Discussion #4: American Imperial Expansion

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The exotic build- ings of the Chicago World’s Columbian Expo- sition of 1893, with their domes, minarets, and foreign flags, show how conscious Americans were becoming of the wider world. A woman takes a camel ride ( right ) while many for- eigners wander through the plaza.

21 1877–1900

>> A n A m e r i c a n S t o r y

“the world united at chicago”

O n May 1, 1893, an eager crowd of nearly half a million people jostled into a dra- matic plaza fronted on either side by gleaming white buildings. Named the Court of Honor, the plaza was the center of a strange, ornamental city that was at once both awesome and entirely imaginary.

At one end stood a building called the Court of Honor, whose magnificent white dome exceeded the height of even the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Unlike the marble-built

The Political System under Strain at Home and Abroad

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Capitol, however, the Court was all surface: a stucco shell plas- tered onto a steel frame and then sprayed with white oil paint to make it glisten. Beyond it stretched thor- oughfares encompassing over 200 colonnaded buildings, piers, islands, and watercourses. Located five miles south of Chicago’s center, this city of the imagination proclaimed itself the “World’s Columbian Exposition” to honor the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to America.

President Grover Cleveland opened the world’s fair in a way that symbolized the nation’s industrial transformation. He pressed a teleg- rapher’s key. Instantly, electric cur- rent put 7,000 feet of shafting into motion—unfurling flags, setting foun- tains pumping, and lighting 10,000 electric bulbs. The lights played over an array of exhibition buildings soon known as the “White City.”

One visitor dismissed the displays within as “the contents of a great dry goods store mixed up with the con- tents of museums.” In a sense he was right. Visitors paraded by an unend- ing stream of typewriters, watches, agricultural machinery, cedar canoes, and refrigerators, to say nothing of a map of the United States fashioned entirely out of pickles. But this riot of mechanical marvels, gewgaws, and bric-a-brac was symbolic, too, of the

nation’s industrial transformation. The fair resembled nothing so much as a living, breathing version of the new mail-order catalogs whose pages were now introducing the goods of the city to the hinterlands.

The connections made by the fair were international as well. This was the World’s Columbian Exposi- tion, with exhibits from 36 nations. Germany’s famous manufacturer of armaments, Krupp, had its own separate building. It housed a 120-ton rifled gun 46 feet long and capable of launching a 1-ton shell 20 miles. At the fair’s amusement park, visitors encountered exotic cultures—and not just temples, huts, and totems, but exhibits in the flesh. The Arabian village fea- tured Saharan camels, veiled ladies, and elders in turbans. Nearby, Irish peasants boiled potatoes over turf fires and Samoan men threw axes.

Like all such fairs the Colum- bian Exposition created a fantasy. Beyond its boundaries the real world was showing signs of strain. Early in 1893 the Philadelphia and Read- ing Railroad had gone bankrupt, setting off a financial panic. By the end of the year nearly 500 banks and 15,000 businesses had failed. Although tourists continued to mar- vel at the fair’s wonders, crowds of worried and unemployed workers

also gathered in Chicago. On Labor Day, Governor John Altgeld of Illi- nois told one such assemblage that the government was powerless to soften the “suffering and distress” of this latest economic downturn.

In truth the political system was ill-equipped to cope with the eco- nomic and social revolutions reshap- ing America. The executive branch remained weak, while Congress and the courts found themselves easily swayed by the financial interests of the industrial class. The crises of the 1890s forced the political order to begin to address such inequities.

The political system also had to take into account develop- ments abroad. Industrialization sent American businesses around the world searching for raw mate- rials and new markets. As that search intensified, many influential Americans argued that like European nations, the United States needed to acquire territory overseas. By the end of the century the nation’s political system had taken its first steps toward modernization at home and abroad. They included a major political realignment and a growing overseas empire. Both changes and the tensions that accompanied them launched the United States into the twentieth century and an era of

prosperity and power. <<

W h a t ’ s t o CC oo mm e 419 The Politics of Paralysis

422 The Revolt of the Farmers

425 The New Realignment

431 Visions of Empire

435 The Imperial Moment

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in a few western states, and beginning in the 1880s, the South erected barriers that eventually disenfranchised many African American voters.

Party loyalty rarely wavered. In every election 16 states could be counted on to vote Republican and 14 Democratic. In only six states—the most important being New York and Ohio—were results ever in doubt.

The Parties  >>   What inspired such loyalty? Republicans and Democrats did have similarities but also had differences. Both parties supported business and condemned radicalism; neither offered embat- tled workers and farmers much help. But Democrats believed in states’ rights and limited government, while Republicans favored federal activism to foster economic growth. The stronghold of Democrats was the South, where they continually reminded voters that they had led the states of the Old Confederacy,

THE POLITICS OF PARALYSIS

During the 1880s and 1890s, as the American politi- cal system came under strain, Moisei Ostrogorski was traveling across the United States. Like other foreign visitors, the Russian political scientist had come to see the new democratic experiment in action. His ver- dict was as blunt as it was common: “the constituted authorities are unequal to their duty.” It seemed that the experiment had fallen victim to greed, indifference, and political mediocrity.

In fact there were deeper problems: a great gulf between rich and poor; a wrenching cycle of boom and bust; the unmet needs of African Americans, women, Indians, and other “others.” These prob- lems had scarcely been addressed let alone resolved. Politics was the traditional medium of resolution, but it was grinding into a dangerous stalemate.

Political Stalemate  >>   From 1877 to 1897 American politics rested on a delicate balance of power that left neither Repub- licans nor Democrats in control. Repub- licans inhabited the White House for 12 years; Democrats, for 8. Margins of vic- tory in presidential elections were paper thin. No president could count on having a major- ity of his party in both houses of Congress for his entire term. Usually Republicans con- trolled the Senate, Democrats the House of Representatives.

With elections so tight both parties worked hard to bring out the vote. Brass bands, parades, cheering crowds of flag-wavers were “the order of the day and night from end to end of the country,” reported a British visi- tor. When Election Day arrived, stores closed and businesses shut down. At political clubs and corner saloons men lined up to get vot- ing orders (along with free drinks) from ward bosses. Fields went untended as farmers took their families to town, cast their ballots, and bet on the outcome.

An average of nearly 80 percent of eligible voters turned out for presidential elections between 1860 and 1900, a figure higher than at any time since. In that era, however, the electorate made up a smaller percentage of the population. About one American in five actually voted in presidential elections from 1876 to 1892. Virtually all were white males. Women could vote in national elections only

THE VOTING PUBLIC Between 1860 and 1910 the population and the number of eligible voters increased nearly threefold. As reforms of the early twentieth century reduced the power of polit- ical machines and parties, the percentage of voter participation actually declined.

1009080706050403020100 Number of people (millions)

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Eligible votersVoter participation

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“redeemed” them from Republican Reconstruction, and championed white supremacy. Republicans dom- inated the North with strong support from industry and business. They, too, invoked memories of the Civil War to secure voters, black as well as white. “Not every Democrat was a rebel,” they chanted, “but every rebel was a Democrat.”

