexican Americans created new civil rights organiza- tions in the postwar years. In Corpus Christi, Texas, World War II veterans founded the American GI Forum in 1948 to protest the poor treatment of Mexican American soldiers and veterans. Activists in Los Angeles created the Community Service Orga- nization (CSO) the same year. Both groups arose to address specifi c local injustices (such as the segregation of military cemeteries), but they quickly broadened their scope to encompass political and economic justice for the larger community. Among the fi rst young activists to work for the CSO were Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, who would later found the United Farm Workers (UFW) and inspire the Chicano movement of the 1960s.

Activists also pushed for legal change. In 1947, fi ve Mexican American fathers in California sued a local school district for placing their children in separate “Mexican” schools. Th e case, Mendez v. Westminster School District, never made it to the U.S.

Bracero Worker Card In the Southwest, Mexican immigrants and many Mexican Americans encoun- tered a caste system not unlike Jim Crow segregation. Most of the hardest, lowest- paying work in states such as Texas, Arizona, and California was performed by people of Mexican descent. Under a government program, braceros, or migrant Mexican workers, were allowed into the United States for a limited time to harvest a variety of fruit and vegetable crops. A worker card issued to one such bracero is pictured here. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Behring Center.

798 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

Supreme Court. But the Ninth Circuit Court ruled such segregation unconstitutional, laying the legal groundwork for broader challenges to racial inequality. Among those fi ling briefs in the case was the NAACP’s Th urgood Marshall, who was then develop- ing the legal strategy to strike at racial segregation in the South. In another signifi cant legal victory, the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 — just two weeks before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision — that Mexican Americans constituted a “dis- tinct class” that could claim protection from discrimination.

Also on the West Coast, Japanese Americans accelerated their legal challenge to discrimination. Undeterred by rulings in the Hirabayashi (1943) and Korematsu (1944) cases upholding wartime imprisonment (Chapter 24), the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) fi led lawsuits in the late 1940s to regain property lost during the war. Th e JACL also challenged the constitutionality of California’s Alien Land Law, which prohibited Japanese immigrants from owning land, and successfully lobbied Congress to enable those same immigrants to become citizens — a right they were denied for fi ft y years. Th ese eff orts by Mexican and Japanese Americans enlarged the sphere of civil rights and laid the foundation for a broader notion of racial equality in the postwar years.

Fighting for Equality Before the Law With civil rights legislation blocked in Congress by southern Democrats throughout the 1950s, activists looked in two diff erent directions for a breakthrough: to northern state legislatures and to the federal courts. School segregation remained a stubborn problem in northern states, but the biggest obstacle to black progress there was persis- tent job and housing discrimination. Th e states with the largest African American populations, and hence the largest share of black Democratic Party voters, became testing grounds for state legislation to end such discriminatory practices.

Winning antidiscrimination legislation depended on coalition politics. African American activists forged alliances with trade unions and liberal organizations such as the American Friends Service Committee (a Quaker group), among many others. Progress was slow and oft en occurred only aft er long periods of unglamorous struggle to win votes in state capitals such as Albany, New York; Springfi eld, Illinois; and Lan- sing, Michigan. Th e fi rst fair employment laws had come in New York and New Jersey in 1945. A decade passed, however, before other states with signifi cant black popula- tions passed similar legislation. Antidiscrimination laws in housing were even more diffi cult to pass, with most progress not coming until the 1960s. Th ese legislative cam- paigns in northern states received little national attention, but they were instrumental in laying the groundwork for legal equality outside the South.

Thurgood Marshall Because the vast majority of southern African Americans were prohibited from voting, state legislatures there were closed to the

kind of organized political pressure possible in the North. Th us activists also looked to federal courts for leverage. In the late 1930s, NAACP lawyers Th urgood Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston, and William Hastie had begun preparing the legal ground in a series of cases challenging racial discrimination. Th e key was prodding the U.S. Supreme Court to use the Fourteenth Amendment’s “equal protection” clause to over-

C H A P T E R 2 7 Walking into Freedom Land: The Civil Rights Movement, 1941–1973 799

turn its 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine.

Marshall was the great-grandson of slaves. Of modest origins, his parents instilled in him a faith in law and the Constitution. Aft er his 1930 graduation from Lincoln University, a prestigious African American institution near Philadelphia, Marshall applied to the University of Maryland Law School. Denied admission because the school did not accept black applicants, he enrolled at all-black Howard University. Th ere Marshall met Houston, a law school dean, and the two forged a friendship and intellectual partnership that would change the face of American legal history. Marshall, with Houston’s and Hastie’s critical strategic input, would argue most of the NAACP’s landmark cases. In the late 1960s, President Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court — the fi rst African American to have that honor.

Marshall, Houston, Hastie, and six other attorneys fi led suit aft er suit, deliberately selecting each one from dozens of possibilities. Th e strategy was slow and time- consuming, but progress came. In 1936, Marshall and Hamilton won a state case that forced the University of Maryland Law School to admit qualifi ed African Americans — a ruling of obvious signifi cance to Marshall. Eight years later, in Smith v. Allwright (1944), Marshall convinced the U.S. Supreme Court that all-white primaries were unconstitutional. In 1950, with Marshall once again arguing the case, the Supreme Court ruled in McLaurin v. Oklahoma that universities could not segregate black stu- dents from others on campus. None of these cases produced swift changes in the daily lives of most African Americans, but they confi rmed that civil rights attorneys were on the right track.

Brown v. Board of Education

Th e NAACP’s legal strategy achieved its ultimate validation in a case involving Linda Brown, a black pupil in Topeka, Kansas, who had been forced to attend a distant segregated school rather than the

nearby white elementary school. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), Marshall argued that such segregation was unconstitutional because it denied Linda Brown the “equal protection of the laws” guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment (Map 27.2). In a unanimous decision on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court agreed, overturning the “separate but equal” doctrine at last. Writing for the Court, the new chief justice, Earl Warren, wrote: “We conclude that in the fi eld of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inher- ently unequal.” In an implementing 1955 decision known as Brown II, the Court declared simply that integration should proceed “with all deliberate speed.”

In the South, however, Virginia senator Harry F. Byrd issued a call for “massive resistance.” Calling May 17 “Black Monday,” the Mississippi segregationist Tom P. Brady invoked the language of the Cold War to discredit the decision, assailing the “totalitarian government” that had rendered the decision in the name of “socialism and communism.” Th at year, half a million southerners joined White Citizens’ Coun- cils dedicated to blocking school integration. Some whites revived the old tactics of violence and intimidation, swelling the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan to levels not seen since the 1920s. Th e “Southern Manifesto,” signed in 1956 by 101 members of Con- gress, denounced the Brown decision as “a clear abuse of judicial power” and encour- aged local offi cials to defy it. Th e white South had declared all-out war on Brown.

800 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

Enforcement of the Supreme Court’s decision was complicated further by Dwight Eisenhower’s presence in the White House — the president was no champion of civil rights. Eisenhower accepted the Brown decision as the law of the land, but he thought it a mistake. Ike was especially unhappy about the prospect of committing federal power to enforce the decision. A crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, fi nally forced his hand. In September 1957, when nine black students attempted to enroll at the all-white Cen- tral High School, Governor Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to bar them. Angry white mobs appeared daily to taunt the students, chanting “Go back to the jungle.” As the vicious scenes played out on television night aft er night, Eisenhower

fi nally acted. He sent 1,000 federal troops to Little Rock and nationalized the Arkansas National Guard, ordering them to protect the black students. Eisenhower thus became the fi rst president since Reconstruction to use fed- eral troops to enforce the rights of African Americans. But Little Rock also showed that southern offi cials had more loyalty to local cus- tom than to the law — a repeated problem in the post-Brown era.

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Murray v. Pearson (1936), Maryland Court of Appeals: Case originated in Baltimore, MD. Outcome: Segregation state without separate black law schools forced to admit qualified candidates regardless of race.

Hirabayashi v. United States (1943), U.S. Supreme Court: Case originated in Seattle, WA. Outcome: Upheld legality of Japanese imprisonment during World War II.

Korematsu v. United States (1944), U.S. Supreme Court: Case originated in San Leandro, CA. Outcome: Reaffirmed Hirabayashi.

Smith v. Allwright (1944), U.S. Supreme Court: Case originated in Harris County, TX. Outcome: Ruled that the white primary was unconstitutional.

Morgan v. Virginia (1946), U.S. Supreme Court: Case originated in Gloucester County, VA. Outcome: Virginia law enforcing segregation on buses ruled unconstitutional.

Mendez v. Westminster School District (1947), U.S. Circuit Court: Case originated in Orange County, CA. Outcome: Segregation of Mexican and Mexican American students ruled unconstitutional.

Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), U.S. Supreme Court: Case originated in St. Louis, MO. Outcome: Ruled that racially restrictive housing covenants are unenforceable.

McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950), U.S. Supreme Court: Case originated in Norman, OK. Outcome: Racial segregation in law and graduate schools ruled unconstitutional.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), U.S. Supreme Court: Case originated in Topeka, KS. Outcome: Ruling dismantled “separate but equal” doctrine in public education as unconstitutional.

Loving v. Virginia (1967), U.S. Supreme Court: Case originated in Caroline County, VA. Outcome: Ruled all state laws prohibiting interracial marriage unconstitutional.

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MAP 27.2 Desegregation Court Cases Desegregation court battles were not limited to the South. Note the important California cases regard- ing Mexican Americans and Japanese Americans. Two seminal decisions, the 1948 housing decision in Shelley v. Kraemer and the 1954 school decision in Brown v. Board of Education, originated in Missouri and Kansas, respectively. This map helps show that racial segregation and discrimination were a national, not simply a southern, problem.

How were the circumstances facing Mexican and Japanese Americans similar to those facing African Americans? How were they diff erent?

How did the NAACP go about developing a legal strategy to attack racial segregation?

C H A P T E R 2 7 Walking into Freedom Land: The Civil Rights Movement, 1941–1973 801

Forging a Protest Movement, 1955–1965 Declaring racial segregation integral to the South’s “habits, traditions, and way of life,” the Southern Manifesto signaled that many whites would not accept African Ameri- can equality readily. As Americans had witnessed in Little Rock, the unwillingness of local offi cials to enforce Brown could render the decision invalid in practice. If legal victories would not be enough, citizens themselves, black and white, would have to take to the streets and demand justice. Following the Brown decision, they did just that, forging a protest movement unique in the history of the United States.

Nonviolent Direct Action Brown had been the law of the land for barely a year when a single act of violence struck at the heart of black America. A fourteen-year-old African American from the South Side of Chicago, Emmett Till, was visiting relatives in Mississippi in the summer of 1955. Seen talking to a white woman in a grocery store, Till was tortured and mur- dered under cover of night. His mutilated body was found at the bottom of a river, tied with barbed wire to a heavy steel cotton gin fan. Photos of Till’s body in Jet magazine brought national attention to the heinous crime.

Two white men were arrested for Till’s murder. During the trial, followed closely in African American communities across the country, the lone witness to Till’s kidnapping — his uncle, Mose Wright — identifi ed both killers. Feeling “the blood boil in hundreds of white people as they sat glaring in the courtroom,” Wright said, “it was the fi rst time in my life I had the courage to accuse a white man of a crime.” Despite Wright’s eyewitness testimony, the all-white jury found the defendants innocent. Th is miscarriage of justice — later, the killers even admitted their guilt in a Look magazine article — galvanized an entire generation of African Americans; no one who lived through the Till case ever forgot it.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

In the wake of the Till case, civil rights advocates needed some good news. Th ey received it three months later, as southern black leaders embraced an old tactic put to new ends: nonviolent protest. On Decem-

ber 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a civil rights activist in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. She was arrested and charged with violating a local segregation ordinance. Parks’s act was not the spur-of-the-moment decision that it seemed: a woman of sterling reputation and a longtime NAACP member, she had been contemplating such an act for some time. Middle-aged and unassuming, Rosa Parks fi t the bill perfectly for the NAACP’s challenge against segregated buses.

Once the die was cast, the black community turned for leadership to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the recently appointed pastor of Montgomery’s Dexter Street Baptist Church. Th e son of a prominent Atlanta minister, King embraced the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. Working closely, but behind the scenes, with Bayard Rustin, King studied nonviolent philosophy, which Rustin and others in the Fellowship of Recon- ciliation had fi rst used in the 1940s. Aft er Rosa Parks’s arrest, King endorsed a plan proposed by a local black women’s organization to boycott Montgomery’s bus system. Th e Montgomery Bus Boycott was inspired by similar boycotts that had taken place in Harlem in 1941 and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1953.

802 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

For the next 381 days, Montgomery’s African Americans formed car pools or walked to work. “Darling, it’s empty!” Coretta Scott King exclaimed to her husband as a bus normally fi lled with black riders rolled by their living room window on the fi rst day of the boycott. Th e transit company neared bankruptcy, and downtown stores complained about the loss of business. But only aft er the Supreme Court ruled in November 1956 that bus segregation was unconstitutional did the city of Montgomery fi nally comply. “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested,” said one woman boycotter.

Th e Montgomery Bus Boycott catapulted King to national prominence. In 1957, along with the Reverend Ralph Abernathy and dozens of black ministers from across the South, he founded the Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Th e black church, long the center of African American social and cultural life, now lent its moral and organizational strength to the civil rights movement. Black churchwomen were a tower of strength, transferring the skills they had honed during years of church work to the fi ght for civil rights. Th e SCLC quickly joined the NAACP at the leading edge of the movement for racial justice.

Greensboro Sit-Ins Th e battle for civil rights entered a new phase in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, when four black college stu-

dents took seats at the whites-only lunch counter at the local Woolworth’s fi ve-and- dime store. Th is simple act was entirely the brainchild of the four students, who had discussed it in their dorm rooms over several preceding nights. A New York–based spokesman for Woolworth’s said the chain would “abide by local custom,” which meant refusing to serve African Americans at the lunch counter. Th e students were deter- mined to “sit in” until they were served. For three weeks, hundreds of students inspired by the original foursome took turns sitting at the counters, quietly eating, doing home- work, or reading. Taunted by groups of whites, pelted with food and other debris, the black students — oft en occupying more than sixty of the sixty-six seats — held strong. Although many were arrested, the tactic worked: the Woolworth’s lunch counter was desegregated, and sit-ins quickly spread to other southern cities (American Voices, p. 803).

Ella Baker and SNCC Inspired by the developments in Greensboro and elsewhere, Ella Baker, an administrator with the SCLC, helped organize the Stu-

dent Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “Snick”) in 1960 to facilitate student sit-ins. Rolling like a great wave across the Upper South, from North Carolina into Virginia, Maryland, and Tennessee, by the end of the year students had launched sit-ins in 126 cities. More than 50,000 people participated, and 3,600 were jailed. Th e sit-ins drew African American college students into the movement in sig- nifi cant numbers for the fi rst time. Northern students formed solidarity committees and raised money for bail. SNCC quickly emerged as the most important student pro- test organization in the country and inspired a generation of students on college cam- puses across the nation.