Ethnicity and religion also cemented voter loyalty. Republicans drew on old-stock Protestants, who feared new immigrants and put their faith in promoting pious behavior. In the Republican Party they found support for immigration restriction, prohibition, and English-only schools. The Democratic Party attracted urban political machines, their immigrant voters, and the working poor. Often Catholic, they saw salvation in following religious rituals, not in dictating the conduct of all society. Year after year these cultural loyalties of region, religion, and ethnicity shaped political allegiances.

Outside the two-party system impassioned reform- ers often fashioned political instruments of their own. Some formed groups that aligned themselves behind issues rather than parties. Opponents of alcohol created the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (1874) and the Anti-Saloon League (1893). Champions of wom- en’s rights joined the National American Woman Suf- frage Association (1890), a reunion of two branches of the women’s suffrage movement that had split in 1869.

Third political parties might also crystallize around a single concern or a particular group. Those who sought inflation of the currency formed the Greenback Party (1874). Angry farmers in the West and South created the Populist, or People’s, Party (1892). All drew supporters from both conventional parties, but as single-interest groups they mobilized minorities, not majorities.

The Issues  >>   In the halls of Congress atten- tion focused on well-worn issues: veterans’ benefits, appointments, tariffs, and money. The presidency had been weakened by the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, the scandals of Ulysses S. Grant, and the contested victory of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876. Thus Congress enjoyed the initiative in making policy.

Some divisive issues were the bitter legacy of the Civil War. Republicans and Democrats waved sym- bolic “bloody shirts,” each tarring the other with responsibility for the war. The politics of the Civil War also surfaced in the lobbying efforts of veterans. The Grand Army of the Repub- lic, an organization of more than 400,000 Union soldiers, petitioned Congress for pensions to make up for poor wartime pay and to support the widows and orphans of fallen comrades. By the turn of the cen- tury Union army veterans and their fam- ilies were receiving $157 million annually. It was one of the largest public assistance

programs in American history and laid the founda- tion for the modern welfare state.

More important than public welfare was the campaign for a new method of staffing federal offices. From barely 53,000 employees at the end of the Civil War, the federal government had mushroomed to 166,000 by the early 1890s, with far more jobs requir- ing special skills. But dismantling the reigning “spoils system” proved difficult for politicians who rewarded faithful supporters with government jobs regardless of their qualifications. American politics rested on this patronage. Without it, politicians—from presidents to lowly ward captains—feared that they could attract neither workers nor money.

It took the assassination of President James Garfield by a frustrated office seeker in 1881 to move Congress to action. Enacted in 1883 the Civil Service Act, or Pendleton Act, created a bipartisan civil ser- vice commission to administer competitive examina- tions for some federal jobs. Later presidents expanded the jobs covered. By 1896 almost half of all federal workers came under civil service jurisdiction.

The protective tariff also aroused Congress. As promoters of economic growth, Republicans usually championed this tax on manufactured imports. Demo- crats, with their strength in the agrarian South, gener- ally sought tariff reduction to encourage foreign trade, reduce prices on manufactured goods, and cut the federal surplus. In 1890, when Republicans controlled the House, Congress passed the McKinley Tariff. It raised schedules to an all-time high. The McKinley Tariff also contained a novel twist called “reciprocity” designed to promote freer trade. The president could lower rates if certain countries did the same.

Just as divisive was the issue of currency. Until the mid-1800s money was coined from both gold and sil- ver. The need for more money during the Civil War had led Congress to issue “greenbacks”—currency printed on paper with a green back. For the next decade and a half, Americans argued over whether to print more paper

Does government work more effectively when one

party controls both the presidency and the Congress?

Opinion

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against Democrat Grover Cleveland, the former gov- ernor of New York. Despite superb talents as a leader and vote-getter, Blaine was haunted by old charges of illegal favoritism for the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad. For his part, “Grover the Good” had built a reputation for honesty by fighting corruption and the spoils system in New York. So hard a worker was the portly Cleveland, sighed a reporter, that he “remains within doors constantly, eats and works, eats and works, and works and eats.” The bachelor Cleveland spent enough time away from his desk to father an illegitimate child. The campaign rang with Republican taunts of “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?”

In the last week of the tight race, the Irish vote in New York swung to the Democrats when a local Protestant minister labeled them the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” (alcohol, Catholicism, and the Civil War). New York went to Cleveland, and with it, the election. Democrats crowed with delight over where to find the bachelor “pa”: “Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!”

Cleveland was the first Democrat elected to the White House since James Buchanan in 1856, and he was more active than many of his predecessors. He pleased reformers by expanding the civil service. His devotion to gold, economy, and efficiency earned him praise from business. He supported the growth of federal power by endorsing the Interstate Commerce Act (1887), new agricultural research, and federal arbitration of labor disputes. Still, his activism remained limited. He vetoed two of every three bills brought to him, more than twice the number vetoed by all his predecessors. Toward the end of his term, embarrassed by the large federal sur- plus, Cleveland finally reasserted himself by attack- ing the tariff, but the Republican-controlled Senate blocked his attempt to lower it.

money (not backed by gold or silver) or take it out of circulation. Farmers and other debtors favored green- backs as a way of inflating prices, which would have the effect of reducing the real cost of their debts. For the opposite reasons, bankers and creditors stood for “sound money” backed by gold. Fear of inflation led Congress first to cut the number of greenbacks and then in 1879 to make all remaining paper money convertible into gold.

A more heated battle was developing over silver- backed money. By the early 1870s so little silver was being used that Congress stopped coining it. A silver mining boom in Nevada soon revived demands for more silver money. In 1878 the Bland-Allison Act inaugu- rated a limited form of silver coinage. But pressure for unlimited coinage of silver—coining all silver presented at U.S. mints—mounted as silver production quadru- pled between 1870 and 1890. In 1890 pressure for silver peaked in the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. It obli- gated the government to buy 4.5 million ounces of sil- ver every month. Paper tender called “treasury notes,” redeemable in either gold or silver, would pay for it. The compromise satisfied both sides only temporarily.

The White House from Hayes to Harrison >>  From the 1870s through the 1890s a string of nearly anonymous presidents presided over the country. Not all were mere caretakers. Some tried to revive the office, but Congress continued to rein in the executive.

Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was the first of the “Ohio dynasty,” which included three presidents from 1876 to 1900. Once elected, Hayes moved quickly to end Reconstruction and tried unsuccessfully to woo southern Democrats with promises of economic support. His pur- suit of civil service reform ended only in splitting his party between “Stalwarts” (who favored the spoils sys- tems) and “Half-Breeds” (who opposed it). Hayes left office after a single term, relieved to be “out of a scrape.”

In 1880 Republican James Garfield, another Ohioan, succeeded Hayes by a handful of votes. He spent his first hundred days in the White House besieged by office hunters and failing to placate the rival sections of his party. After Garfield’s assassina- tion only six months into his term, Chester A. Arthur, the “spoilsman’s spoilsman,” became president.

To everyone’s surprise the dapper Arthur turned out to be an honest president who broke with machine poli- ticians. He worked to lower the tariff, warmly endorsed the new Civil Service, or Pendleton, Act, and reduced the federal surplus by beginning construction of a mod- ern navy. Such evenhanded administration left him little chance for renomination by divided party leaders.

The election of 1884 was one of the dirtiest ever waged. Senator James Blaine, the beloved “Plumed Knight” from Maine and leader of the Half-Breeds, ran

>> A Chinese laborer, holding his queue of long hair, proudly displays patches in support of the 1888 Democratic presiden- tial candidate, Grover Cleveland, and his running mate, Allen B. Thurman. Cleveland and Thurman lost to Benjamin Harrison and Levi P. Morton, a wealthy New York banker. After his victory, Harrison, a pious Presbyterian, grabbed the hand of Senator Matthew Quay and crowed, “Providence has given us the victory.” “Providence hadn’t a damn thing to do with it,” Quay said later, irked that Harrison seemed to have no idea how many Republicans “were compelled to approach the gates of the peniten- tiary to make him President.”

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the new industrial order mounted closer to home, in state and city governments. Experimental and often effective, state programs at least began to grapple with the problems of corporate power, discriminatory rail- road rates, political corruption, and urban disorder.

Starting in 1869 with Massachusetts, states estab- lished commissions to investigate and regulate indus- try, especially railroads, America’s first big business. By the turn of the century almost two-thirds of the states had them. The first commissions gathered and publicized information on shipping rates and business practices and furnished advice about public policy but had little power.

In the Midwest, on the Great Plains, and in the Far West, merchants and farmers pressed state govern- ments to reduce railroad rates and stop the rebates given to large shippers. On the West Coast and in the Midwest, state legislatures empowered commissions to end rebates and monitor rates. In 1870 Illinois became the first of several states to define railroads as public highways subject to public regulation, including setting maximum rates.

In 1888 Republicans nominated a sturdy defender of tariffs, Benjamin Harrison, the grandson of President

William Henry Harrison. Cleveland won a plurality of the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College. The “human iceberg” (as Harri- son’s colleagues called him) worked hard, rarely del- egated management, and turned the White House into

a well-run office. He helped to shape the Sherman Sil- ver Purchase Act (1890), kept abreast of the McKinley Tariff (1890), and accepted the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) to limit the size of big businesses.

By the end of Harrison’s term in 1892 Congress had completed its most productive session of the era, including the first billion-dollar peacetime budget. To Democratic jeers of a “Billion Dollar Congress,” Republican House Speaker Thomas Reed shot back, “This is a billion-dollar country!”

Ferment in the States and Cities >>  Despite growing expenditures and more legislation, most peo- ple expected little from the federal government. Few newspapers even bothered to send correspondents to Washington. Public pressure to curb the excesses of

plurality in elections, a can- didate who receives a plu- rality wins more votes than any other candidate but less than half of all votes cast. Receiving more than half of the votes cast is called a majority.

̂̂ Mary Shelley’s novel of a man-made creature who turns against its creator strikes the theme for this antirailroad cartoon titled “The American Frankenstein” (1874). “Agriculture, commerce, and manufacture are all in my power,” bellows the mechanical monster with the head of a locomotive.

✔ R E V I E W What factors led to the paralysis of politics in the late nineteenth century?

THE REVOLT OF THE FARMERS

In 1890 the politics of stalemate cracked as the patience of farmers across the South and the western plains finally gave out. Beginning in the 1880s a sharp depression drove down agricultural prices, pushed up surpluses, and forced thousands from their land. Farmers also suffered from a great deal more, includ- ing heavy mortgages, widespread poverty, and railroad rates that discriminated against them. In 1890 their

resentment boiled over. An agrarian revolt—called Populism —swept across the political landscape and broke the stalemate of the previous 20 years.

The Harvest of Discontent  >>   The revolt of the farmers stirred first on the southern frontier, spreading eastward from Texas through the rest of the Old Confederacy, then west across the plains. Farmers blamed their troubles on obvious inequalities: man- ufacturers protected by the tariff, railroads charg- ing sky-high rates, bankers who held their mounting

Populism political outlook that supports the rights and powers of the common people in opposition to the interests of the privileged elite.

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charges of intermediaries. By the early 1870s they also were lobbying midwestern legislatures to adopt “Granger laws” regulating rates charged by railroads, grain elevator operators, and other intermediaries.

Eight “Granger cases” came before the Supreme Court in the 1870s to test the new regulatory mea- sures. The most important of them, Munn v. Illinois (1877), upheld the right of Illinois to regulate private property (in this case, giant elevators used for stor- ing grain) “devoted to a public use.” Later decisions allowed state regulation of railroads but only within state lines. Congress responded in 1887 by creating the Interstate Commerce Commission, a federal agency to regulate commerce across state boundaries. In practice, it had little power, but it was a key step toward estab- lishing the public right to regulate private corporations.

Slumping prices in the 1870s and 1880s bred new farm organizations. Slowly they blended into what the press called the “Alliance Movement.” The South- ern Alliance, formed in Texas in 1875, spread rap- idly after Dr. Charles W. Macune took command in 1886. A doctor and lawyer as well as a farmer, Macune planned to expand the state’s network of local chap- ters, or sub-alliances, into a national network of state Alliance exchanges. Like the Grangers the exchanges pooled their resources in cooperatively owned enter- prises for buying and selling, milling and storing, banking and manufacturing.

Soon the Southern Alliance was publicizing its activities in local newspapers, publishing a journal, and sending lecturers across the country. For a brief period, between 1886 and 1892, the Alliance coopera- tives multiplied throughout the South, grew to more than a million members, and challenged accepted ways of doing business. Macune claimed that his new Texas Exchange saved members 40 percent on plows and 30 percent on wagons. But most Alliance cooperatives were managed by farmers without the time or experi- ence to succeed. Usually opposed by irate local mer- chants, the ventures eventually failed.

Although the Southern Alliance admitted no African Americans, it encouraged them to organize. A small group of black and white Texans founded the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union in 1886. By 1891 a quarter of a million black farmers had joined. Its operations were largely secret, since public action often brought swift retaliation from white supremacists. When the Colored Farm- ers’ Alliance organized a strike of black cotton pickers near Memphis in 1891, white mobs hunted down and lynched 15 strikers. The murders went unpunished, and the Colored Alliance began to founder.

The Alliance Peaks >>   The key to success for what soon became known as the National Farm- ers’ Alliance lay not in organization but leadership.

debts, and expensive intermediaries such as grain ele- vator operators and millers who stored and processed farm commodities. All seemed to profit at the expense of farmers.

The true picture was more complex. The tariff protected industrial goods but also supported some farm commodities. Railroad rates, however high, actually fell from 1865 to 1890. And although mort- gages were heavy, most were short, no more than four years. Farmers often refinanced them, using the money to buy more land and machinery, which only increased their debt. Millers and operators of grain elevators earned handsome profits; yet every year more of them came under state regulation.

In hard times, when debts mounted and children went hungry, complexity mattered little. And in the South many poor farmers seemed condemned to hard times forever. A credit crunch lay at the root of the problem, since most southern farmers had to borrow money to plant and harvest their crops. The inequi- ties of sharecropping and the crop-lien system forced them deeper into debt. When crop prices fell, farmers borrowed still more, stretching the financial resources of the South beyond their meager limits. Within a few years after the Civil War, Massachusetts’s banks had five times as much money as all the banks of the Old Confederacy.