Baker took a special interest in these students, because she found them receptive to her notion of participatory democracy. Th e granddaughter of slaves, Baker had moved to Harlem in the 1930s, where she worked for New Deal agencies and then the NAACP. She believed in nurturing leaders from the grass roots, encouraging ordinary

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S

803

D e s e g r e g a t i n g L u n c h C o u n t e r s F R A N K L I N M C C A I N Among the many challenges historians face is fi guring out the processes by which long- oppressed ordinary people fi nally rise up and demand justice. During the 1950s, a liberating process was quietly under way among southern blacks, bursting forth dramatically in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and then, by the end of the decade, emerging across the South. Franklin McCain was one of the four African American students at North Carolina A&T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, who sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter on February 1, 1960, setting off a wave of student sit-ins that rocked the South and helped initiate a national civil rights movement.

Th e planning process was on a Sunday night, I remember it quite well. I think it was Joseph who said, “It’s time that we take some action now. We’ve been getting together, and we’ve been, up to this point, still like most people we’ve talked about for the past few weeks or so — that is, people who talk a lot but, in fact, make very little action.” Aft er selecting the technique, then we said, “Let’s go down and just ask for service.” It certainly wasn’t titled a “sit-in” or “sit-down” at that time. “Let’s just go down to Woolworth’s tomorrow and ask for ser- vice, and the tactic is going to be simply this: we’ll just stay there.”

. . . Once getting there . . . we did make purchases of school supplies and took the patience and time to get receipts for our purchases, and Joseph and myself went over to the counter and asked to be served coff ee and doughnuts. As anticipated, the reply was, “I’m sorry, we don’t serve you here.” And of course we said, “We just beg to disagree with you. We’ve in fact already been served.” . . . Th e attendant or waitress was a little bit dumbfounded, just didn’t know what to say under circumstances like that. . . .

If it’s possible to know what it means to have your soul cleansed — I felt pretty clean at that time. I probably felt better on that

day than I’ve ever felt in my life. Seems like a lot of feelings of guilt or what-have-you suddenly left me, and I felt as though I had gained my manhood. . . . Not Franklin McCain only as an individual, but I felt as though the manhood of a number of other black persons had been restored and had gotten some respect from just that one day.

Th e movement started out as a move- ment of nonviolence and a Christian movement. . . . It was a movement that was seeking justice more than anything else and not a movement to start a war. . . . We knew that probably the most powerful and potent weapon that people have literally no defense for is love, kindness. Th at is, whip the enemy with something that he doesn’t understand. . . . Th e individual who had probably the most infl uence on us was Gandhi. . . . Yes, Martin Luther King’s name was well-known when the sit-in movement was in eff ect, but . . . no, he was not the individual we had upmost in mind when we started the sit-in movement.

SOURCE: My Soul Is Rested by Howell Raines, copyright 1977 Howell Raines. Used by permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. and Russell & Volkening as agents for the author.

804 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

people to stand up for their rights rather than to depend on charismatic fi gureheads. “My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders,” she once said. Nonetheless, Baker nurtured a generation of young activists in SNCC, including Stokely Carmichael, Anne Moody, John Lewis, and Diane Nash, who went on to become some of the most important civil rights leaders in the United States.

Freedom Rides Emboldened by SNCC’s sit-in tactics, in 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized a series of what were called Freedom

Rides on interstate bus lines throughout the South. Th e aim was to call attention to blatant violations of recent Supreme Court rulings against segregation in interstate commerce. Th e activists who signed on — mostly young, both black and white — knew that they were taking their lives in their hands. Th ey found courage in song, as civil rights activists had begun to do across the country, with lyrics such as “I’m tak- ing a ride on the Greyhound bus line. . . . Hallelujah, I’m traveling down freedom’s main line!”

Courage they needed. Club-wielding Klansmen attacked the buses when they stopped in small towns. Outside Anniston, Alabama, one bus was fi rebombed; the Freedom Riders escaped only moments before it exploded. Some riders were then brutally beaten. Freedom Riders and news reporters were also viciously attacked by

Ella Baker Born in Virginia and educated at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, Ella Baker was one of the foremost theorists of grassroots, participatory democracy in the United States. Active all her life in the black freedom movement, in 1960 Baker cofounded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Com- mittee (SNCC). Her advocacy of leadership by ordinary, nonelite people often led her to disagree with the top-down movement strategy of Martin Luther King Jr. and other ministers of the South- ern Christian Leadership Confer- ence (SCLC). AP Images.

C H A P T E R 2 7 Walking into Freedom Land: The Civil Rights Movement, 1941–1973 805

Klansmen in Birmingham and Montgomery. Despite the violence, state authorities refused to intervene. “I cannot guarantee protection for this bunch of rabble rousers,” declared Governor John Patterson of Alabama.

Once again, local offi cials’ refusal to enforce the law left the fate of the Freedom Riders in Washington’s hands. Th e new president, John F. Kennedy, was cautious about civil rights. Despite a campaign commitment, he failed to deliver on a civil rights bill. Elected by a thin margin, Kennedy believed that he could ill aff ord to lose the support of powerful southern senators. But civil rights was unlike other domestic issues. Its fate was going to be decided not in the halls of Congress, but on the streets of southern cities. Although President Kennedy discouraged the Freedom Rides, beatings shown on the nightly news forced Attorney General Robert Kennedy to dispatch federal mar- shals. Civil rights activists thus learned the value of nonviolent protest that provoked violent white resistance.

Th e victories so far had been limited, but the groundwork had been laid for a civil rights off ensive that would transform the nation. Th e NAACP’s legal strategy had been followed closely by the emergence of a major protest movement. And now civil rights leaders focused their attention on Congress.

Legislating Civil Rights, 1963–1965 Th e fi rst civil rights law in the nation’s history came in 1866 just aft er the Civil War. Its provisions were long ignored (Chapter 15). A second law was passed during Recon- struction in 1875, but it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. For nearly ninety years, new civil rights legislation was blocked or fi libustered by southern Democrats in Congress. Only a weak, largely symbolic act was passed in 1957 during the Eisenhower administration. But by the early 1960s, with legal precedents in their favor and nonviolent protest awakening the nation, civil rights leaders believed the time had come for a serious civil rights bill. Th e challenge was getting one through a still-reluctant Congress.

The Battle for Birmingham

Th e road to such a bill began when Martin Luther King Jr. called for demonstrations in “the most segregated city in the United States”: Bir- mingham, Alabama. King and the SCLC needed a concrete victory in

Birmingham to validate their strategy of nonviolent protest. In May 1963, thousands of black marchers tried to picket Birmingham’s department stores. Eugene “Bull” Connor, the city’s public safety commissioner, ordered the city’s police troops to meet the marchers with violent force: snarling dogs, electric cattle prods, and high-pressure fi re hoses. Television cameras captured the scene for the evening news.

While serving a jail sentence for leading the march, King, scribbling in pencil on any paper he could fi nd, composed one of the classic documents of nonviolent direct action: “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” “Why direct action?” King asked. “Th ere is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth.” Th e civil rights movement sought, he continued, “to create such a crisis and establish such a creative tension.” Grounding his actions in equal parts Christian brotherhood and democratic liberalism, King argued that Americans confronted a moral choice: they could “preserve

806 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

the evil system of segregation” or take the side of “those great wells of democracy . . . the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”

Outraged by the brutality in Birmingham and embarrassed by King’s imprison- ment for leading a nonviolent march, President Kennedy decided that it was time to act. On June 11, 1963, aft er newly elected Alabama governor George Wallace barred two black students from the state university, Kennedy denounced racism on national television and promised a new civil rights bill. Many black leaders felt Kennedy’s action was long overdue, but they nonetheless hailed this “Second Emancipation Proc- lamation.” Th at night, Medgar Evers, president of the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP, was shot in the back in his driveway in Jackson by a white supremacist. Evers’s martyrdom became a spur to further action.

The Battle of Birmingham One of the hardest-fought desegregation struggles of the early 1960s took place in April and May 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama. In response to the daily rallies and peaceful protests, authorities cracked down, arresting hundreds. They also employed tactics such as those shown here, turning fi re hoses on young, nonviolent student demonstrators and using police dogs to intimidate peaceful marchers. These protests, led by Martin Luther King Jr. and broadcast on television news, prompted President Kennedy to introduce a civil rights bill in Congress in June 1963. © Bob Adelman/Corbis.

C H A P T E R 2 7 Walking into Freedom Land: The Civil Rights Movement, 1941–1973 807

The March on Washington and

the Civil Rights Act

To marshal support for Kennedy’s bill, civil rights leaders adopted a tactic that A. Philip Randolph had fi rst advanced in 1941: a massive demonstration in Washington. Under the leadership of Randolph and Bayard Rustin, thousands of volunteers across the

country coordinated car pools, “freedom buses,” and “freedom trains,” and on August 28, 1963, delivered a quarter of a million people to the Lincoln Memorial for the offi - cially named March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Although other people did the planning, Martin Luther King Jr. was the public face of the march. It was King’s dramatic “I Have a Dream” speech, beginning with his admonition that too many black people lived “on a lonely island of poverty” and end- ing with the exclamation from a traditional black spiritual — “Free at last! Free at last! Th ank God almighty, we are free at last!” — that captured the nation’s imagination. Th e sight of 250,000 blacks and whites marching solemnly together marked the high point of the civil rights movement and confi rmed King’s position as the leading spokesper- son for the cause.

To have any chance of getting the civil rights bill through Congress, King, Randolph, and Rustin knew they had to sustain this broad coalition of blacks and whites. Th ey could aff ord to alienate no one. Refl ecting a younger, more militant set of activists, however, SNCC member John Lewis had prepared a more provocative speech for that aft ernoon. Lewis wrote, “Th e time will come when we will not confi ne our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the Heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did.” Signaling a growing restlessness among black youth, Lewis warned: “We shall fragment the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together again in the image of democracy.” Fearing the speech would alienate white supporters, Rustin and others implored Lewis to tone down his rhetoric. With only minutes to spare before he stepped up to the podium, Lewis agreed. He delivered a more conciliatory speech, but his confl ict with march organizers signaled an emerging rift in the movement.

Although the March on Washington galvanized public opinion, it changed few congressional votes. Southern senators continued to block Kennedy’s legislation. Georgia senator Richard Russell, a leader of the opposition, refused to support any bill that would “bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races.” Th en, suddenly, tragedies piled up, one on another. In September, white supremacists bombed a Baptist church in Birmingham, killing four black girls in Sun- day school. Less than two months later, Kennedy himself lay dead, the victim of assassination.

On assuming the presidency, Lyndon Johnson made passing the civil rights bill a priority. A southerner and former Senate majority leader, Johnson was renowned for his fi erce persuasive style and tough political bargaining. Using equal parts moral leverage, the memory of the slain JFK, and his own brand of hardball politics, Johnson overcame the fi libuster. In June 1964, Congress approved the most far-reaching civil rights law since Reconstruction. Th e keystone of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VII, outlawed discrimination in employment on the basis of race, religion, national origin, and sex. Another section guaranteed equal access to public accommodations and schools. Th e law granted new enforcement powers to the U.S. attorney general and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to implement the prohi- bition against job discrimination.

808 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

Freedom Summer Th e Civil Rights Act was a law with real teeth, but it left untouched the obstacles to black voting rights. So protesters went back into

the streets. In 1964, in what came to be known as Freedom Summer, black organiza- tions mounted a major campaign in Mississippi. Th e eff ort drew several thousand vol- unteers from across the country, including nearly one thousand white college students from the North. Led by the charismatic SNCC activist Robert Moses, the four major civil rights organizations (SNCC, CORE, NAACP, and SCLC) spread out across the state. Th ey established freedom schools for black children and conducted a major voter registration drive. Yet so determined was the opposition that only about twelve hundred black voters were registered that summer, at a cost of four murdered civil rights workers and thirty-seven black churches bombed or burned.

Th e murders strengthened the resolve of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which had been founded during Freedom Summer. Banned from the “whites only” Mississippi Democratic Party, MFDP leaders were determined to attend the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, as the legiti- mate representatives of their state. Inspired by Fannie Lou Hamer, a former sharecrop- per turned civil rights activist, the MFDP challenged the most powerful fi gures in the Democratic Party, including Lyndon Johnson, the Democrats’ presidential nominee. “Is this America?” Hamer asked party offi cials when she demanded that the MFDP, and not the all-white Mississippi delegation, be recognized by the convention. Demo- cratic leaders, however, seated the white Mississippi delegation and refused to recog- nize the MFDP. Demoralized and convinced that the Democratic Party would not change, Moses told television reporters: “I will have nothing to do with the political system any longer.”

Selma and the Voting Rights Act

Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC did not share Moses’s skep- ticism. Th ey believed that another confrontation with southern injustice could provoke further congressional action. In March

1965, James Bevel of the SCLC called for a march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital, Montgomery, to protest the murder of a voting-rights activist. As soon as the six hundred marchers left Selma, crossing over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, mounted state troopers attacked them with tear gas and clubs. Th e scene was shown on national television that night, and the day became known as Bloody Sunday. Calling the epi- sode “an American tragedy,” President Johnson went back to Congress.

Th e Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was signed by President Johnson on August 6, outlawed the literacy tests and other devices that prevented African Ameri- cans from registering to vote, and authorized the attorney general to send federal examiners to register voters in any county where registration was less than 50 percent. Together with the Twenty-fourth Amendment (1964), which outlawed the poll tax in federal elections, the Voting Rights Act enabled millions of African Americans to vote for the fi rst time since the Reconstruction era.

In the South, the results were stunning. In 1960, only 20 percent of black citizens had been registered to vote; by 1971, registration reached 62 percent (Map 27.3). Moreover, across the nation the number of black elected offi cials began to climb, qua- drupling from 1,400 to 4,900 between 1970 and 1980 and doubling again by the early 1990s. Most of those elected held local offi ces — from sheriff to county commis-

C H A P T E R 2 7 Walking into Freedom Land: The Civil Rights Movement, 1941–1973 809

sioner — but nonetheless embodied a shift in political representation nearly unimagi- nable a generation earlier. As Hartman Turnbow, a Mississippi farmer who risked his life to register in 1964, later declared, “It won’t never go back where it was.”

Something else would never go back either: the liberal New Deal coalition. By the second half of the 1960s, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party had won its battle with the conservative, segregationist wing. Democrats had embraced the civil rights movement and made African American equality a cornerstone of a new “rights” liber- alism. But over the next generation, between the 1960s and the 1980s, southern whites and many conservative northern whites would respond by switching to the Republi- can Party. Strom Th urmond, the segregationist senator from South Carolina, symbolically led the revolt by renouncing the Democrats and becoming a Republican in 1964. Th e New Deal coalition — which had joined working-class whites, northern African Americans, urban professionals, and white southern segregation- ists together in a fragile political alliance since the 1930s — was beginning to crumble.

Number of Black Registered Voters

1964 1975

2,164,000 (1964)

3,835,000 (1975)

Total for South:

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MAP 27.3 Black Voter Registration in the South, 1964 and 1975 After passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, black registration in the South increased dramatically. The bars on the map show the number of African Americans registered in 1964, before the act was passed, and in 1975, after it had been in eff ect for ten years. States in the Deep South, such as Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, had the biggest increases.

What lessons did activists learn from the evolution of the civil rights movement between 1957 and 1961?

In what ways did white resistance hinder the civil rights movement? In what ways did it help?