Beginning in the 1870s, nearly 100,000 debt-ridden farmers a year picked up stakes across the Deep South and fled to Texas to escape the system, only to find it waiting for them. Others stood and fought, as one pamphlet exhorted in 1889, “not with glittering mus- ket, flaming sword and deadly cannon, but with the silent, potent and all-powerful ballot.”

The Origins of the Farmers’ Alliance  >>   Before farmers could vote together, they had to get together. Life on the farm was harsh, drab, and iso- lated. Such conditions shocked Oliver Hudson Kelley as he traveled across the South after the Civil War. In 1867 the young government clerk founded the Patrons of Husbandry to brighten the lives of farmers and broaden their horizons. Local chapters, called granges, brought a dozen or so farmers and their families together to pray, sing, and learn new farming tech- niques. The Grangers sponsored fairs, picnics, dances, lectures—anything to break the bleakness of farm life. After a slow start the Patrons of Husbandry grew quickly. By 1875 there were 800,000 members in 20,000 locales, most in the Midwest, South, and Southwest.

At first the Grangers swore off politics. But in a pattern often repeated, socializing led to a recogni- tion of common problems and recognition to economic and then political solutions. By pooling their money for supplies and equipment to store and market their crops, for example, Grangers sought to avoid the high

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make government more responsive to the public. The most innovative feature came from Charles Macune. His “subtreasury system” would have required the federal government to furnish warehouses for har- vested crops and low-interest loans to tide farmers over until prices rose. Under such a system farmers would no longer have had to sell in a glutted mar- ket, as they did under the crop-lien system. And they could expand the money supply simply by borrowing at harvest time.

In the off-year elections of 1890 the old parties faced hostile farmers across the nation. In the South, the Alliance worked within the Democratic Party and elected 4 governors, won 8 legislatures, and sent 44 members of the House and 3 senators to Washington. Newly created farmer parties elected 5 representatives and 2 senators in Kansas and South Dakota and took over both houses of the Nebraska legislature.

In February 1892, as the presidential election year opened, a convention of 900 labor, feminist, farm, and other reform delegates (100 of them black) met in St. Louis. They founded the People’s, or Populist, Party and called for another convention to nominate a presi- dential ticket. Initially southern Populists held back, clinging to their strategy of working within the Demo- cratic Party. But when newly elected Democrats failed to support Alliance programs, southern leaders such as Tom Watson of Georgia abandoned the Democrats and began recruiting black and white farmers for the Populists. Although a wealthy farmer, Watson sym- pathized with the poor of both races.

The national convention of Populists met in Omaha, Nebraska, on Independence Day, 1892. Their impassioned platform promised to return government “to the hands of ‘the plain people.’” Planks advo- cated the subtreasury plan, unlimited coinage of silver and an increase in the money supply, direct election of senators, an income tax, and government owner- ship of railroads, telegraph, and telephone. To attract wage earners the party endorsed the eight-hour workday, restriction of immigration, and a ban on the use of Pinkerton detectives in labor disputes—for the Pinkertons had engaged in a savage gun battle with strikers that year at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead Steel Plant. Delegates rallied behind the old green- backer and Union general James B. Weaver, care- fully balancing their presidential nomination with a one-legged Confederate veteran as his running mate.

The Election of 1892  >>   The Populists enliv- ened the otherwise dull campaign, as Democrat Grover Cleveland and Republican incumbent Benjamin Harrison refought the election of 1888. This time, however, Cleve- land won, and for the first time since the Civil War, Democrats gained control of both houses of Congress. The Populists, too, enjoyed success. Weaver polled over

Alliance lecturers fanned out across the South and the Great Plains, organizing sub-alliances and teaching new members about finance and cooperative busi- nesses. Women were often as active as men, sometimes more active. In the summer of 1890 alone, Alliance organizer Mary Elizabeth Lease, the “Kansas Pytho- ness” known for her biting attacks on big business, gave 160 speeches.

In 1890 members of the Alliance met in Ocala, Florida, and issued the “Ocala Demands.” The mani- festo reflected their deep distrust of “the money power”—large corporations and banks whose financial power gave them the ability to manipulate the “free” market. The Ocala Demands called on government to correct such abuses by reducing tariffs, abolishing national banks, regulating railroads, and coining silver money freely. The platform also demanded a federal income tax and the popular election of senators, to

̂̂ This illustration by artist W. W. Denslow, titled “You Ought to Be Ashamed of Yourself,” is from The Wonderful Wizard of OZ, pub- lished in 1900 by L. Frank Baum. It was the first of 14 best-selling books on the mythical land. Although Baum claimed only to be tell- ing children’s stories, some readers have found a symbolic resem- blance to the Populist politics of the day. The “yellow brick road” is the gold standard, they say, leading to a place of false promises (the Emerald City of Oz) under the spell of a bellowing politician (the Wizard), who is exposed by the Scarecrow (farmers), the Tin Man (laborers), and the Lion (the Populists).

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But in 1893 the cost of interdependence came due. A major downturn in one area affected the other sectors of the economy. And with no way to control swings in the business cycle, depression came on a scale as large as that of the booming prosperity. Out of the crisis emerged a new realignment that left the Repub- lican Party in control of national politics for decades to come.

The Depression of 1893  >>   The depression of 1893, the deepest the nation had yet experienced, lasted until 1897. Railroad baron and descendant of two presidents Charles Francis Adams Jr. called it a “convulsion,” but the country experienced it as crush- ing idleness. By the end of 1894 nearly one worker in five was out of a job.

The federal government had no program to deal with unemployment. “While the people should patriotically and cheerfully support their Government,” President Cleveland declared, “its functions do not include the support of the people.” The states offered little more. Relief, like poverty, was considered a private matter.

a million votes, the first third-party candidate to do so. Populists elected 3 governors, 5 senators, 10 representa- tives, and nearly 1,500 members of state legislatures.

Despite these victories the election revealed dan- gerous weaknesses in the People’s Party. No doubt a campaign of intimidation and repression hurt the People’s Party in the South, where white conservatives had been appalled by Tom Watson’s open courtship of black southerners. In the North, Populists failed to win over labor and most city dwellers. Both were more concerned with family budgets than with the problems of farmers and the downtrodden.

The darker side of Populism also put off many Americans. Its rhetoric was often violent and laced with anti-immigrant, nativist slurs; it spoke ominously of conspiracies and stridently in favor of immigration restriction. In fact the Alliance lost members, an omen of defeats to come. But for the present the People’s Party had demonstrated two conflicting truths: how far from the needs of many ordinary Americans the two parties had drifted, and how difficult it would be to break their power.

✔ R E V I E W How did the National Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party attempt to resolve the problems faced by farmers?

THE NEW REALIGNMENT

On May 1, 1893, President Cleveland was in Chicago to throw the switch that set ablaze 10,000 electric bulbs and opened the World’s Columbian Exposition. Four days later a wave of bankruptcies destroyed major firms across the country, and stock prices sank to all- time lows, setting off the depression of 1893.

At first Chicago staved off the worst, thanks to the business generated by the exposition. But when its doors closed in October, thousands of laborers found themselves out of work. Chicago’s mayor estimated the number of unemployed in the city to be near 200,000. He had some firsthand experience on which to base his calculations. Every night desperate men slept on the floors and stairways of City Hall and every police sta- tion in the city put up 60 to 100 additional homeless.

The sharp contrast between the exposition’s White City and the nation’s economic misery demonstrated the inability of the political system to smooth out the economy’s cycle of boom and bust. The new industrial order had brought prosperity by increasing production, opening markets, and tying Americans closer together.

̂̂ The political and social turbulence of the era is reflected in this cartoon of a businessman being tossed and buffeted by agrarian Populists and “silverites” as well as Republicans and Democrats.

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W H AT S H O U L D T H E G O V E R N M E N T D O ? In 1887 President Grover Cleveland vetoed the “Texas Seed Bill,” legislation designed to aid drought-stricken Texas farmers through the natural disaster (Document 1). Four years later, Nebraska farmer W. M. Taylor made a desperate plea for help in the face of natural and man-made disasters (Document 2).

Dueling D O C U M E N T S

D O C U M E N T 1 President Grover Cleveland: Government Should Not Help Individuals

It is represented that a long-continued and extensive drought has existed in cer- tain portions of the State of Texas, result- ing in a failure of crops and consequent distress and destitution. Though there has been some difference in statements concerning the extent of the people’s needs in the localities thus affected, there seems to be no doubt that there has existed a condition calling for relief; and I am willing to believe that, notwithstand- ing the aid already furnished, a donation of seed grain to the farmers located in this region, to enable them to put in new crops, would serve to avert a continuance or return of an unfortunate blight.

And yet I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan as proposed by this bill, to indulge a benevolent and chari- table sentiment through the appropriation of public funds for that purpose.

I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think be steadfestly resisted, to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the govern- ment, the government should not support the people.

The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow citizens in misfortune. This has been repeatedly and quite lately demonstrated. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and

weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood.

It is within my personal knowledge that individual aid has, to some extent, already been extended to the sufferers mentioned in this bill. The failure of the proposed appropriation of $10,000 additional to meet their remaining wants, will not necessarily result in continued distress if the emergency is fully made known to the people of the country.

It is here suggested that the Commis- sioner of Agriculture is annually directed to expend a large sum of money for the purchase, propagation, and distribution of seeds and other things of this description, two-thirds of which are, upon the request of senators, representatives, and delegates

The burden fell on local charities, benevolent societies, churches, labor unions, and ward bosses.

Others were less charitable. As the popular preacher Henry Ward Beecher told his congregation what most Americans believed: “No man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault—unless it be his sin.” But the scale of hardship was so great, its targets so random, that anyone could be thrown out of work—an industrious neighbor, a factory foreman with 20 years on the job, a bank president. Older attitudes about personal responsibility for poverty began to give way to new ideas about its social origins and the obli- gation of public agencies to help.

The Rumblings of Unrest  >>   Even before the depression, rumblings of unrest had begun to roll across the country. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 ignited nearly two decades of labor strife. After 1893 discontent mounted as wages were cut, employees laid off, and factories closed. During the first year of the depression, 1,400 strikes sent more than half a million workers from their jobs.

Uneasy business executives and politicians saw radicalism and the possibility of revolution in every strike. But the depression of 1893 unleashed another force: simple discontent. In the spring of 1894 gov- ernment inaction came under fire. On Easter Sun- day “General” Jacob Coxey, a 39-year-old Populist and factory owner, launched the “Tramps’ March on Washington” from Massillon, Ohio. His “Common- weal Army of Christ”—some 500 men, women, and children—descended on Washington to offer “a peti- tion with boots on” for a federal program of public works. Cleveland’s staff tightened security around the White House as other “armies” of unemployed mobi- lized. On May 1, Coxey’s troops, armed with “clubs of peace,” massed at the foot of the Capitol. When Coxey entered the Capitol grounds, 100 mounted police routed the demonstrators and arrested the gen- eral for trespassing on the grass. Nothing came of the protest, other than to signal a growing demand for federal action.

Federal help was not to be found. President Cleve- land had barely moved into the White House when

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| THE NEW REALIGNMENT | 427

D O C U M E N T 2 W. M. Taylor: Farmers’ Problems Are Beyond Their Control

This season is without a parallel in this part of the country. The hot winds burned up the entire crop, leaving thousands of families wholly destitute, many of whom might have been able to run through this crisis had it not been for the galling yoke put on them by the money loaners and sharks—not by charging 7 percent per annum, which is the lawful rate of inter- est of even 10 per cent but the unlawful and inhuman country destroying rate of 3 per cent a month, some going still far- ther and charging 50 per cent per annum. We are cursed, many of us financially, beyond redemption, not by the hot winds so much as by the swindling game of the bankers and money loaners, who have taken the money and now are after the property, leaving the farmer moneyless

and homeless. . . . I have borrowed for example $1,000. I pay $25 besides to the commission man. I give my note and sec- ond mortgage of 3 per cent of the $1,000 which is $30 more. Then I pay 7 per cent on the $1,000 to the actual loaner. Then besides all this I pay for appraising the land, abstract, recording, etc., so when I have secured my loan I am out the first year $150. Yet I am told by the agent who loans me the money, he can’t stand to loan at such low rates. This is on the farm, but now come the chattel loan. I must have $50 to save myself. I get the money; my note is made payable in thirty or sixty days for $35, secured by chattel of two horses, harness and wagon about five times the value of the note. The time comes to pay, I ask for a few days. No I

can’t wait; must have the money. If I can’t get the money. I have the extreme plea- sure of seeing my property taken end sold by this iron handed money loaner while my family and I suffer.

Source: W. M. Taylor to editor, Farmer’s Alliance (Lincoln), January 10, 1891, Nebraska Historical Society, reprinted in Robert D. Marcus and David Burner, eds., America Firsthand, Vol. II (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), p. 90.

T H I N K I N G C R I T I C A L LY How does President Cleveland justify his veto of the “Texas Seed Bill”? What, in his view, is the role of the federal government in times of disaster? What problems does the farmer face? How would President Cleveland have responded to the farmer’s letter?

in Congress, supplied to them for distribu- tion among their constituents.

The appropriation of the current year for this purpose is $100,000, and it will probably be no less in the appro- priation for the ensuing year. I under- stand that a large quantity of grain is furnished for such distribution, and it is supposed that this free apportionment

among their neighbors is a privilege which may be waived by our senators and representatives.

If sufficient of them should request the Commissioner of Agriculture to send their shares of the grain thus allowed them, to the suffering farmers of Texas, they might be enabled to sow their crops; the constituents, for whom in theory this

grain is intended could well bear the tem- porary deprivation, and the donors would experience the satisfaction attending deeds of charity.

Source: President Grover Cleveland Vetoes Disaster Relief Legislation, February 16, 1887, reprinted in J. F. Watts and Fred Israel, eds., Presidential Documents: The Speeches, Proclamations, and Policies That Have Shaped the Nation from Washington to Clinton (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 164–165.

the depression struck. The country blamed him; he blamed silver. In his view the Sherman Silver Pur- chase Act of 1890 had shaken business confidence by forcing the government to use its shrinking reserves of gold to purchase (though not coin) silver. Repeal of the act, Cleveland believed, was the way to build gold reserves and restore confidence. After bitter debate, Congress complied. But this economic tinkering only strengthened the resolve of “silverites” in the Demo- cratic Party to overwhelm Cleveland’s conservative “gold” wing.