810 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

Beyond Civil Rights, 1966–1973 Activists had long known that Supreme Court decisions and new laws do not automati- cally produce changes in society. But in the mid-1960s, civil rights advocates confronted a more profound issue: perhaps even protests were not enough. In 1965, Bayard Rustin wrote of the need to move “from protest to politics” in order to build institutional black power. Some black leaders, such as the young SNCC activists Stokely Carmichael, Frances Beal, and John Lewis, grew frustrated with the slow pace of reform and the stubborn resistance of whites. Still others believed that addressing black poverty and economic disadvantage remained the most important objective. Neither new laws nor long marches appeared capable of meeting these varied and complex challenges.

Th e conviction that civil rights alone were incapable of guaranteeing equality took hold in many minority communities in this period. African Americans were joined by Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and American Indians. Th ey came at the problem of inequality from diff erent perspectives, but each group asked a similar question: As crucial as legal equality was, how much did it matter if most people of color remained in or close to poverty, if white society still regarded nonwhites as inferior, and if the major social and political institutions in the country were run by whites? Black leaders and representatives of other nonwhite communities increasingly asked themselves this question as they searched for ways to build on the achievements of the civil rights decade of 1954–1965.

Black Nationalism Seeking answers to these questions led many African Americans to embrace black nationalism. Th e philosophy of black nationalism signifi ed many things in the 1960s. It could mean anything from pride in one’s community to total separatism, from build- ing African American–owned businesses to wearing dashikis in honor of African tra- ditions. Historically, nationalism had emphasized the diff erences between blacks and whites as well as black people’s power (and right) to shape their own destiny. In the late nineteenth century, nationalists founded the Back to Africa movement, and in the 1920s the nationalist Marcus Garvey inspired African Americans to take pride in their racial heritage (Chapter 22).

In the early 1960s, the leading exponent of black nationalism was the Nation of Islam, which fused a rejection of Christianity with a strong philosophy of self-improvement. Black Muslims, as they were known, adhered to a strict code of personal behavior; men were recognizable by their dark suits, white shirts, and ties, women by their long dresses and head coverings. Black Muslims preached an apocalyptic brand of Islam, anticipating the day when Allah would banish the white “devils” and give the black nation justice. Although its full converts numbered only about ten thousand, the Nation of Islam had a wide popular following among African Americans in northern cities.

Malcolm X Th e most charismatic Black Muslim was Malcolm X (the X stood for his African family name, lost under slavery). A spellbinding speaker,

Malcolm X preached a philosophy of militant separatism, although he advocated vio- lence only for self-defense. Hostile to mainstream civil rights organizations, he causti- cally referred to the 1963 March on Washington as the “Farce on Washington.”

C H A P T E R 2 7 Walking into Freedom Land: The Civil Rights Movement, 1941–1973 811

Malcolm X said plainly, “I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don’t believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn’t want brotherhood with me.” Malcolm X had little interest in changing the minds of hostile whites. Strengthening the black community, he believed, represented a surer path to freedom and equality.

In 1964, aft er a power struggle with founder Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam. While he remained a black nationalist, he moderated his antiwhite views and began to talk of a class struggle uniting poor whites and blacks. Following an inspiring trip to the Middle East, where he saw Muslims of all races wor- shipping together, Malcolm X formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity to promote black pride and to work with traditional civil rights groups. But he got no further. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated while delivering a speech in Harlem. Th ree Black Muslims were later convicted of his murder.

Black Power A more secular brand of black nationalism emerged in 1966 when SNCC and CORE activists, following the lead of Stokely Carmichael, began to

call for black self-reliance under the banner of Black Power. Advocates of Black Power asked fundamental questions: If alliances with whites were necessary to achieve racial justice, as King believed they were, did that make African Americans dependent on the good intentions of whites? If so, could black people trust those good intentions in the long run? Increasingly, those inclined toward Black Power believed that African Americans should build economic and political power in their own communities. Such power would translate into a less dependent relationship with white America. “For once,” Carmichael wrote, “black people are going to use the words they want to use — not the words whites want to hear.”

Spurred by the Black Power slogan, African American activists turned their atten- tion to the poverty and social injustice faced by so many black people. President Johnson had declared the War on Poverty, and black organizers joined, setting up day care centers, running community job training programs, and working to improve hous- ing and health care in urban neighborhoods. In major cities such as Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, activists sought to open jobs in police and fi re depart- ments and in construction and transportation to black workers, who had been excluded from these occupations for decades. Others worked to end police harassment — a major problem in urban black communities — and to help black entrepreneurs to receive small-business loans. CORE leader Floyd McKissick explained, “Black Power is not Black Supremacy; it is a united Black Voice refl ecting racial pride.”

Th e attention to racial pride led some African Americans to reject white society and to pursue more authentic cultural forms. In addition to focusing on economic disadvantage, Black Power emphasized black pride and self-determination. Th ose sub- scribing to these beliefs wore African clothing, chose natural hairstyles, and celebrated black history, art, and literature. Th e Black Arts movement thrived, and musical tastes shift ed from the crossover sounds of Motown to the soul music of Philadelphia, Mem- phis, and Chicago.

Black Panther Party One of the most radical nationalist groups was the Black Pan- ther Party, founded in Oakland, California, in 1966 by two col-

lege students, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. A militant organization dedicated to protecting African Americans from police violence, the Panthers took their cue from

812 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

the slain Malcolm X. Th ey vehemently opposed the Vietnam War and declared their affi nity for Th ird World revolutionary movements and armed struggle. In their mani- festo, “What We Want, What We Believe,” the Panthers outlined their Ten Point Pro- gram for black liberation.

Th e Panthers’ organization spread to other cities in the late 1960s, where members undertook a wide range of community-organizing projects. Th eir free breakfast program for children and their testing program for sickle-cell anemia, an inherited disease with a high incidence among African Americans, were especially popular. However, the Pan- thers’ radicalism and belief in armed self-defense resulted in violent clashes with police. Newton was charged with murdering a police offi cer, several Panthers were killed by police, and dozens went to prison. Moreover, under its domestic counterintelligence pro- gram, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had begun disrupting party activities.

Young Lords Among those inspired by the Black Panthers were Puerto Ricans in New York. Th eir vehicle was the Young Lords Organization (YLO), later

renamed the Young Lords Party. Like the Black Panthers, YLO activists sought self- determination for Puerto Ricans, both those in the United States and those on the island in the Caribbean. In practical terms, the YLO focused on improving neighbor- hood conditions: city garbage collection was notoriously poor in East Harlem, where most Puerto Ricans lived, and slumlords had allowed the housing to become squalid. Women in the YLO were especially active, protesting sterilization campaigns against Puerto Rican women and fi ghting to improve access to health care. As was true of so many nationalist groups, immediate victories for the YLO were few, but their dedi- cated community organizing produced a generation of leaders (many of whom later went into politics) and awakened community consciousness.

The New Urban Politics Black Power also inspired African Americans to work within the political system. By the mid-1960s, black residents neared

50 percent of the population in several major American cities — such as Atlanta, Cleveland, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. Black Power in these cities was not abstract; it counted in real votes. Residents of Gary, Indiana, and Cleveland, Ohio, elected the fi rst black mayors of large cities in 1967. Richard Hatcher in Gary and Carl Stokes in Cleveland helped forge a new urban politics in the United States. Th eir campaign teams registered thousands of black voters and made alliances with enough whites to create a working majority. Many saw Stokes’s victory, in particular, as heralding a new day. As one of Stokes’s campaign staff ers said: “If Carl Stokes could run for mayor in the eighth largest city in America, then maybe who knows. We could be senators. We could be anything we wanted.”

Having met with some political success, black leaders gathered in Gary for the 1972 National Black Political Convention. In a meeting that brought together radicals, liberals, and centrists, debate centered on whether to form a third political party. Hatcher recalled that many in attendance believed that “there was going to be a black third party.” In the end, however, delegates decided to “give the Democratic Party one more chance.” Instead of creating a third party, the convention issued the National Black Political Agenda, which included calls for community control of schools in black neighborhoods, national health insurance, and the elimination of the death penalty.

C H A P T E R 2 7 Walking into Freedom Land: The Civil Rights Movement, 1941–1973 813

Democrats failed to enact the National Black Political Agenda, but African Ameri- cans were increasingly integrated into American political institutions. By the end of the century, black elected offi cials had become commonplace in major American cities. Th ere were forty-seven African American big-city mayors by the 1990s, and blacks had led most of the nation’s most prominent cities: Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Th ese politicians had translated black power not into a wholesale rejection of white society but into a revitalized liberalism that would remain an indelible feature of urban politics for the rest of the century.

Poverty and Urban Violence Black Power was not, fundamentally, a violent political ideology. But violence did play a decisive role in the politics of black liberation in the mid-1960s. Too many Ameri- cans, white and black, had little knowledge or understanding of the rage that existed just below the surface in many poor northern black neighborhoods. Th at rage boiled over in a wave of riots that struck the nation’s cities in mid-decade. Th e fi rst “long hot summer” began in July 1964 in New York City when police shot a black criminal sus- pect in Harlem. Angry youths looted and rioted there for a week. Over the next four years, the volatile issue of police brutality set off riots in dozens of cities.

In August 1965, the arrest of a young black motorist in the Watts section of Los Angeles sparked six days of rioting that left thirty-four people dead. “Th ere is a diff erent type of Negro emerging,” one riot participant told investigators. “Th ey are not going to wait for the evolutionary process for their rights to be a man.” Th e riots of 1967, how- ever, were the most serious, engulfi ng twenty-two cities in July and August. Forty-three people were killed in Detroit alone, nearly all of them black, and $50 million worth of property was destroyed. President Johnson called in the National Guard and U.S. Army troops, many of them having just returned from Vietnam, to restore order.

Johnson, who believed that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had immeasurably helped African Americans, was stunned by the rioting. Despondent at the news from Watts, “he refused to look at the cables from Los Angeles,” recalled one aide. Virtually all black leaders condemned the rioting, though they understood its origins in poverty and deprivation. At a meeting in Watts, Martin Luther King Jr. admitted that he had “failed to take the civil rights movement to the masses of the people,” such as those in the Los Angeles ghetto. His appearance appeased few. “We don’t need your dreams; we need jobs!” one heckler shouted at King.

Following the gut-wrenching riots in Detroit and Newark in 1967, Johnson appointed a presidential commission, headed by Illinois governor Otto Kerner, to investigate the causes of the violence. Released in 1968, the Kerner Commission Report was a searing look at race in America, the most honest and forthright govern- ment document about race since the Presidential Committee on Civil Rights’ 1947 report “To Secure Th ese Rights.” “Our nation is moving toward two societies,” the Kerner Commission Report concluded, “one black, one white — separate and unequal.” Th e report did not excuse the brick-throwing, fi rebombing, and looting of the previ- ous summers, but it placed the riots in sociological context. Shut out of white- dominated society, impoverished African Americans felt they had no stake in the social order.

814 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

Stirred by turmoil in the cities, and seeing the limitations of his civil rights achieve- ments, Martin Luther King Jr. began to expand his vision beyond civil rights to con- front the deep-seated problems of poverty and racism in America as a whole. He criticized President Johnson and Congress for prioritizing the war in Vietnam over the fi ght against poverty at home, and he planned a massive movement called the Poor People’s Campaign to fi ght economic injustice. To advance that cause, he went to Memphis, Tennessee, to support a strike by predominantly black sanitation workers. Th ere, on April 4, 1968, he was assassinated by escaped white convict James Earl Ray. King’s death set off a further round of urban rioting, with major violence breaking out in more than a hundred cities.

Tragically, King was murdered before achieving the transformations he sought: an end to racial injustice and a solution to poverty. Th e civil rights movement had helped set in motion permanent, indeed revolutionary, changes in American race relations. Jim Crow segregation ended, federal legislation ensured black Americans’ most basic civil rights, and the white monopoly on political power in the South was broken. However, by 1968, the fi ght over civil rights had also divided the nation. Th e Democratic Party was splitting, and a new conservatism was gaining strength. Many whites felt that the issue of civil rights was receiving too much attention, to the detriment of other national con- cerns. Th e riots of 1965, 1967, and 1968 further alienated many whites, who blamed the violence on the inability of Democratic offi cials to maintain law and order.

Rise of the Chicano Movement Mexican Americans had something of a counterpart to Martin Luther King: Cesar Chavez. In Chavez’s case, however, economic struggle in community organizations and the labor movement had shaped his approach to mobilizing society’s disadvan- taged. He and Dolores Huerta had worked for the Community Service Organization (CSO), a California group founded in the 1950s to promote Mexican political partici- pation and civil rights. Leaving that organization in 1962, Chavez concentrated on the agricultural region around Delano, California. With Huerta, he organized the United Farm Workers (UFW), a union for migrant workers.

Huerta was a brilliant organizer, but the deeply spiritual and ascetic Chavez embodied the moral force behind what was popularly called La Causa. A 1965 grape pickers’ strike led the UFW to call a nationwide boycott of table grapes, bringing Chavez huge publicity and backing from the AFL-CIO. In a bid for attention to the struggle, Chavez staged a hunger strike in 1968, which ended dramatically aft er twenty-eight days with Senator Robert F. Kennedy at his side to break the fast. Victory came in 1970 when California grape growers signed contracts recognizing the UFW.

Mexican Americans shared some civil rights concerns with African Americans — especially access to jobs — but they also had unique concerns: the status of the Spanish language in schools, for instance, and immigration policy. Mexican Americans had been politically active since the 1940s, aiming to surmount factors that obstructed their political involvement: poverty, language barriers, and discrimination. Th eir eff orts began to pay off in the 1960s, when the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) mobilized support for John F. Kennedy and worked successfully with other organizations to elect Mexican American candidates such as Edward Roybal of Cali- fornia and Henry González of Texas to Congress. Two other organizations, the Mexi-

C H A P T E R 2 7 Walking into Freedom Land: The Civil Rights Movement, 1941–1973 815

can American Legal Defense Fund (MALDF) and the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project, carried the fi ght against discrimination to Washington, D.C., and mobilized Mexican Americans into an increasingly powerful voting bloc.

Younger Mexican Americans grew impatient with civil rights groups such as MAPA and MALDF, however. Th e barrios of Los Angeles and other western cities produced the militant Brown Berets, modeled on the Black Panthers (who wore black berets). Reject- ing their elders’ assimilationist approach (that is, a belief in adapting to Anglo society), fi ft een hundred Mexican American students met in Denver in 1969 to hammer out a new political and cultural agenda. Th ey proclaimed a new term, Chicano (and its femi- nine form, Chicana), to replace Mexican American, and later organized a political party, La Raza Unida (Th e United Race), to promote Chicano interests. Young Chicana femi- nists formed a number of organizations, including Las Hijas (Th e Daughters), which organized women both on college campuses and in the barrios. In California and many southwestern states, students staged demonstrations to press for bilingual education, the hiring of more Chicano teachers, and the creation of Chicano studies programs. By the 1970s, dozens of such programs were off ered at universities throughout the region.

The American Indian Movement American Indians, inspired by the Black Power and Chicano movements, organized to address their unique circumstances. Numbering nearly 800,000 in the 1960s, native people were exceedingly diverse — divided by language, tribal history, region, and degree of integration into American life. As a group, they shared a staggering unem- ployment rate — ten times the national average — and were the worst off in housing, disease rates, and access to education. Native people also had an oft en troubling rela- tionship with the federal government. In the 1960s, the prevailing spirit of protest swept through Indian communities. Young militants challenged their elders in the National Congress of American Indians. Beginning in 1960, the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), under the slogan “For a Greater Indian America,” promoted the ideal of Native Americans as a single ethnic group. Th e eff ort to both unite Indians and celebrate individual tribal culture proved a diffi cult balancing act.

Th e NIYC had substantial infl uence within tribal communities, but two other organizations, the militant Indians of All Tribes (IAT) and the American Indian Move- ment (AIM), attracted more attention in the larger society. Th ese groups embraced the concept of Red Power, and beginning in 1968 they staged escalating protests to draw attention to Indian concerns, especially the concerns of urban Indians, many of whom had been encouraged, or forced, to leave reservations by the federal government in earlier decades. In 1969, members of the IAT occupied the deserted federal peniten- tiary on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and proclaimed: “We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for twenty-four dollars in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white man’s purchase of a similar island [Manhattan] about 300 years ago.” In 1972, AIM members joined the Trail of Broken Treaties, a march sponsored by a number of Indian groups. When AIM activists seized the headquarters of the hated Bureau of Indian Aff airs in Washington, D.C., and ransacked the building, older tribal leaders denounced them.

To see a longer excerpt of the “Proclamation To the Great White Father and All His People,” along with other primary sources from this period, see Sources for America’s History.

816 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

However, AIM managed to focus national media attention on Native American issues with a siege at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in February 1973. Th e site of the infamous 1890 massacre of the Sioux, Wounded Knee was situated on the Pine Ridge reservation, where young AIM activists had cultivated ties to sympathetic elders. For

more than two months, AIM members occu- pied a small collection of buildings, surrounded by a cordon of FBI agents and U.S. marshals. Several gun battles left two dead, and the siege was fi nally brought to a negotiated end. Although upsetting to many white onlookers and Indian elders alike, AIM protests attracted widespread mainstream media coverage and spurred gov- ernment action on tribal issues.

Why were Black Power and black nationalism compelling to many African Americans?

What did the Chicano and Ameri- can Indian movements have in common with the black freedom movement?

Native American Activism In November 1969, a group of Native Americans, united under the name Indians of All Tribes, occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. They claimed the land under a nineteenth-century treaty, but their larger objective was to force the federal government — which owned the island — to address the long- standing grievances of native peoples, including widespread poverty on reservations. Shown here is the view along the gunwale of the boat carrying Tim Williams, a chief of the Klamath River Hurek tribe in full ceremonial regalia, to the island. Ralph Crane/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.

C H A P T E R 2 7 Walking into Freedom Land: The Civil Rights Movement, 1941–1973 817

S U M M A RY African Americans and others who fought for civil rights from World War II through the early 1970s sought equal rights and economic opportunity. Th at quest was also inspired by various forms of nationalism that called for self-determination for minor- ity groups. For most of the fi rst half of the twentieth century, African Americans faced a harsh Jim Crow system in the South and a segregated, though more open, society in the North. Segregation was maintained by a widespread belief in black inferiority and by a southern political system that denied African Americans the vote. In the South- west and West, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Americans of Asian descent faced discriminatory laws and social practices that marginalized them.

Th e civil rights movement attacked racial inequality in three ways. First, the movement sought equality under the law for all Americans, regardless of race. Th is required patient work through the judicial system and the more arduous task of win- ning congressional legislation, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Second, grassroots activists, using nonviolent protest, pushed all levels of government (from city to federal) to abide by Supreme Court decisions (such as Brown v. Board of Education) and civil rights laws. Th ird, the movement worked to open economic opportunity for minority populations. Th is was embodied in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Ultimately, the civil rights movement successfully established the principle of legal equality, but it faced more diffi cult prob- lems in fi ghting poverty and creating widespread economic opportunity.

Th e limitations of the civil rights model led black activists — along with Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and others — to adopt a more nationalist stance aft er 1966. Nationalism stressed the creation of political and economic power in communi- ties of color, the celebration of racial heritage, and the rejection of white cultural standards.

Fo r Fu r t h e r E x p l o rat i o n Peniel Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America

(2006). An important history of Black Power. Ian F. Haney López, Racism on Trial: Th e Chicano Fight for Justice (2003). An exceptional case

study of the Chicano movement in Los Angeles. Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: Th e Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi

Freedom Struggle (1995). A detailed case study that provides a local view of movement activism.

Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement (2003). A powerful biography of a key activist.

Th omas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: Th e Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008). A signifi cant, readable overview of the civil rights movement.

Th e Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive, at digilib.usm.edu/crmda.php, off ers 150 oral histories relating to Mississippi.

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T I M E L I N E

1941 A. Philip Randolph proposes march on Washington

Roosevelt issues Executive Order 8802

1942 Double V Campaign launched Congress of Racial Equality

(CORE) founded 1947 “To Secure These Rights”

published Jackie Robinson integrates

major league baseball Mendez v. Westminster School

District 1948 States’ Rights Democratic Party

(Dixiecrats) founded 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of

Topeka 1955 Emmett Till murdered (August) Montgomery Bus Boycott

(December) 1956 Southern Manifesto issued

against Brown ruling 1957 Integration of Little Rock High

School Southern Christian Leadership

Conference (SCLC) founded

1960 Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-ins (February)

Student Nonviolent Coordinat- ing Committee (SNCC) founded

1961 Freedom Rides (May) 1963 Demonstrations in Birming-

ham, Alabama March on Washington for Jobs

and Freedom 1964 Civil Rights Act passed by

Congress Freedom Summer 1965 Voting Rights Act passed by

Congress Malcolm X assassinated

(February 21) Riot in Watts neighborhood of

Los Angeles (August) 1966 Black Panther Party founded 1967 Riots in Detroit and Newark 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. assassi-

nated (April 4) 1969 Young Lords founded Occupation of Alcatraz 1972 National Black Political

Convention “Trail of Broken Treaties”

protest

M AK E IT S T I C K

Go online and use LearningCurve to retain what you’ve read.

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28 Uncivil Wars: Liberal Crisis and Conservative Rebirth1961–1972 The civil rights movement stirred American liberals and pushed them to initiate bold new government policies to advance racial equality. Th at progressive spirit inspired an even broader reform agenda that came to include women’s rights, new social programs for the poor and the aged, job training, environmen- tal laws, and other educational and social benefi ts for the middle class. All told, Congress passed more liberal legislation

between 1964 and 1972 than in any period since the 1930s. Th e great bulk of it came during the 1965–1966 legislative session, one of the most active in American history. Liberalism was at high tide.

It did not stay there long. Liberals quickly came under assault from two direc- tions. First, young activists became frustrated with slow progress on civil rights and rebelled against the Vietnam War. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, police teargassed and clubbed antiwar demonstrators, who chanted (as the TV cameras rolled), “Th e whole world is watching!” Some of them had been among the young idealists inspired by Kennedy’s inaugural address and the civil rights move- ment. Now they rejected everything that Cold War liberalism stood for. Inside the convention hall, the proceedings were chaotic, the atmosphere poisonous, the dele- gates bitterly divided over Vietnam.

A second assault on liberalism came from conservatives, who found their footing aft er being marginalized during the 1950s. Conservatives opposed the dramatic expan- sion of the federal government under President Lyndon B. Johnson and disdained the “permissive society” they believed liberalism had unleashed. Advocating law and order, belittling welfare, and resisting key civil rights reforms, conservatives leaped back to political life in the late sixties. Th eir champion was Barry Goldwater, a Republican sena- tor from Arizona, who warned that “a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have.”

Th e clashing of left , right, and center made the decade between the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961 and the 1972 landslide reelection of Richard Nixon one of the most contentious, complicated, and explosive eras in American

IDENTIFY THE BIG IDEA What were liberalism’s social and political achievements in the 1960s, and how did debates over liberal values contribute to confl ict at home and refl ect tension abroad?

820 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

history. Th ere were thousands of marches and demonstrations; massive new federal programs aimed at achieving civil rights, ending poverty, and extending the welfare state; and new voices among women, African Americans, and Latinos demanding to be heard. With heated, vitriolic rhetoric on all sides, these developments overlapped with political assassinations and violence both overseas and at home. In this chapter, we undertake to explain how the rekindling of liberal reform under the twin auspices of the civil rights movement and the leadership of President Johnson gave way to a profound liberal crisis and the resurgence of conservatism.

Liberalism at High Tide In May 1964, Lyndon Johnson, president for barely six months, delivered the com- mencement address at the University of Michigan. Johnson off ered his audience a

grand and inspirational vision of a new liberal age. “We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society,” Johnson continued, “but upward to the Great Society.” As the sun-baked graduates listened, Johnson spelled out what he meant: “Th e Great Society rests on abun-

dance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice.” Even this, Johnson declared, was just the beginning. He would push to renew American educa- tion, rebuild the cities, and restore the natural environment. Ambitious — even auda- cious — Johnson’s vision was a New Deal for a new era. From that day forward, the president would harness his considerable political skills to make that vision a reality. A tragic irony, however, was that he held the presidency at all.

John F. Kennedy’s Promise In 1961, three years before Johnson’s Great Society speech, John F. Kennedy declared at his inauguration: “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.” He challenged his fellow citizens to “ask what you can do for your country,” a call to service that inspired many Americans. Th e British journalist Henry Fairley called Kennedy’s activ- ism “the politics of expectation.” Over time, the expectations Kennedy embodied, combined with his ability to inspire a younger generation, laid the groundwork for an era of liberal reform.

Kennedy’s legislative record did not live up to his promising image. Th is was not entirely his fault; congressional partisanship and resistance stymied many presidents in the twentieth century. Kennedy’s domestic advisors devised bold plans for health insurance for the aged, a new antipoverty program, and a tax cut. Aft er enormous pressure from Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders — and pushed by the demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 — they added a civil rights bill. None of these initiatives went anywhere in the Senate, where powerful conservative interests practiced an old legislative art: delay, delay, delay. All Kennedy’s bills were at a virtual standstill when tragedy struck.

To see a longer excerpt of Johnson’s commencement address, along with other primary sources from this period, see Sources for America’s History.

C H A P T E R 2 8 Uncivil Wars: Liberal Crisis and Conservative Rebirth, 1961–1972 821

On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was in Dallas, Texas, on a political trip. As he and his wife, Jacqueline, rode in an open car past the Texas School Book Depository, he was shot through the head and neck by a sniper. He died within the hour. (Th e accused killer, twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself killed while in custody a few days later by an assassin, a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby.) Before Air Force One left Dallas to take the president’s body back to Washington, a grim-faced Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as Kennedy’s successor.

Kennedy’s youthful image, the trauma of his assassination, and the nation’s sense of loss contributed to a powerful Kennedy mystique. His canonization aft er death capped what had been an extraordinarily stage-managed presidency. An admir- ing country saw in Jack and Jackie Kennedy an ideal American marriage (though JFK was, in fact, an obsessive womanizer); in Kennedy the epitome of robust good health (though he was actually affl icted by Addison’s disease); and in the Kennedy White House a glamorous world of high fashion and celebrity. No other presi- dency ever matched the Kennedy aura, but every president aft er him embraced the idea that image mattered as much as reality in conducting a politically eff ective presidency.

Lyndon B. Johnson and the Great Society In many ways, Lyndon Johnson was the opposite of Kennedy. A seasoned Texas politi- cian and longtime Senate leader, Johnson was most at home in the back rooms of power. He was a rough-edged character who had scrambled his way up, with few scru- ples, to wealth and political eminence. But he never forgot his modest, hill-country origins or lost his sympathy for the downtrodden. Johnson lacked Kennedy’s style, but he rose to the political challenge aft er Kennedy’s assassination, applying his astonish- ing energy and negotiating skills to revive several of Kennedy’s stalled programs, and many more of his own, in the ambitious Great Society.

On assuming the presidency, Johnson promptly pushed for civil rights legislation as a memorial to his slain predecessor (Chapter 27). His motives were complex. As a southerner who had previously opposed civil rights for African Americans, Johnson wished to prove that he was more than a regional fi gure — he would be the president of all the people. He also wanted to make a mark on history, telling Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders to lace up their sneakers because he would move so fast on civil rights they would be running to catch up. Politically, the choice was risky. Johnson would please the Democratic Party’s liberal wing, but because most northern African Americans already voted Democratic, the party would gain few additional votes. Moreover, southern white Democrats would likely revolt, dividing the party at a time when Johnson’s legislative agenda most required unanimity. But Johnson pushed ahead, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act stands, in part, as a testament to the president’s political risk-taking.

More than civil rights, what drove Johnson hardest was his determination to “end poverty in our time.” Th e president called it a national disgrace that in the midst of plenty, one-fi ft h of all Americans — hidden from most people’s sight in Appalachia, urban ghettos, migrant labor camps, and Indian reservations — lived in poverty. But, Johnson declared, “for the fi rst time in our history, it is possible to conquer poverty.”

822 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

Th e Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created a series of programs to reach these Americans, was the president’s answer — what he called the War on Pov- erty. Th is legislation included several diff erent initiatives. Head Start provided free nursery schools to prepare disadvantaged preschoolers for kindergarten. Th e Job Corps and Upward Bound provided young people with training and employment. Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), modeled on the Peace Corps, off ered tech- nical assistance to the urban and rural poor. An array of regional development pro- grams focused on spurring economic growth in impoverished areas. On balance, the 1964 legislation provided services to the poor rather than jobs, leading some critics to charge the War on Poverty with doing too little.

The 1964 Election With the Civil Rights Act passed and his War on Poverty initiatives off the ground, Johnson turned his attention to the upcoming

presidential election. Not content to govern in Kennedy’s shadow, he wanted a national mandate of his own. Privately, Johnson cast himself less like Kennedy than as the heir of Franklin Roosevelt and the expansive liberalism of the 1930s. Johnson had come to Congress for the fi rst time in 1937 and had long admired FDR’s political skills. He reminded his advisors never to forget “the meek and the humble and the lowly,” because “President Roosevelt never did.”

The Great Society President Lyndon Johnson toured poverty-stricken regions of the country in 1964. Here he visits with Tom Fletcher, a father of eight children in Martin County, Kentucky. Johnson envisioned a dramatic expansion of liberal social programs, both to assist the needy and to strengthen the middle class, that he called the Great Society. © Bettmann/Corbis.

C H A P T E R 2 8 Uncivil Wars: Liberal Crisis and Conservative Rebirth, 1961–1972 823

In the 1964 election, Johnson faced Republican Barry Goldwater of Arizona. An archconservative, Goldwater ran on an anticommunist, antigovernment platform, off ering “a choice, not an echo” — meaning he represented a genuinely conservative alternative to liberalism rather than the echo of liberalism off ered by the moderate wing of the Republican Party (Chapter 25). Goldwater campaigned against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and promised a more vigorous Cold War foreign policy. Among those supporting him was former actor Ronald Reagan, whose speech on behalf of Goldwater at the Republican convention, called “A Time for Choosing,” made him a rising star in the party.

But Goldwater’s strident foreign policy alienated voters. “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” he told Republicans at the convention. Moreover, there remained strong national sentiment for Kennedy. Telling Americans that he was run- ning to fulfi ll Kennedy’s legacy, Johnson and his running mate, Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, won in a landslide. In the long run, Goldwater’s candidacy marked the beginning of a grassroots conservative revolt that would eventually transform the Republican Party. In the short run, however, Johnson’s sweeping victory gave him a popular mandate and, equally important, congressional majorities that rivaled FDR’s in 1935 — just what he needed to push the Great Society forward.