Worse for the president, repeal of silver pur- chases brought no economic revival. In the short run, abandoning silver hurt the economy by contract- ing the money supply just when expansion might have stimulated it by providing needed credit. As panic and unemployment spread across the country, Cleveland’s popularity wilted. Democrats were bur- ied in the congressional elections of 1894. Dropping moralistic reforms and stressing national activism, Republicans won control of both the House and the Senate.

With the Democrats confined to the South, the politics of stalemate was over. All that remained for the Republican Party was to capture the White House in 1896.

The Battle of the Standards >>  The campaign of 1896 quickly became a “battle of the standards.” Both major parties obsessed over whether gold alone or gold and silver should become the monetary stan- dard. Most Republicans saw gold as the stable base for building business confidence and economic prosperity. They adopted a platform calling for “sound money” supported by gold. Their candidate, Governor William McKinley of Ohio, cautiously supported the gold plank and firmly believed in high tariffs to protect American industry.

Silverites campaigned for “free and independent” coinage of silver, in which the Treasury freely minted all the silver presented to it, independent of other nations. The supply of money would increase, prices would rise, and the economy would revive—or so their theory said. The free silver movement was more than

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crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” The next day the convention nominated him for the presidency.

Populists were in a quandary. They expected the Democrats to stick with Cleveland and gold, sending unhappy silverites headlong into their camp. Instead, the Democrats stole their thun- der by endorsing silver and nominating Bryan. “If we fuse [with the Democrats] we are sunk,” complained one Populist. “If we don’t fuse, all the silver men we have will leave us for the more power- ful Democrats.” At a bitter convention fusionists nominated Bryan for president. The best antifusionists could do was drop the Democrats’ vice presidential candi- date in favor of the fiery agrarian rebel from Georgia, Tom Watson.

Campaign and Election >>  Bryan knew he faced an uphill battle. Mount- ing an aggressive campaign that would be imitated in the future, he traveled 18,000 miles by train, gave as many as 30 speeches a day, and reached perhaps

3 million people in 27 states. The nomination of the People’s Party actually did more harm than good by labeling Bryan a Populist (which he was not) and a radical (which he definitely was not). Devoted to the “plain people,” the Great Commoner spoke for rural America and Jeffersonian values: small farmers, small towns, small government.

McKinley knew he could not compete with Bry- an’s barnstorming. He contented himself with sedate speeches from his front porch in Canton, Ohio. The folksy appearance of the campaign belied its real- ity. From the beginning, campaign strategist Marcus Alonzo Hanna, a talented Ohio industrialist, relied on modern techniques of organization and marketing. He advertised McKinley, said Theodore Roosevelt, “as if he were patent medicine.” The well-financed campaign brought to Canton tens of thousands, who cheered the candidate’s promises of a “full dinner pail.” Hanna also saturated the country with millions of leaflets, along with 1,400 speakers attacking free trade and free silver. McKinley won in a walk, amassing the first majority of the popular vote since Ulysses S. Grant in 1872.

The election proved to be one of the most criti- cal in the Republic’s history. 1 Over the previous three decades, political life had been characterized by vibrant

a monetary theory. It was a symbolic protest of region and class—of the agricultural South and West against the commercial Northeast, of debt-ridden farm folk against industrialists and financiers, of have-nots against haves. Silverites pressed their case like preach- ers exhorting their flocks, nowhere more effectively than in William Harvey’s best-selling pamphlet, Coin’s Financial School (1894). It reached tens of thousands of readers with the common sense of Coin, its young hero, fighting for silver.

At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska was ready to fight as well. Just 36 years old, Bryan looked “like a young divine”—“tall, slender, handsome,” with a rich melodic voice that reached the back rows of the largest halls (no small asset in the days before electric amplification). He had served two terms in Congress and worked as a journalist. He favored low tariffs, opposed Cleveland, and came out belatedly for free silver. Systematically, he coordinated a quiet fight for his nomination.

Silverites controlled the convention from the start. They paraded with silver banners, wore silver buttons, and wrote a plank into the anti-Cleveland platform calling for free and unlimited coinage of the metal. The high point came when Bryan stepped to the lectern and offered himself to “a cause as holy as the cause of liberty—the cause of humanity.” The crowd was in a near frenzy as he reached the dramatic climax and spread his arms in mock crucifixion: “You shall not

̂̂ William Jennings Bryan made the first of his three presidential bids in 1896, when he ran on both the Democratic and Populist tickets. Passionate in his convictions and devoted to the “plain people,” the “Great Commoner” is depicted in this hostile car- toon as a Populist snake devouring the Democratic Party.

1Five elections, in addition to the contest of 1896, are often cited as critical shifts in voter allegiance and party alignments: the Fed- eralist defeat of 1800, Andrew Jackson’s rise in 1828, Lincoln’s Republican triumph of 1860, Al Smith’s Democratic loss in 1928, and—perhaps—Ronald Reagan’s conservative tide of 1980.

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William McKin ley

(Republican)

271 (61)

7,108,480 (52)

William Jennin gs Bryan

(Democrat)

176 (39)

6,511,495 (48)

Nonvoting terr itories

Candidate (Par ty) Elect

oral Vote (%) Popular Vote (%

)

64 4

15

46 36

32 10 3

8126 23

14

15

12 1

12 11

9 13

4

9

9

8

17

24

15

9

8

4

3 9

12

13

3

3

4

3

4

4

3

8 3

11 11

| THE NEW REALIGNMENT | 429

As the century drew to a close, long- standing racialism—categorizing people on the basis of race—deepened. The arrival of “new” immi- grants from eastern and southern Europe and the acquisition of new overseas colonies encouraged prejudices that stridently rationalized white supremacy, segregation and other forms of racial control (page 357). In the South racism was enlisted in a political purpose: preventing an alliance of poor blacks and whites that might topple white conservative Democrats. So the white supremacy campaign was coupled with another, a drive to deprive poor southern- ers of their right to vote. Ostensibly directed at African Americans, these campaigns also had a broader target in the world of politics: rebellion from below, whether black or white.

Mississippi, where Democrats had led the move to “redeem” their state from Republi- can Reconstruction, in 1890 took the lead in disenfranchising African Americans. A new state constitution required voters to pay a poll tax and pass a literacy test, require- ments that eliminated the great majority of black voters. Conservative Democrats

favored the plan, because it also reduced the voting of poor whites, who were most likely to join opposition parties. Before the new constitution went into effect, Mississippi contained more than 250,000 eligible vot- ers. By 1892, after its adoption, there were fewer than 77,000. Between 1895 and 1908, disenfranchisement campaigns won out in every southern state, barring many poor whites from the polls as well.

The disenfranchisement campaign had one final consequence: splitting rebellious whites from blacks, as the fate of Tom Watson demonstrated. Only a dozen years after his biracial campaign of 1892, Watson was promoting black disenfranchisement in Georgia. Like other southern Populists, Watson returned to the Democratic Party still hoping to help poor whites. But he turned against black southerners. Only by playing a powerful race card could he hope to win election. “What does civilization owe the negro?” he asked bit- terly. “Nothing! Nothing!! NOTHING!!! ” In 1920, after a decade of baiting blacks (as well as Catholics and Jews), the Georgia firebrand was elected to the Senate. Watson, who began with such high racial ideals, gained power only by abandoning them.