Great Society Initiatives

One of Johnson’s fi rst successes was breaking a congressional deadlock on education and health care. Passed in April 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act authorized $1 billion in federal funds

for teacher training and other educational programs. Standing in his old Texas school- house, Johnson, a former teacher, said: “I believe no law I have signed or will ever sign means more to the future of America.” Six months later, Johnson signed the Higher Education Act, providing federal scholarships for college students. Johnson also had the votes he needed to achieve some form of national health insurance. Th at year, he also won passage of two new programs: Medicare, a health plan for the elderly funded by a surcharge on Social Security payroll taxes, and Medicaid, a health plan for the poor paid for by general tax revenues and administered by the states.

Th e Great Society’s agenda included environmental reform as well: an expanded national park system, improvement of the nation’s air and water, protection for endan- gered species, stronger land-use planning, and highway beautifi cation. Hardly pausing for breath, Johnson oversaw the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD); won funding for hundreds of thousands of units of public hous- ing; made new investments in urban rapid transit such as the new Washington, D.C., Metro and the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in San Francisco; ushered new child safety and consumer protection laws through Congress; and helped create the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the work of artists, writers, and scholars.

It even became possible, at this moment of reform zeal, to tackle the nation’s dis- criminatory immigration policy. Th e Immigration Act of 1965 abandoned the quota system that favored northern Europeans, replacing it with numerical limits that did not discriminate among nations. To promote family reunifi cation, the law also stipu- lated that close relatives of legal residents in the United States could be admitted

824 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

outside the numerical limits, an exception that especially benefi tted Asian and Latin American immigrants. Since 1965, as a result, immigrants from those regions have become increasingly visible in American society (Chapter 31).

Assessing the Great Society

Th e Great Society enjoyed mixed results. Th e proportion of Ameri- cans living below the poverty line dropped from 20 percent to 13 percent between 1963 and 1968. Medicare and Medicaid, the most

enduring of the Great Society programs, helped millions of elderly and poor citizens aff ord necessary health care. Further, as millions of African Americans moved into the middle class, the black poverty rate fell by half. Liberals believed they were on the right track.

Conservatives, however, gave more credit for these changes to the decade’s boom- ing economy than to government programs. Indeed, conservative critics accused Johnson and other liberals of believing that every social problem could be solved with a government program. In the fi nal analysis, the Great Society dramatically improved the fi nancial situation of the elderly, reached millions of children, and increased the racial diversity of American society and workplaces. However, entrenched poverty remained, racial segregation in the largest cities worsened, and the national distribution of wealth remained highly skewed. In relative terms, the bottom 20 per- cent remained as far behind as ever. In these arenas, the Great Society made little progress.

Rebirth of the Women’s Movement Th e new era of liberal reform reawakened the American women’s movement. Inspired by the civil rights movement and legislative advances under the Great Society, but frustrated by the lack of attention both gave to women, feminists entered the political fray and demanded not simply inclusion, but a rethinking of national priorities.

Labor Feminists Th e women’s movement had not languished entirely in the postwar years. Feminist concerns were kept alive in the 1950s and early

1960s by working women, who campaigned for such things as maternity leave and equal pay for equal work. One historian has called these women “labor feminists,” because they belonged to unions and fought for equality and dignity in the workplace. “It became apparent to me why so many employers could legally discriminate against women — because it was written right into the law,” said one female labor activist. Trade union women were especially critical in pushing for, and winning, congressio- nal passage of the 1963 Equal Pay Act, which established the principle of equal pay for equal work.

Labor feminists were responding to the times. More women — including married women (40 percent by 1970) and mothers with young children (30 percent by 1970) — were working outside the home than ever before. But they faced a labor market that undervalued their contributions. Moreover, most working women faced the “double day”: they were expected to earn a paycheck and then return home to domestic labor. One woman put the problem succinctly: “Th e working mother has no ‘wife’ to care for her children.”

C H A P T E R 2 8 Uncivil Wars: Liberal Crisis and Conservative Rebirth, 1961–1972 825

Betty Friedan and the National Organization

for Women

When Betty Friedan’s indictment of suburban domesticity, Th e Feminine Mystique, appeared in 1963, it targeted a diff er- ent audience: college-educated, middle-class women who found themselves not working for wages but rather stifl ed by

their domestic routine. Tens of thousands of women read Friedan’s book and thought, “She’s talking about me.” Th e Feminine Mystique became a runaway best-seller. Friedan persuaded middle-class women that they needed more than the convenience foods, improved diapers, and better laundry detergents that magazines and television urged them to buy. To live rich and fulfi lling lives, they needed education and work outside the home.

Paradoxically, the domesticity described in Th e Feminine Mystique was already crumbling. Aft er the postwar baby boom, women were again having fewer children, aided now by the birth control pill, fi rst marketed in 1960. And as states liberalized divorce laws, more women were divorcing. Educational levels were also rising: by 1970, women made up 42 percent of the college population. All of these changes undermined traditional gender roles and enabled many women to embrace Th e Femi- nine Mystique’s liberating prescriptions.

Government action also made a diff erence. In 1961, Kennedy appointed the Presi- dential Commission on the Status of Women, which issued a 1963 report documenting

National Organization for Women Kathryn F. Clarenbach (left) and Betty Friedan (right) announced a “Bill of Rights for Women in 1968” to be presented to candidates in that election year. Clarenbach was the fi rst chairwoman of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and Friedan the organization’s fi rst president. NOW became a fi xture of the women’s movement and the leading liberal voice for women’s legal and social equality. © Bettmann/Corbis.

826 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

job and educational discrimination. A bigger breakthrough came when Congress added the word sex to the categories protected against discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Women suddenly had a powerful legal tool for fi ghting sex discrimination.

To force compliance with the new act, Friedan and others, including many labor feminists from around the country, founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966. Modeled on the NAACP, NOW intended to be a civil rights organi- zation for women, with the aim of bringing “women into full participation in . . . American society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men.” Under Friedan’s leadership, membership grew to fi ft een thousand by 1971, and NOW became, like the NAACP, a powerful voice for equal rights.

One of the ironies of the 1960s was the enormous strain that all of this liberal activism placed on the New Deal coalition. Faced with oft en competing demands from

the civil rights movement, feminists, the poor, labor unions, conservative southern Democrats, the suburban middle class, and urban political machines, the old Rooseveltian coalition had begun to fray. Johnson hoped that the New Deal coalition was strong enough to negotiate competing demands among its own constitu- ents while simultaneously resisting conserva- tive attacks. In 1965, that still seemed possible. It would not remain so for long.

The Vietnam War Begins As the accelerating rights revolution placed strain on the Democratic coalition, the war in Vietnam divided the country. In a CBS interview before his death, Kennedy remarked that it was up to the South Vietnamese whether “their war” would be won or lost. But the young president had already placed the United States on a course that would make retreat diffi cult. Like other presidents, Kennedy believed that giving up in Vietnam would weaken America’s “credibility.” Withdrawal “would be a great mis- take,” he said.

It is impossible to know how JFK would have managed Vietnam had he lived. What is known is that in the fall of 1963, Kennedy had lost patience with Ngo Dinh Diem, the dictatorial head of South Vietnam whom the United States had supported since 1955. Th e president let it be known in Saigon that the United States would support a military coup. Kennedy’s hope was that if Diem, reviled throughout the South because of his brutal repression of political opponents, could be replaced by a popular general or other military fi gure, a stable government would emerge — one strong enough to repel the South Vietnam National Liberation Front (NLF), or Vietcong. But when Diem was over- thrown on November 1, the South Vietnamese generals went further than Kennedy’s team had anticipated and assassinated both Diem and his brother. Th is made the coup look less like an organic uprising and more like an American plot.

South Vietnam fell into a period of chaos marked by several coups and defi ned by the increasing ungovernability of both the cities and countryside. Kennedy himself

What new roles did the federal government assume under Great Society initiatives, and how did they extend the New Deal tradition?

What factors accounted for the resurgence of feminism in the 1960s?

C H A P T E R 2 8 Uncivil Wars: Liberal Crisis and Conservative Rebirth, 1961–1972 827

was assassinated in late November and would not live to see the grim results of Diem’s murder: American engagement in a long and costly civil confl ict in the name of fi ght- ing communism.

Escalation Under Johnson Just as Kennedy had inherited Vietnam from Eisenhower, so Lyndon Johnson inher- ited Vietnam from Kennedy. Johnson’s inheritance was more burdensome, however, for by now only massive American intervention could prevent the collapse of South Vietnam (Map 28.1). Johnson, like Kennedy, was a subscriber to the Cold War tenets of global containment. “I am not going to lose Vietnam,” he vowed on taking offi ce. “I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went” (Chapter 25).

Gulf of Tonkin It did not take long for Johnson to place his stamp on the war. During the summer of 1964, the president got reports that North Vietnamese

torpedo boats had fi red on the U.S. destroyer Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. In the fi rst attack, on August 2, the damage infl icted was limited to a single bullet hole; a second attack, on August 4, later proved to be only misread radar sightings. To Johnson, it didn’t matter if the attack was real or imagined; the president believed a wider war was inevitable and issued a call to arms, sending his national approval rating from 42 to 72 percent. In the entire Congress, only two senators voted against his request for autho- rization to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” Th e Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, as it became known, gave Johnson the freedom to conduct operations in Vietnam as he saw fi t.

Despite his congressional mandate, Johnson was initially cautious about revealing his plans to the American people. “I had no choice but to keep my foreign policy in the wings . . . ,” Johnson later said. “I knew that the day it exploded into a major debate on the war, that day would be the beginning of the end of the Great Society.” So he ran in 1964 on the pledge that there would be no escalation — no American boys fi ghting Vietnam’s fi ght. Privately, he doubted the pledge could be kept.

The New American Presence

With the 1964 election safely behind him, Johnson began an American takeover of the war in Vietnam. Th e escalation, begin- ning in the early months of 1965, took two forms: deployment of

American ground troops and the intensifi cation of bombing against North Vietnam. On March 8, 1965, the fi rst marines waded ashore at Da Nang. By 1966, more than

380,000 American soldiers were stationed in Vietnam; by 1967, 485,000; and by 1968, 536,000. Th e escalating demands of General William Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces, and Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, pushed Johnson to Americanize the ground war in an attempt to stabilize South Vietnam. “I can’t run and pull a Chamberlain at Munich,” Johnson privately told a reporter in early March 1965, referring to the British prime minister who had appeased Hitler in 1938.

Meanwhile, Johnson authorized Operation Rolling Th under, a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam in 1965. Over the entire course of the war, the United

828 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

States dropped twice as many tons of bombs on Vietnam as the Allies had dropped in both Europe and the Pacifi c during the whole of World War II. To McNamara’s sur- prise, the bombing had little eff ect on the Vietcong’s ability to wage war in the South. Th e North Vietnamese quickly rebuilt roads and bridges and moved munitions plants underground. Instead of destroying the morale of the North Vietnamese, Operation Rolling Th under hardened their will to fi ght. Th e massive commitment of troops and air power devastated Vietnam’s countryside, however. Aft er one harsh but not unusual engagement, a commanding offi cer reported that “it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it” — a statement that came to symbolize the terrible logic of the war.

Ho Chi Minh Trail

Tet attacks, 1968

Communist nations

Nations allied with U.S.

Neutral nations 0 200 kilometers100

0 200 miles100

N

S

EW

Gulf of Thailand

South China

Sea

Gulf of Tonkin

Mekong R.

Mekong Delta

Tonlé Sap

Red R.

C H I N A

LAOS

CAMBODIA SOUTH VIETNAM

NORTH VIETNAM

THAILAND

BURMA

Demarcation Line of 1954

Hainan

17th Parallel

Dien Bien Phu Hanoi

Hue

Pleiku

Hai Phong

Vientiane

Phnom Penh

Saigon

Can Tho

Ca Mau

Cam Ranh BayBo Tuc

Nha Trang

Quang Ngai

Da Nang

Vinh Linh

Dong Hoi

Quang Tri

Chulai Tam Ky

Kon Tum

Bien Hoa Tan Son Nhut

My Lai

Qui Nhon Bangkok

Vinh

Da Lat

MAP 28.1 The Vietnam War, 1968 The Vietnam War was a guerrilla war, fought in skirmishes rather than set-piece battles. Despite repeated airstrikes, the United States was never able to halt the fl ow of North Vietnamese troops and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which wound through Laos and Cambodia. In January 1968, Vietcong forces launched the Tet off ensive, a surprise attack on cities and provincial centers across South Vietnam. Although the attackers were pushed back with heavy losses, the Tet off ensive revealed the futility of American eff orts to suppress the Vietcong guerrillas and marked a turning point in the war.

C H A P T E R 2 8 Uncivil Wars: Liberal Crisis and Conservative Rebirth, 1961–1972 829

Th e Johnson administration gambled that American superiority in personnel and weaponry would ultimately triumph. Th is strategy was inextricably tied to political considerations. For domestic reasons, policymakers searched for an elusive middle ground between all-out invasion of North Vietnam, which included the possibility of war with China, and disengagement. “In eff ect, we are fi ghting a war of attrition,” said General Westmoreland. “Th e only alternative is a war of annihilation.”

Public Opinion and the War Johnson gradually grew more confi dent that his Vietnam policy had the support of the American people. Both Democrats and Republicans approved Johnson’s escalation in Vietnam, and so did public opinion polls in 1965 and 1966. But then opinion began to shift .

Every night, Americans saw the carnage of war on their television screens, includ- ing images of dead and wounded Americans. One such incident occurred in the fi rst months of fi ghting in 1965. Television reporter Morley Safer witnessed a marine unit burning the village of Cam Ne to the ground. “Today’s operation is the frustration of Vietnam in miniature,” Safer explained. America can “win a military victory here, but to a Vietnamese peasant whose home is [destroyed] it will take more than presidential promises to convince him that we are on his side.”

With such fi rsthand knowledge of the war, journalists began to write about a “cred- ibility gap.” Th e Johnson administration, they charged, was concealing bad news about the war’s progress. In February 1966, television coverage of hearings by the Senate For- eign Relations Committee (chaired by J. William Fulbright, an outspoken critic of the war) raised further questions about the administration’s policy. Johnson complained to his staff in 1966 that “our people can’t stand fi rm in the face of heavy losses, and they can bring down the government.” Economic problems put Johnson even more on the defensive. Th e Vietnam War cost taxpayers $27 billion in 1967, pushing the federal defi - cit from $9.8 billion to $23 billion. By then, military spending had set in motion the infl ationary spiral that would plague the U.S. economy throughout the 1970s.

Out of these troubling developments, an antiwar movement began to crystallize. Its core, in addition to long-standing pacifi st groups, comprised a new generation of peace activists such as SANE (the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy), which in the 1950s had protested atmospheric nuclear testing. Aft er the escalation in 1965, the activist groups were joined by students, clergy, civil rights advocates, and even Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose book on child care had helped raise many of the younger activists (American Voices, p. 830). Despite their diversity, these opponents of the war shared a skepticism about U.S. policy in Vietnam. Th ey charged variously that intervention was antithetical to American ideals; that an independent, anticommunist South Vietnam was unattainable; and that no American objective justifi ed the suff er- ing that was being infl icted on the Vietnamese people.

Rise of the Student Movement College students, many of them inspired by the civil rights movement, had begun to organize and agitate for social change. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, they founded Stu- dents for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1960. Two years later, forty students from Big

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S

830

L e t t e r s t o D r. S p o c k Th e Vietnam War was among the most controversial wars in American history. It divided the country politically and split one generation from another. One of the war’s foremost critics was Dr. Benjamin Spock, who was famous in the 1940s and 1950s for writing the child-rearing guidebook, Th e Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, used by so many parents to raise their baby-boomer children. Spock received thousands of letters in the 1960s in response to his antiwar activism. Here are two.

May 10, 1967 Dear Dr. Spock, I have read with great interest your eff orts to tell people the truth about our involvement in Vietnam. I certainly approve of every- thing you said on the Merv Griffi n show and was glad that he gave you the time to present it on TV.

I’m sure that many people in the United States feel the same way, but other than write to our Congressman and the Presi- dent, we don’t know what to do about it. I certainly know how my Congressmen feel about the war and president Johnson tells us he’s for peace, when he’s continually escalating the war. I am a Democrat, but would never again vote for Mr. Johnson or Mr. Humphrey. . . . What have we to vote for? Is any candidate going to come out AGAINST the war or some settlement for peace? Is there anyone who really wants peace?

I have a son, who is 17 and will soon be 18. (By the way, your little paperback is still in my cupboard, with loose pages, rather worn from use because I brought up two babies using it as my “Bible.”) I don’t want my son to fi ght in Vietnam for a cause that I don’t believe in. I didn’t work so hard to keep him good, bring him up to do right, keep him healthy and well . . . to have him go the jungles of Asia in the pretense of keeping democracy there. M. C. [female]

January 28, 1968 Dr. Spock, My name is [name deleted], a junior in high school, and the daughter of an Air Force sgt. I watched your interview today on Meet the Press. It aroused me somewhat. My father is in Vietnam on the U.S.S. Ranger working for the navy and our country. . . . My boyfriend is also in Vietnam, on the U.S.S. Canberra. Certainly I don’t like the draft , as most Americans dislike sending their fathers, husbands, boyfriends, brothers, and friends off to war and perhaps to die. But . . . they are dying for their country and for what they love and believe in. . . .

Every week I get letters from my boyfriend telling me how good it makes them all feel to be fi ghting for us, yes us, you and me. But he says that the moral[e] needs lift ing over there. I can certainly see why. Th ere they are fi ghting and many of them dying while alot of punks are protesting the war and the draft . It makes some of them wonder if the fi ghting is worth it. . . .

You are older and perhaps wiser than I, but it could be that you can’t see things as clearly from your point of view as I can from mine. Cordially yours, L. D. [female]

SOURCE: Benjamin Spock Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library.

C H A P T E R 2 8 Uncivil Wars: Liberal Crisis and Conservative Rebirth, 1961–1972 831

Ten and Ivy League universities held the fi rst national SDS convention in Port Huron, Michigan. Tom Hayden penned a manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, expressing students’ disillusionment with the nation’s consumer culture and the gulf between rich and poor. “We are people of this generation,” Hayden wrote, “bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” Th ese students rejected Cold War foreign policy, including the war in Vietnam.

The New Left Th e founders of SDS referred to their movement as the New Left to distinguish themselves from the Old Left — communists and socialists

of the 1930s and 1940s. As New Left infl uence spread, it hit major university towns fi rst — places such as Madison, Wisconsin, and Berkeley, California. One of the fi rst major demonstrations erupted in the fall of 1964 at the University of California at Berkeley aft er administrators banned student political activity on university grounds. In protest, student organizations formed the Free Speech Movement and organized a sit-in at the administration building. Some students had just returned from Freedom Summer in Mississippi, radicalized by their experience. Mario Savio spoke for many when he compared the confl ict in Berkeley to the civil rights struggle in the South: “Th e same rights are at stake in both places — the right to participate as citizens in a democratic society and to struggle against the same enemy.” Emboldened by the Berkeley movement, students across the nation were soon protesting their universities’ academic policies and then, more passionately, the Vietnam War.

One spur to student protest was the military’s Selective Service System, which in 1967 abolished automatic student deferments. To avoid the draft , some young men enlisted in the National Guard or applied for conscientious objector status; others avoided the draft by leaving the country, most oft en for Canada or Sweden. In public demonstrations, opponents of the war burned their draft cards, picketed induction centers, and on a few occasions broke into Selective Service offi ces and destroyed records. Antiwar demonstrators numbered in the tens or, at most, hundreds of thousands — a small fraction of American youth — but they were vocal, visible, and determined.

Students were on the front lines as the campaign against the war escalated. Th e 1967 Mobilization to End the War brought 100,000 protesters into the streets of San Francisco, while more than a quarter million followed Martin Luther King Jr. from Central Park to the United Nations in New York. Another 100,000 marched on the Pentagon. President Johnson absorbed the blows and counterpunched — “Th e ene- my’s hope for victory . . . is in our division, our weariness, our uncertainty,” he pro- claimed — but it had become clear that Johnson’s war, as many began calling it, was no longer uniting the country.

Young Americans for Freedom

Th e New Left was not the only political force on college campuses. Conservative students were less noisy but more numerous. For them, the 1960s was not about protesting the war, staging student

strikes, and idolizing Black Power. Inspired by the group Young Americans for Free- dom (YAF), conservative students asserted their faith in “God-given free will” and their fear that the federal government “accumulates power which tends to diminish order and liberty.” Th e YAF, the largest student political organization in the country,

832 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

defended free enterprise and supported the war in Vietnam. Its founding principles were outlined in “Th e Sharon Statement,” draft ed (in Sharon, Connecticut) two years before the Port Huron Statement, and inspired young conservatives, many of whom would play important roles in the Reagan administration in the 1980s.

The Counterculture While the New Left organized against the political and economic system and the YAF defended it, many other young Americans

embarked on a general revolt against authority and middle-class respectability. Th e “hippie” — identifi ed by ragged blue jeans or army fatigues, tie-dyed T-shirts, beads, and long unkempt hair — symbolized the new counterculture. With roots in the 1950s Beat culture of New York’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s North Beach, the 1960s counterculture initially turned to folk music for its inspiration. Pete Seeger set the tone for the era’s idealism with songs such as the 1961 antiwar ballad “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” In 1963, the year of the civil rights demonstrations in Birming- ham and President Kennedy’s assassination, Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” refl ected the impatience of people whose faith in America was wearing thin. Joan Baez emerged alongside Dylan and pioneered a folk sound that inspired a generation of female musicians.

The Counterculture The three-day outdoor Woodstock concert in August 1969 was a defi ning moment in the rise of the counterculture. The event attracted 400,000 young people, like those pictured here, to Bethel, New York, for a weekend of music, drugs, and sex. The counterculture was distinct from the New Left and was less a political movement than a shifting set of cultural styles, attitudes, and practices. It rejected conformity of all kinds and placed rebellion and contrariness among its highest values. Another concept held dear by the counterculture was, simply, “love.” In an era of military violence abroad and police violence at home, many in the counterculture hoped that “peace and love” would prevail instead. Bill Eppridge/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.

C H A P T E R 2 8 Uncivil Wars: Liberal Crisis and Conservative Rebirth, 1961–1972 833

By the mid-1960s, other winds of change in popular music came from the Beatles, four working-class Brits whose awe-inspiring music — by turns lyrical and driving — spawned a commercial and cultural phenomenon known as Beatlemania. American youths’ embrace of the Beatles — as well as even more rebellious bands such as the Rolling Stones, the Who, and the Doors — deepened the generational divide between young people and their elders. So did the recreational use of drugs — especially mari- juana and the hallucinogen popularly known as LSD or acid — which was celebrated in popular music in the second half of the 1960s.

For a brief time, adherents of the counterculture believed that a new age was dawn- ing. In 1967, the “world’s fi rst Human Be-In” drew 20,000 people to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Th at summer — called the Sum- mer of Love — San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, New York’s East Village, Chicago’s Uptown neigh- borhoods, and the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles swelled with young dropouts, drift ers, and teen- age runaways whom the media dubbed “fl ower children.” Although most young people had little interest in all-out revolt, media coverage made it seem as though all of American youth was reject- ing the nation’s social and cultural norms.

Days of Rage, 1968–1972 By 1968, a sense of crisis gripped the country. Riots in the cities, campus unrest, and a nose-thumbing counterculture escalated into a general youth rebellion that seemed on the verge of tearing America apart. Calling 1968 “the watershed year for a generation,” SDS founder Tom Hayden wrote that it “started with legendary events, then raised hopes, only to end by immersing innocence in tragedy.” It was perhaps the most shock- ing year in all the postwar decades. Violent clashes both in Vietnam and back home in the United States combined with political assassinations to produce a palpable sense of despair and hopelessness (America Compared, p. 835).

War Abroad, Tragedy at Home President Johnson had gambled in 1965 on a quick victory in Vietnam, before the political cost of escalation came due. But there was no quick victory. North Vietnam- ese and Vietcong forces fought on, the South Vietnamese government repeatedly col- lapsed, and American casualties mounted. By early 1968, the death rate of U.S. troops had reached several hundred a week. Johnson and his generals kept insisting that there was “light at the end of the tunnel.” Facts on the ground showed otherwise.

The Tet Off ensive On January 30, 1968, the Vietcong unleashed a massive, well- coordinated assault in South Vietnam. Timed to coincide with Tet,

the Vietnamese new year, the off ensive struck thirty-six provincial capitals and fi ve of the six major cities, including Saigon, where the Vietcong nearly overran the U.S.

In what larger context did Presi- dent Johnson view the Vietnam confl ict, and why was he deter- mined to support South Vietnam?

Contrast the political views of the SDS, the YAF, and the counter- culture. How would you explain the diff erences?

834 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

embassy. In strictly military terms, the Tet off ensive was a failure, with very heavy Vietcong losses. But psychologically, the eff ect was devastating. Television brought into American homes shocking live images: the American embassy under siege and the Saigon police chief placing a pistol to the head of a Vietcong suspect and execut- ing him.

Th e Tet off ensive made a mockery of offi cial pronouncements that the United States was winning the war. How could an enemy on the run manage such a large- scale, complex, and coordinated attack? Just before Tet, a Gallup poll found that 56 percent of Americans considered themselves “hawks” (supporters of the war), while only 28 percent identifi ed with the “doves” (war opponents). Th ree months later, doves outnumbered hawks 42 to 41 percent. Without embracing the peace movement, many Americans simply concluded that the war was unwinnable.

Th e Tet off ensive undermined Johnson and discredited his war policies. When the 1968 presidential primary season got under way in March, antiwar senators Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and Robert Kennedy of New York, JFK’s brother, challenged Johnson for the Democratic nomination. Discouraged, perhaps even physically exhausted, on March 31 Johnson stunned the nation by announcing that he would not seek reelection.

Political Assassinations

Americans had barely adjusted to the news that a sitting president would not stand for reelection when, on April 4, James Earl Ray shot and killed Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. Riots erupted in more

than a hundred cities. Th e worst of them, in Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., left dozens dead and hundreds of millions of dollars in property damaged or destroyed. Th e violence on the streets of Saigon had found an eerie parallel on the streets of the United States.

One city that did not erupt was Indianapolis. Th ere, Robert Kennedy, in town campaigning in the Indiana primary, gave a quiet, somber speech to the black com- munity on the night of King’s assassination. Americans could continue to move toward “greater polarization,” Kennedy said, “black people amongst blacks, white amongst whites,” or “we can replace that violence . . . with an eff ort to understand, compassion and love.” Kennedy sympathized with African Americans’ outrage at whites, but he begged them not to strike back in retribution. Impromptu and heartfelt, Kennedy’s speech was a plea to follow King’s nonviolent example, even as the nation descended into greater violence.

But two months later, having emerged as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Kennedy, too, would be gone. On June 5, as he was celebrat- ing his victory in the California primary over Eugene McCarthy, Kennedy was shot dead by a young Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan. Amid the national mourning for yet another political murder, one newspaper columnist declared that “the country does not work anymore.” Newsweek asked, “Has violence become a way of life?” Kennedy’s assassination was a calamity for the Democratic Party because only he had seemed able to surmount the party’s fi ssures over Vietnam. In the space of eight weeks, Ameri- can liberals had lost two of their most important national fi gures, King and Kennedy. A third, Johnson, was unpopular and politically damaged. Without these unifying leaders, the crisis of liberalism had become unmanageable.

A M E R I C A C O M PA R E D

835

T h e G l o b a l P r o t e s t s o f 19 6 8 Nineteen sixty-eight was a year of youthful protest, political unrest, and violence across the globe. Th e year of massive antiwar protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as well as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy saw equal or greater turmoil around the world. Half of Italy’s universities were occupied; a massive student strike in France turned into a violent confrontation with police; prodemoc- racy students in Mexico City led huge protests that drew police gunfi re; and protests and street battles with police took place in Prague, Berlin, Tokyo, Rome, and London.

René Bourrigaud, French Student

My most vivid memory of May ’68? Th e new-found ability for everyone to speak — to speak of anything with anyone. In that month of talking during May you learnt more than in the whole of your fi ve years of studying. SOURCE: Ronald Fraser, 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 9.

The “Two Thousand Words” Manifesto, June 27, 1968, Prague, Czechoslovakia

Th roughout the spring and summer of 1968, the government of Czechoslovakia, under new communist leadership, pursued reforms pushed by students and other protesters. In August, the Soviet Union invaded and put an end to the new openness.

Th is spring a great opportunity was given to us once again, as it was at the end of the war [World War II]. Again we have the chance to take into our own hands our common cause, which for working purposes we will call socialism, and give it a form more appropriate to our once-good reputation and to the fairly good opinion we used to have of ourselves. SOURCE: Jaromír Navrátil, Th e Prague Spring 1968: A National Security Archive Documents Reader (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998), 181.

Interview with Participants in 1968 Protests in Mexico City

During the summer of 1968, hundreds of thousands of students protested against Mexico’s authoritarian national government and brutal police repression.

Sergio Aguayo: It was, in a symbolic way, the clash of a new Mexico and an old Mexico. Antonio Azuela: You have a middle class with eyes closed and a group of students saying, this was not a democracy. And this is not working.  Marcela Fernandez De Violante: And so we were together hundred and hundreds and hundreds. We had these big, big meetings at the campus crowded, crowded. And people singing, Que Vivan los Estudiantes . . . ta-ri-ra-ra-ra-ra. Marcela Fernandez De Violante: We were very young, very naive. But for the fi rst time, you had this notion that this country was going to be changed by the power of our convictions. Miguel Breseda: You would get in a bus and give a speech and inform the people. Because newspaper wouldn’t publish anything. And people would give you money, they would congratulate you and they would say, “We are with you young people. . . .”

SOURCE: Produced by Radio Diaries (radiodiaries .org) and originally broadcast on NPR’s All Th ings Considered. To hear the entire documentary, visit radiodiaries.org. Used by permission of Radio Diaries.

836 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

The Antiwar Movement and the 1968 Election Before their deaths, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had spoken elo- quently against the Vietnam War. To antiwar activists, however, bold speeches and marches had not produced the desired eff ect. “We are no longer interested in merely protesting the war,” declared one. “We are out to stop it.” Th ey sought nothing short of an immediate American withdrawal. Th eir anger at Johnson and the Democratic Party — fueled by news of the Tet off ensive, the murders of King and Kennedy, and the general youth rebellion — had radicalized the movement.