The African American Response  >>   To mount a successful crusade for disenfranchisement, white conservatives inflamed racial passions. They staged “White Supremacy Jubilees” and peppered newspaper editorials with complaints of “bump- tious” and “impudent” African Americans. The number of black lynchings by whites peaked during

campaigns, slim party margins, high voter turnout, and low-profile presidents. The election of 1896 signaled a new era of dwindling party loyalties and voter turnout, stronger presidents, and Republican rule. McKinley’s victory broke the political stalemate and forged a pow- erful coalition that dominated politics for the next 30 years. It rested on the industrial cities of the North- east and Midwest and combined old support from busi- nesses, farmers, and Union Army veterans with broader backing from industrial wage earners. The Democrats controlled little but the South. And the Populists vir- tually vanished, but not before leaving a compound legacy: as a catalyst for political realignment, a cry for federal action, and a prelude to a new age of reform.

The Rise of Jim Crow Politics  >>   In 1892, despite the stumping of Populists like Tom Watson, African Americans cast their ballots for Republicans, when they were permitted to vote freely. But increas- ingly, their voting rights were being curtailed across the South.

MAP 21.1 : ELECTION OF 1896 The critical election of 1896 established the Republicans as the majority party, ending two decades of political gridlock with a new political realignment. Republican victor William McKinley domi- nated the large industrial cities and states, as the returns of the Electoral College show.

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instead the need for accepting the prevailing frame- work for race relations and working within it. “I love the South,” he reassured an audience of white and black southerners in Atlanta in 1895. He conceded that white prejudice existed throughout the region but nonetheless counseled African Americans to work for their economic betterment through manual labor. Every laborer who learned a trade, every farmer who tilled the land could increase his or her savings. Those earnings amounted to “a little green ballot” that “no one will throw out or refuse to count.” Toward that end, Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1881. It stressed vocational skills for farming, manual trades, and industrial work.

Many white Americans hailed what one black critic called Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise,” for it struck the note of patient humility they were eager to hear. For African Americans, it made the best of a bad situation. Washington, an astute politician, dis- covered that philanthropists across the nation hoped to make Tuskegee an example of their generosity. He was the honored guest of Andrew Carnegie at his imposing Skibo Castle. California railroad magnate Collis Hun- tington became his friend, as did other business exec- utives eager to discuss “public and social questions.”

Throughout, Washington preached accommoda- tion to the racial caste system. He accepted segre- gation (as long as separate facilities were equal) and qualifications on voting (if they applied to white citi- zens as well). Above all, Washington sought economic self-improvement for common black folk in fields and factories. In 1900 he organized the National Negro Business League to help establish black businessmen as the leaders of their people. The rapid growth of local chapters (320 by 1907) extended his influence across the country.

In the “Solid South” (as well as an openly racialized North), it was Washington’s restrained approach that articulated an agenda for most African Americans. The ferment of the early 1890s among black Populists and white was replaced by an all-white Democratic Party that dominated the region for decades to come but remained in the minority on the national level.

McKinley in the White House >>  In William McKinley, Republicans found a skillful chief with a national agenda and personal charm. He cultivated news reporters, openly walked the streets of Washington, and courted the public with handshakes and flowers plucked from his lapel. Firmly but delicately, he curbed the power of state bosses. When necessary, he prodded Congress to action. In all these ways, he foreshadowed “modern” presidents, who would act as party leaders rather than as executive caretakers.

Fortune at first smiled on McKinley. When he entered the White House, the economy had already

the 1890s, averaging over a hundred a year for the decade. Most took place in the South.

Under such circumstances African Americans worked out their own responses to the climate of intolerance. Ida B. Wells, a black woman born into slavery, turned her talents into a nationwide campaign against lynch- ing when a friend and two of his partners in the Peo- ple’s Grocery were brutally murdered after a fight with a white competitor in 1892. She spent much of her time educating Americans about the use of lynching and other forms of mob violence as devices for terrorizing African Americans in the absence of slavery. Though her lobbying failed to produce a federal antilynching law, Wells did help organize black women, eventually into the National Association of Colored Women in 1896. It supported wide-ranging reforms, including education, housing, health care, and, of course, antilynching.

Wells’s campaign focused on mob violence, but another former slave, Booker T. Washington, stressed

̂̂ This black-and-white photo of the charismatic African American activist and educator Booker T. Washington highlights his piercing gray eyes nearly luminous against what one observer described as his “reddish” complexion. Born into slavery, Washington sits here with his legs casually crossed, a literate, well-to-do free man in a suit and tie. (Note the reading material in his lap.) “He wasn’t dark and he wasn’t light,” wrote the composer Zenobia Powell Perry. “I’ll never forget those eyes.” In many ways Washington served as a bridge between white and black worlds and his “in between” complexion may have advanced that role.

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$2,000

1,750

1,500

1,250

1,000

750

250

0

Millions of Dollars

1870 1875 1880 1885 1890 1895 1900 1905 1910

Exports

500

Imports

Imports exceed ExportsImports

exceed Exports

YearYearYear

| VISIONS OF EMPIRE | 431

entered the race in the late nineteenth century. Spain and Portugal still clung to the remnants of their colo- nial empires. Meanwhile, England, France, and Rus- sia accelerated their drive to control foreign peoples and lands. The late nineteenth century became the new age of imperialism because weapons technology and new networks of communication, transportation, and com- merce brought the pros- pect of effective, truly global empires within reach.

The speed and efficiency with which Europeans took over in the Niger and Congo basins of Africa in the 1880s prompted many Americans to argue for this European-style imperialism of conquest and possession. Germany, Japan, and Belgium were eagerly joining the hunt for colonies. But other Americans preferred a more indirect imperialism: one that exported products, ideas, and influence. To them, this American-style imperi- alism seemed somehow purer, for they could portray themselves as bearers of long-cherished values: democ- racy, free-enterprise capitalism, and Christianity.

begun its recovery. Factory orders were slowly increas- ing, and unemployment dropped. Farm prices climbed. New discoveries of gold in Alaska and South Africa expanded the supply of money without causing “gold bugs” to panic that it was being destabilized by silver.

Freed from the burdens of the economic crisis, McKinley called a special session of Congress to revise the tariff. In 1897 the Dingley Tariff raised protec- tive rates still higher but followed the strategy of reci- procity by allowing U.S. tariffs to come down if other nations lowered theirs. McKinley also sought a solution for resolving railroad strikes before they turned vio- lent. The Erdman Act of 1898 set up machinery for government mediation. McKinley even began laying plans for stronger regulation of trusts.

The same expansiveness that had pushed an indus- trial nation across the continent and shipped grain and cotton abroad was also drawing the country into a race for empire and a war with Spain. Regulation—and an age of reform—would have to await the next century. ✔ R E V I E W How did the election of 1896 resolve the “Politics of Stalemate” of the late nineteenth century?

VISIONS OF EMPIRE

The war with Spain was only the affair of the moment that turned American atten- tion abroad. Underlying the conflict were larger forces linking the United States to the world economy and international events. By the 1890s, southern farmers were exporting half their cotton crop to factories worldwide. Western wheat farmers earned some 30 to 40 percent of their income from foreign mar- kets. John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Com- pany shipped about two-thirds of its refined products overseas, and Cyrus McCormick supplied Russian farmers with the reaper.