Democratic Convention

In August, at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the political divisions generated by the war consumed the party. Th ousands of protesters descended on the city. Th e most visible group, led by Jerry

Rubin and Abbie Hoff man, a remarkable pair of troublemakers, claimed to represent the Youth International Party. To mock those inside the convention hall, these “Yip- pies” nominated a pig, Pigasus, for president. Th e Yippies’ stunts were geared toward maximum media exposure. But a far larger and more serious group of activists had come to Chicago to demonstrate against the war as well — and they staged what many came to call the Siege of Chicago.

Democratic mayor Richard J. Daley ordered the police to break up the demon- strations. Several nights of skirmishes between protesters and police culminated on the evening of the nominations. In what an offi cial report later described as a “police riot,” police offi cers attacked protesters with tear gas and clubs. As the nominating speeches proceeded, television networks broadcast scenes of the riot, cementing a popular impression of the Democrats as the party of disorder. “Th ey are going to be spending the next four years picking up the pieces,” one Republican said gleefully. Inside the hall, the party dispiritedly nominated Hubert H. Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president. Th e delegates approved a middle-of-the-road platform that endorsed con- tinued fi ghting in Vietnam while urging a diplomatic solution to the confl ict.

Richard Nixon On the Republican side, Richard Nixon had engineered a remarkable political comeback. Aft er losing the presidential campaign in 1960

and the California gubernatorial race in 1962, he won the Republican presidential nomination in 1968. Sensing Democratic weakness, Nixon and his advisors believed there were two groups of voters ready to switch sides: northern working-class voters and southern whites.

Tired of the antiwar movement, the counterculture, and urban riots, northern blue-collar voters, especially Catholics, had drift ed away from the Democratic Party. Growing up in the Great Depression, these families were admirers of FDR and perhaps even had his picture on their living-room wall. But times had changed over three decades. To show how much they had changed, the social scientists Ben J. Wattenberg and Richard Scammon profi led blue-collar workers in their study Th e Real Majority (1970). Wattenberg and Scammon asked their readers to consider people such as a forty-seven-year-old machinist’s wife from Dayton, Ohio: “[She] is afraid to walk the streets alone at night. . . . She has a mixed view about blacks and civil rights.” More- over, they wrote, “she is deeply distressed that her son is going to a community junior

C H A P T E R 2 8 Uncivil Wars: Liberal Crisis and Conservative Rebirth, 1961–1972 837

college where LSD was found on campus.” Such northern blue-collar families were once reliable Democratic voters, but their political loyalties were increasingly up for grabs — a fact Republicans knew well.

George Wallace Working-class anxieties over student protests and urban riots were fi rst exploited by the controversial governor of Alabama, George C.

Wallace. Running in 1968 as a third-party presidential candidate, Wallace traded on his fame as a segregationist governor. He had tried to stop the federal government from desegregating the University of Alabama in 1963, and he was equally obstructive during the Selma crisis of 1965. Appealing to whites in both the North and the South, Wallace called for “law and order” and claimed that mothers on public assistance were, thanks to Johnson’s Great Society, “breeding children as a cash crop.”

Wallace’s hope was that by carrying the South, he could deny a major candidate an electoral majority and force the election into the House of Representatives. Th at strat- egy failed, as Wallace fi nished with just 13.5 percent of the popular vote. But he had defi ned hot-button issues — liberal elitism, welfare policies, and law and order — that became hallmarks for the next generation of mainstream conservatives.

Nixon’s Strategy Nixon off ered a subtler version of Wallace’s populism in a two-pronged approach to the campaign. He adopted what his advisors called the

“southern strategy,” which aimed at attracting southern white voters still smarting over the civil rights gains by African Americans. Nixon won over the key southerner, Democrat- turned-Republican senator Strom Th urmond of South Carolina, the 1948 Dixiecrat presi- dential nominee. Nixon informed Th urmond that while formally he had to support civil rights, his administration would go easy on enforcement. He also campaigned against the antiwar movement, urban riots, and protests, calling for a strict adherence to “law and order.” He pledged to represent the “quiet voice” of the “great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the nonshouters, the nondemonstrators.” Here Nixon was speaking not just to the South, but to the many millions of suburban voters across the country who worried that social disorder had gripped the nation.

Th ese strategies — southern and suburban — worked. Nixon received 43.4 percent of the vote to Humphrey’s 42.7 percent, defeating him by a scant 500,000 votes out of the 73 million that were cast. But the numerical closeness of the race could not disguise the devastating blow to the Democrats. Humphrey received almost 12 million fewer votes than Johnson had in 1964. Th e white South largely abandoned the Democratic Party, an exodus that would accelerate in the 1970s. In the North, Nixon and Wallace made sig- nifi cant inroads among traditionally Democratic voters. New Deal Democrats lost the unity of purpose that had served them for thirty years. A nation exhausted by months of turmoil and violence had chosen a new direction. Nixon’s victory in 1968 foreshad- owed — and helped propel — a national electoral realignment in the coming decade.

The Nationalist Turn Vietnam and the increasingly radical youth rebellion intersected with the turn toward racial and ethnic nationalism by young African American and Chicano activists. As we saw in Chapter 27, the Black Power and Chicano movements broke with the liberal

838 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

“rights” politics of an older generation of leaders. Th ese new activists expressed fury at the poverty and white racism that were beyond the reach of civil rights laws; they also saw Vietnam as an unjust war against other people of color.

In this spirit, the Chicano Moratorium Committee organized demonstrations against the war. Chanting “Viva la Raza, Afuera Vietnam” (“Long live the Chicano people, Get out of Vietnam”), 20,000 Mexican Americans marched in Los Angeles in August 1970. At another rally, Cesar Chavez said: “For the poor it is a terrible irony that they should rise out of their misery to do battle against other poor people.” He and other Mexican American activists charged that the draft was biased against the poor — like most wars in history, Vietnam was, in the words of one retired army colonel, “a poor boy’s fi ght.”

Among African Americans, the Black Panther Party and the National Black Anti- war Antidraft League spoke out against the war. “Black Americans are considered to be the world’s biggest fools,” Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party wrote in his typically acerbic style, “to go to another country to fi ght for something they don’t have for themselves.” Muhammad Ali, the most famous boxer in the world, refused his army induction. Sentenced to prison, Ali was eventually acquitted on appeal. But his action cost him his heavyweight title, and for years he was not allowed to box profes- sionally in the United States.

Women’s Liberation Among women, 1968 also marked a break with the past. Th e late 1960s spawned a new brand of feminism: women’s liberation. Th ese feminists were primarily younger, college-educated women fresh from the New Left , antiwar, and civil rights move- ments. Th ose movements’ male leaders, they discovered, considered women little more than pretty helpers who typed memos and fetched coff ee. Women who tried to raise feminist issues at civil rights and antiwar events were shouted off the platform with jeers such as “Move on, little girl, we have more important issues to talk about here than women’s liberation.”

Fed up with second-class status, and well versed in the tactics of organization and protest, women radicals broke away and organized on their own. Unlike the National Organization for Women (NOW), the women’s liberation movement was loosely structured, comprising an alliance of collectives in New York, San Francisco, Boston, and other big cities and college towns. “Women’s lib,” as it was dubbed by a skeptical media, went public in 1968 at the Miss America pageant. Demonstrators car- ried posters of women’s bodies labeled as slabs of beef — implying that society treated them as meat. Mirroring the identity politics of Black Power activists and the self- dramatization of the counterculture, women’s liberation sought an end to the deni- gration and exploitation of women. “Sisterhood is powerful!” read one women’s liberationist manifesto. Th e national Women’s Strike for Equality in August 1970 brought hundreds of thousands of women into the streets of the nation’s cities for marches and demonstrations.

By that year, new terms such as sexism and male chauvinism had become part of the national vocabulary. As converts fl ooded in, the two branches of the women’s movement began to converge. Radical women realized that key feminist goals — child

C H A P T E R 2 8 Uncivil Wars: Liberal Crisis and Conservative Rebirth, 1961–1972 839

care, equal pay, and reproduction rights — could best be achieved in the political arena. At the same time, more traditional activists, exemplifi ed by Betty Friedan, developed a broader view of women’s oppression. Th ey came to understand that women required more than equal opportunity: the culture that regarded women as nothing more than sexual objects and helpmates to men had to change as well. Although still largely white and middle class, feminists began to think of themselves as part of a broad social crusade.

“Sisterhood” did not unite all women, however. Rather than joining white-led women’s liberation organizations, African American and Latina women continued to work within the larger framework of the civil rights movement. New groups such as the Combahee River Collective and the National Black Feminist Organization arose to speak for the concerns of African American women. Th ey criticized sexism but were reluctant to break completely with black men and the struggle for racial equality. Chi- cana feminists came from Catholic backgrounds in which motherhood and family were held in high regard. “We want to walk hand in hand with the Chicano brothers, with our children, our viejitos [elders], our Familia de la Raza,” one Chicana feminist wrote. Black and Chicana feminists embraced the larger movement for women’s rights but carried on their own struggles to address specifi c needs in their communities.

One of the most important contributions of women’s liberation was to raise aware- ness about what feminist Kate Millett called sexual politics. Liberationists argued that unless women had control over their own bodies, they could not freely shape their destinies. Th ey campaigned for reproductive rights, especially access to abortion, and railed against a culture that blamed women in cases of sexual assault and turned a blind eye to sexual harassment in the workplace.

Meanwhile, women’s opportunities expanded dramatically in higher education. Dozens of formerly all-male bastions such as Yale, Princeton, and the U.S. military academies admitted women undergraduates for the fi rst time. Colleges started wom- en’s studies programs, which eventually numbered in the hundreds, and the pro- portion of women attending graduate and professional schools rose markedly. With the adoption of Title IX in 1972, Congress broadened the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include educational institutions, prohibiting colleges and universities that received federal funds from discriminating on the basis of sex. By requiring comparable fund- ing for sports programs, Title IX made women’s athletics a real presence on college campuses.

Women also became increasingly visible in public life. Congresswomen Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm joined Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, the founder of Ms. magazine, to create the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971. Abzug and Chisholm, both from New York, joined Congresswomen Patsy Mink from Hawaii and Martha Griffi ths from Michigan to sponsor equal rights legislation. Congress autho- rized child-care tax deductions for working parents in 1972 and in 1974 passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which enabled married women to get credit, including credit cards and mortgages, in their own names.

Antiwar activists, black and Chicano nationalists, and women’s liberationists had each challenged the Cold War liberalism of the Democratic Party. In doing so, they helped build on the “rights liberalism” forged fi rst by the African American–led civil rights movement. But they also created rift s among competing parts of the former

840 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

liberal consensus. Many Catholics, for instance, opposed abortion rights and other freedoms sought by women’s liberationists. Still other Democrats, many of them blue- collar trade unionists, believed that antiwar protesters were unpatriotic and that sup- porting one’s government in time of war was a citizen’s duty. Th e antiwar movement and the evolving rights liberalism of the sixties had made the old Democratic coalition increasingly unworkable.

Stonewall and Gay Liberation Th e liberationist impulse transformed the gay rights movement as well. Homophile activists in the 1960s (Chapter 26) had pursued rights by protesting, but they adopted the respectable dress and behavior they knew straight society demanded. Meanwhile, the vast majority of gay men and lesbians remained “in the closet.” So many were clos- eted because homosexuality was considered immoral and was even illegal in the vast majority of states — sodomy statutes outlawed same-sex relations, and police used other morals laws to harass and arrest gay men and lesbians. In the late 1960s, how- ever, inspired by the Black Power and women’s movements, gay activists increasingly demanded immediate and unconditional recognition of their rights. A gay newspaper in New York bore the title Come Out!

Th e new gay liberation found multiple expressions in major cities across the coun- try, but a defi ning event occurred in New York’s Greenwich Village. Police had raided gay bars for decades, making arrests, publicizing the names of patrons, and harassing customers simply for being gay. When a local gay bar called the Stonewall Inn was raided by police in the summer of 1969, however, its patrons rioted for two days, burn- ing the bar and battling with police in the narrow streets of the Village. Decades of police repression had taken their toll. Few commentators excused the violence, and the Stonewall riots were not repeated, but activists celebrated them as a symbolic demand for full citizenship. Th e gay liberation movement grew quickly aft er Stone- wall. Local gay and lesbian organizations proliferated, and activists began pushing for

nondiscrimination ordinances and consensual sex laws at the state level. By 1975, the National Gay Task Force and other national organiza- tions lobbied Congress, served as media watch- dogs, and advanced suits in the courts. Despite all the activity, progress was slow; in most are- nas of American life, gays and lesbians did not enjoy the same legal protections and rights as other Americans.

Richard Nixon and the Politics of the Silent Majority Vietnam abroad and the antiwar movement and the counterculture at home tore at the fabric of the Democratic coalition and proved too diffi cult for Lyndon Johnson to navigate. Richard Nixon, in contrast, showed himself adept at taking advantage of the nation’s unrest through carefully timed speeches and displays of moral outrage. A cen-

What changed between 1965 and 1968, and how did these develop- ments aff ect national political life?

How did the antiwar movement, women’s liberation, and gay liberation break with an earlier liberal politics?

C H A P T E R 2 8 Uncivil Wars: Liberal Crisis and Conservative Rebirth, 1961–1972 841

trist by nature and temperament, Nixon was not part of the conservative Goldwater wing of the Republican Party. Th ough he was an ardent anticommunist like Goldwa- ter, Nixon also shared some of Eisenhower’s traits, including a basic acceptance of government’s role in economic matters. Nixon is thus most profi tably viewed as a tran- sitional fi gure, a national politician who formed a bridge between the liberal postwar era and the much more conservative decades that followed the 1970s.

In late 1969, following a massive antiwar rally in Washington, President Nixon gave a televised speech in which he referred to his supporters as the silent majority. It was classic Nixonian rhetoric. In a single phrase, he summed up a generational and cultural struggle, placing himself on the side of ordinary Americans against the rabble- rousers and troublemakers. It was an oversimplifi cation, but the label silent majority stuck, and Nixon had defi ned a political phenomenon. For the remainder of his presi- dency, Nixon cultivated the impression that he was the defender of a reasonable mid- dle ground under assault from the radical left .

Nixon in Vietnam On the war in Vietnam, Nixon picked up where Johnson had left off . Cold War assump- tions continued to dictate presidential policy. Abandoning Vietnam, Nixon insisted, would damage America’s “credibility” and make the country seem “a pitiful, helpless

Richard Nixon Richard Nixon completed one of the more remarkable political rehabilitations in modern times. He had lost the 1960 presidential election and the 1962 California gubernatorial election. But he came back strong in 1968 to ride — and help direct — a growing wave of reaction among conservative Americans against Great Society liberalism, the antiwar movement, civil rights, and the counterculture. In this photograph, President Nixon greets supporters in June 1969, just a few months after his inauguration. © Wally McNamee/Corbis.

842 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

giant.” Nixon wanted peace, but only “peace with honor.” Th e North Vietnamese were not about to oblige him. Th e only outcome acceptable to them was a unifi ed Vietnam under their control.

Vietnamization and Cambodia

To neutralize criticism at home, Nixon began delegating the ground fi ghting to the South Vietnamese. Under this new policy of Viet- namization, American troop levels dropped from 543,000 in 1968 to

334,000 in 1971 to barely 24,000 by early 1973. American casualties dropped corre- spondingly. But the killing in Vietnam continued. As Ellsworth Bunker, the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, noted cynically, it was just a matter of changing “the color of the bodies.”

Far from abating, however, the antiwar movement intensifi ed. In November 1969, half a million demonstrators staged a huge protest in Washington called the Vietnam Moratorium. On April 30, 1970, as part of a secret bombing campaign against Vietcong supply lines, American troops destroyed enemy bases in neutral Cambodia. When news of the invasion of Cambodia came out, American campuses exploded in out- rage — and, for the fi rst time, students died. On May 4, 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio, panicky National Guardsmen fi red into an antiwar rally, wounding eleven stu- dents and killing four. Less than two weeks later, at Jackson State College in Mississippi, Guardsmen stormed a dormitory, killing two black students. More than 450 colleges closed in protest. Across the country, the spring semester was essentially canceled.

“I Want Out” Protest movements of all kinds shook the foundations of American society and national politics in the 1960s. No issue was more controversial and divisive than the war in Vietnam. Private Collection/ Peter Newark American Pictures/The Bridgeman Art Library.

C H A P T E R 2 8 Uncivil Wars: Liberal Crisis and Conservative Rebirth, 1961–1972 843

My Lai Massacre Meanwhile, one of the worst atrocities of the war had become pub- lic. In 1968, U.S. Army troops had executed nearly fi ve hundred

people in the South Vietnamese village of My Lai, including a large number of women and children. Th e massacre was known only within the military until 1969, when jour- nalist Seymour Hersh broke the story and photos of the massacre appeared in Life magazine, discrediting the United States around the world. Americans, Time observed, “must stand in the larger dock of guilt and human conscience.” Although high-ranking offi cers participated in the My Lai massacre and its cover-up, only one soldier, a low- ranking second lieutenant named William Calley, was convicted.

Believing that Calley had been made a fall guy for offi cial U.S. policies that inevi- tably brought death to innocent civilians, a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War publicized other atrocities committed by U.S. troops. In a controversial protest in 1971, they returned their combat medals at demonstrations outside the U.S. Capitol, literally hurling them onto the Capitol steps. “Here’s my merit badge for murder,” one vet said. Supporters of the war called these veterans cowardly and un-American, but their heartfelt antiwar protest exposed the deep personal torment that Vietnam had caused many soldiers.

Détente As protests continued at home, Nixon pursued two strategies to achieve his declared “peace with honor,” one diplomatic and the other brutal. First,

he sought détente (a lessening of tensions) with the Soviet Union and a new open- ness with China. In a series of meetings between 1970 and 1972, Nixon and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev resolved tensions over Cuba and Berlin and signed the fi rst Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), the latter a symbolic step toward ending the Cold War arms race. Heavily infl uenced by his national security advisor, the Har- vard professor Henry Kissinger, Nixon believed that he could break the Cold War impasse that had kept the United States from productive dialogue with the Soviet Union.

Th en, in 1972, Nixon visited China, becoming the fi rst sitting U.S. president to do so. In a televised weeklong trip, the president pledged better relations with China and declared that the two nations — one capitalist, the other communist — could peace- fully coexist. Th is was the man who had risen to prominence in the 1950s by railing against the Democrats for “losing” China and by hounding communists and fellow travelers. Indeed, the president’s impeccable anticommunist credentials gave him the political cover to travel to Beijing. He remarked genially to Mao: “Th ose on the right can do what those on the left only talk about.” Praised for his eff orts to lessen Cold War tensions, Nixon also had tactical objectives in mind. He hoped that by befriending both the Soviet Union and China, he could play one against the other and strike a bet- ter deal over Vietnam at the ongoing peace talks in Paris. His second strategy, however, would prove less praiseworthy and cost more lives.

Exit America In April 1972, in an attempt to strengthen his negotiating position, Nixon ordered B-52 bombing raids against North Vietnam. A month

later, he approved the mining of North Vietnamese ports, something Johnson had never dared to do. Th e North Vietnamese were not isolated, however: supplies from China and the Soviet Union continued, and the Vietcong fought on.

844 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

With the 1972 presidential election approaching, Nixon sent Kissinger back to the Paris peace talks, which had been initiated under Johnson. In a key concession, Kissinger accepted the presence of North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam. North Vietnam then agreed to an interim arrangement whereby the South Vietnamese gov- ernment in Saigon would stay in power while a special commission arranged a fi nal settlement. With Kissinger’s announcement that “peace is at hand,” Nixon got the elec- tion lift he wanted, but the agreement was then sabotaged by General Nguyen Van Th ieu, the South Vietnamese president. So Nixon, in one fi nal spasm of bloodletting, unleashed the two-week “Christmas bombing,” the most intense of the entire war. On January 27, 1973, the two sides signed the Paris Peace Accords.

Nixon hoped that with massive U.S. aid, the Th ieu regime might survive. But Congress was in revolt. It refused appropriations for bombing Cambodia aft er August 15, 1973, and gradually cut back aid to South Vietnam. In March 1975, North Viet- namese forces launched a fi nal off ensive, and on April 30, Vietnam was reunited. Sai- gon, the South Vietnamese capital, was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, aft er the founding father of the communist regime.

Th e collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 produced a powerful, and tragic, historical irony: an outcome little diff erent from what would likely have resulted from the unifi - cation vote in 1954 (Chapter 25). In other words, America’s most disastrous military adventure of the twentieth century barely altered the geopolitical realities in Southeast Asia. Th e Hanoi regime called itself communist but never intended to be a satellite of any country, least of all China, Vietnam’s ancient enemy.

Many paid a steep price for the Vietnam War. America’s Vietnamese friends lost jobs and property, spent years in “reeducation” camps, or had to fl ee the country. Mil- lions of Vietnamese had died in a decade of war, which included some of the most intensive aerial bombing of the twentieth century. In bordering Cambodia, the mania- cal Khmer Rouge, followers of Cambodia’s ruling Communist Party, took power and murdered 1.7 million people in bloody purges. And in the United States, more than 58,000 Americans had sacrifi ced their lives, and 300,000 had been wounded. On top of the war’s $150 billion price tag, slow-to-heal internal wounds divided the country, and Americans increasingly lost confi dence in their political leaders.

The Silent Majority Speaks Out Nixon placed himself on the side of what he called “the nonshouters, the nondemon- strators.” But moderate and conservative Americans increasingly spoke out. Th ey were not in the mood to simply remain silent. During Nixon’s fi rst presidential term, those opposed to the direction liberalism had taken since the early 1960s focused their dis- content on what they believed were the excesses of the “rights revolution” — the enor- mous changes in American law and society initiated by the civil rights movement and advanced by feminists and others thereaft er.

Law and Order and the Supreme Court

Th e rights revolution found an ally in an unexpected place: the U.S. Supreme Court. Th e decision that stood as a landmark in the civil rights movement, Brown v. Board of Education (1954),

triggered a larger judicial revolution. Following Brown, the Court increasingly agreed to hear human rights and civil liberties cases — as opposed to its previous focus on

C H A P T E R 2 8 Uncivil Wars: Liberal Crisis and Conservative Rebirth, 1961–1972 845

property-related suits. Surprisingly, this shift was led by the man whom President Dwight Eisenhower had appointed chief justice in 1953: Earl Warren. A popular Republican governor of California, Warren surprised many, including Eisenhower himself, with his robust advocacy of civil rights and civil liberties. Th e Warren Court lasted from 1954 until 1969 and established some of the most far-reaching liberal jurisprudence in U.S. history.

Right-wing activists fi ercely opposed the Warren Court, which they accused of “legislating from the bench” and contributing to social breakdown. Th ey pointed, for instance, to the Court’s rulings that people who are arrested have a constitutional right to counsel (1963, 1964) and, in Miranda v. Arizona (1966), that arrestees have to be informed by police of their right to remain silent. Compounding conservatives’ frus- tration was a series of decisions that liberalized restrictions on pornography. Trying to walk the fi ne line between censorship and obscenity, the Court ruled in Roth v. United States (1957) that obscene material had to be “utterly without redeeming social impor- tance” to be banned. Th e “social importance” test, however, proved nearly impossible to defi ne and left wide latitude for pornography to fl ourish.

Th at measure was fi nally abandoned in 1972, when the Court ruled in Miller v. California that “contemporary community standards” were the rightful measure of obscenity. But Miller, too, had little eff ect on the pornographic magazines, fi lms, and peep shows proliferating in the 1970s. Conservatives found these decisions especially distasteful, since the Court had also ruled that religious ritual of any kind in public schools — including prayers and Bible reading — violated the constitutional separa- tion of church and state. To many religious Americans, the Court had taken the side of immorality over Christian values.

Supreme Court critics blamed rising crime rates and social breakdown on the Warren Court’s liberal judicial record. Every category of crime was up in the 1970s, but especially disconcerting was the doubling of the murder rate since the 1950s and the 76 percent increase in burglary and theft between 1967 and 1976. Sensational crimes had always grabbed headlines, but now “crime” itself preoccupied politicians, the media, and the public. However, no one could establish a direct causal link between increases in crime and Supreme Court decisions, given a myriad of other social fac- tors, including drugs, income inequality, enhanced statistical record-keeping, and the proliferation of guns. But when many Americans looked at their cities in the 1970s, they saw pornographic theaters, X-rated bookstores, and rising crime rates. Where, they wondered, was law and order?

Busing Another major civil rights objective — desegregating schools — produced even more controversy and fi reworks. For fi ft een years, southern states, by a

variety of stratagems, had fended off court directives that they desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” In 1968, only about one-third of all black children in the South attended schools with whites. At that point, the federal courts got serious and, in a series of stiff decisions, ordered an end to “dual school systems.”

Where schools remained highly segregated, the courts increasingly endorsed the strategy of busing students to achieve integration. Plans diff ered across the country. In some states, black children rode buses from their neighborhoods to attend previously all-white schools. In others, white children were bused to black or Latino neighbor- hoods. In an important 1971 decision, the Supreme Court upheld a countywide busing

846 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

plan for Charlotte-Mecklenburg, a North Carolina school district. Despite local oppo- sition, desegregation proceeded, and many cities in the South followed suit. By the mid-1970s, 86 percent of southern black children were attending school with whites. (In recent years, this trend has reversed.)

In the North, where segregated schooling was also a fact of life — arising from suburban residential patterns — busing orders proved less eff ective. Detroit drama- tized the problem. To integrate Detroit schools would have required merging city and suburban school districts. A lower court ordered just such a merger in 1971, but in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), the Supreme Court reversed the ruling, requiring busing plans to remain within the boundaries of a single school district. Without including the largely white suburbs in busing eff orts, however, achieving racial balance in Detroit, and other major northern cities, was all but impossible. Postwar suburbaniza- tion had produced in the North what law had mandated in the South: entrenched racial segregation of schools.

As the 1972 election approached, President Nixon took advantage of rising dis- content over “law and order” and busing. He was the political benefi ciary of a growing reaction against liberalism that had begun to take hold between 1968 and the early 1970s.

The 1972 Election Political realignments have been infrequent in American history. One occurred between 1932 and 1936, when many Republicans, despairing over the Great Depres- sion, had switched sides and voted for FDR. Th e years between 1968 and 1972 were another such pivotal moment. Th is time, Democrats were the ones who abandoned their party.

Aft er the 1968 elections, the Democrats fell into disarray. Bent on sweeping away the party’s old guard, reformers took over, adopting new rules that granted women, African Americans, and young people delegate seats “in reasonable relation to their presence in the population.” In the past, an alliance of urban machines, labor unions, and white ethnic groups — the heart of the New Deal coalition — dominated the nom- inating process. But at the 1972 convention, few of the party faithful qualifi ed as del- egates under the changed rules. Th e crowning insult came when the convention rejected the credentials of Chicago mayor Richard Daley and his delegation, seating instead an Illinois delegation led by Jesse Jackson, a fi rebrand young black minister and former aide to Martin Luther King Jr.

Capturing the party was one thing; beating the Republicans was quite another. Th ese party reforms opened the door for George McGovern, a liberal South Dakota senator and favorite of the antiwar and women’s movements, to capture the nomina- tion. But McGovern took a number of missteps, including failing to mollify key party backers such as the AFL-CIO, which, for the fi rst time in memory, refused to endorse the Democratic ticket. A weak campaigner, McGovern was also no match for Nixon, who pulled out all the stops. Using the advantages of incumbency, Nixon gave the economy a well-timed lift and proclaimed (prematurely) a cease-fi re in Vietnam. Nixon’s appeal to the “silent majority” — people who “care about a strong United States, about patriotism, about moral and spiritual values” — was by now well honed.

C H A P T E R 2 8 Uncivil Wars: Liberal Crisis and Conservative Rebirth, 1961–1972 847

Nixon won in a landslide, receiving nearly 61 percent of the popular vote and carrying every state except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Th e returns revealed how fractured traditional Democratic voting blocs had become. McGovern received only 38 percent of the big-city Catholic vote and lost 42 percent of self-identifi ed Democrats overall. Th e 1972 election marked a pivotal moment in the country’s shift to the right. Yet observers legitimately wondered whether the 1972 election results proved the popularity of conservatism or merely showed that the country had grown weary of liberalism and the changes it had wrought in national life.

S U M M A RY In this chapter, we saw that the combined pressures of the Vietnam War and racial and cultural confl ict fractured and split the New Deal coalition. Following John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Lyndon Johnson advanced the most ambitious liberal reform program since the New Deal, securing not only civil rights legislation but also many programs in education, medical care, transportation, environmental protection, and, above all, his War on Poverty. But the Great Society fell short of its promise as Johnson escalated American involvement in Vietnam.

Th e war bitterly divided Americans. Galvanized by the carnage of war and the draft , the antiwar movement spread rapidly among young people, and the spirit of rebellion spilled beyond the war. Th e New Left took the lead among college students, while the more apolitical counterculture preached liberation through sex, drugs, music, and personal transformation. Women’s liberationists broke from the New Left and raised new concerns about society’s sexism. Conservative students rallied in sup- port of the war and on behalf of conservative principles, but they were oft en drowned out by the more vocal and demonstrative liberals and radicals.

In 1968, the nation was rocked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as by a wave of urban riots, fueling a growing popular desire for law and order. Adding to the national disquiet was the Democratic National Con- vention that summer, divided by the Vietnam War and besieged by street riots outside. Th e stage was set for a new wave of conservatism to take hold of the country, and a resurgence of the Republican Party under Richard Nixon between 1968 and 1972. President Nixon ended the war in Vietnam, but only aft er fi ve more years and many more casualties.

Fo r Fu r t h e r E x p l o rat i o n Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973 (1998). An engaging

biography of Johnson and an account of his era. Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: Th e Civil War of the 1960s (1999). A

vivid account of dissent in the 1960s. G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot, Th e Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of

Change in the 1960s (2008). A thoughtful account of the Great Society.

How was President Nixon’s Vietnam policy diff erent from President Johnson’s?

848 PA R T E I G H T The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980

Ruth Rosen, Th e World Split Open (2000). An accessible exploration of the women’s move- ment and feminism.

Bruce Schulman, Th e Seventies: Th e Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (2001). A thoughtful explanation of Nixon and political realignment.

Marilyn Young, Th e Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (1991). An excellent history of the decades- long confl ict in Vietnam.

T I M E L I N E

1963 John F. Kennedy assassinated; Lyndon B. Johnson assumes presidency

1964 Civil Rights Act Economic Opportunity Act

inaugurates War on Poverty Free Speech Movement at

Berkeley Gulf of Tonkin Resolution 1965 Immigration Act abolishes

national quota system Medicare and Medicaid