More than commerce turned American eyes overseas. Since the 1840s, expansionists had spoken of a divine destiny to overspread the North American continent. Some Americans still cast covetous glances at Canada to the north and Mexico and Cuba to the south. And they dreamed of empire in more-distant lands.

Imperialism, European-Style and Ameri- can >>   The scramble for empire was well under way by the time the Americans, Japanese, and Germans

imperialism acquisition of control over the govern- ment and the economy of another nation, usually by conquest.

BALANCE OF U.S. IMPORTS AND EXPORTS, 1870–1910 After the depression of 1893 both imports and exports rose sharply, suggesting one reason why the age of imperialism was so closely linked with the emerging global industrial economy.

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was present at the end of the nineteenth century, the small farmer or steelworker was little concerned with how the United States advanced its goals abroad. An elite group—Christian missionaries, intellectu- als, business leaders, and commercial farmers—joined navy careerists to shape American imperialism. In doing so, they lobbied the White House and Congress, where foreign policy was made, and the State and War Departments, where it was carried out.

The success of imperial ventures depended on a strong navy, whether to project American might

While Americans tried to justify imperial control in the name of such values, social, economic, and politi- cal forces were drawing them rapidly into the imperial race. The growth of industrial networks linked them to international markets as never before. With economic systems more tightly knit and political systems more responsive to industrialists and financiers, a rush for markets and distant lands was perhaps unavoidable.

The Shapers of American Imperialism >>   Although the climate for expansion and imperialism

MAP 21.2 : IMPERIALIST EXPANSION, 1900 Often resource-poor countries such as Great Britain sought colonies for their raw materials—for example, South African diamonds and tin from Southeast Asia. While China appears to be undivided, the major powers were busy establishing spheres of influence there. How did the political map of Africa change between 1878 (see inset) and 1900? Which colonial powers lost and gained the most territory on that continent? What geographic factors explain the location of U.S. possessions abroad?

Silk

Tea Silk

Cotton

Jute

Rubber Tin

Spices

Gold Wool

Dairy

Copper Meat

Gold

Rubber

Diamonds

Rubber

Oil

Tin

DUTCH EAST INDIES

Belgian

British

Dutch

French

German

Italian

Ottoman

Portuguese

Spanish

United States

SAHARA DESERT

KALAHARI DESERT

1878

R U S S I A N E M P I R E

C H I N AOTTOMAN EMPIRE

PERSIA AFGHAN.

INDIA BURMA

EGYPT TRIPOLI

MOROCCO

RIO DE ORO

FRENCH WEST AFRICA

NIGERIA

ANGLO- EGYPTIAN

SUDAN ETHIOPIA

BRITISH EAST AFRICA

SOMALILAND

BELGIAN CONGO

ANGOLA

GERMAN SOUTHWEST

AFRICA

CAPE COLONY

MADAGASCAR

MOZAMBIQUE

F

RE N CH

E Q

. A FR

IC A

GERMAN EAST AFRICA

ARABIA

SIAM FRENCH INDO- CHINA

HONG KONG

PHILIPPINES

A U S T R A L I A

NEW ZEALAND

PA C I F I C I S L A N D S

WAKE ISLAND

MIDWAY ISLAND

HAWAIIAN ISLANDS

JOHNSTON ISLAND

KINGMAN REEF

BAKER ISLAND JARVIS ISLAND

PALMYRA ISLAND

AMERICAN SAMOA

ALEUTIAN ISLANDS

GUAM

A L A S K A

R H

O D

ES IA

Tea

LIBERIA

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̂̂ Missionaries often viewed the Chinese as uncivilized “heathen,” whose souls needed saving and whose culture needed civilizing. This cartoon, published around 1900, pokes fun at the common stereotype by suggesting what the Chinese must think of the American “heathen.” “Contributions Received Here to Save the Foreign Devils,” reads the sign of the Chinese “preacher,” who laments the uncivilized behavior of corrupt American city governments, feuding backwoodsmen, rioting laborers, and mobs tormenting Chinese and black Americans.

Mahan’s logic was so persuasive and the profits to be reaped by American factories so great that in the 1880s Congress launched a program to rebuild the old wood-and-sail navy with steam vessels made of steel. By 1900 the U.S. Navy ranked third in the world. With a modern navy the country had the means to become an imperial power.

Protestant missionaries provided a spiritual rationale that complemented Mahan’s navalism. Because mission- aries often encountered people whose cultural differences made them unreceptive to the Christian message, many believed that the natives first had to become Western in culture before becoming Christian in belief. They intro- duced Western goods, education, and systems of gov- ernment administration—any “civilizing medium,” as one minister remarked. Yet most American missionaries were not territorial imperialists. They eagerly took up what they called the “White Man’s Burden” of intro- ducing civilization to the “colored” races of the world but opposed direct military or political intervention.

From scholars, academics, and scientists came racial theories to justify European and American

abroad or to guard the sea lanes of commerce. But by 1880 the once-proud Civil War fleet of more than 600 warships was rotting from neglect. The U.S. Navy ranked twelfth in the world, behind Denmark and Chile. The United States had a coastal fleet but no functional fleet to protect its interests overseas. Discontented navy officers combined with trade- hungry business leaders to lobby Congress for a modern navy.

Alfred Thayer Mahan, a navy captain and later admiral, formulated their ideas into a widely accepted theory of navalism . In The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), Mahan argued that great nations were seafaring powers that relied on foreign trade for wealth and might. The only way to protect foreign markets, Mahan reasoned, was with large cruisers and battleships. These ships, operating far from American shores, would need coaling stations and other facilities to resupply them throughout the world.

navalism theories of war- fare and trade that rely on a nation’s navy as a princi- pal instrument of policy.

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to markets in the Far East. In pursuit of these goals Seward made two acquisitions in 1867: Midway Island in the Pacific, and Alaska. Midway was unimportant by itself; its value lay in being a way station to Asia not far from Hawai’i, where missionary planters were already establishing an American presence. Critics called Alaska “Seward’s Folly,” but he paid only about 2 cents an acre for a mineral-rich territory twice the size of Texas.

Seward’s conviction that the future of the United States lay in the Pacific and Asia flourished only in the 1890s, when Mahan provided the naval theory nec- essary to make the leap and the vanishing American frontier supplied an economic rationale for extend- ing Manifest Destiny beyond continental borders of the nation. But in the 1880s Secretary of State James G. Blaine began to look for ways to expand American trade and influence southward into Central and South America, where Great Britain had interests of its own to protect.

Blaine launched a campaign to cancel the Clayton- Bulwer Treaty (1850), which shared rights with Great Britain to any canal built in Central America. In 1901 Great Britain finally ceded its interest in building a canal across the Central American isthmus in return for a U.S. promise to leave such a canal open to ships of all nations. Blaine also tried to shift Central American imports from British to U.S. goods by proposing that a “customs union” be created to reduce trade barriers in the Americas. His efforts resulted only in a weak Pan-American Union to foster peaceful understanding in the region.

If American expansionists wanted to extend trade across the Pacific to China, Hawai’i was the cru- cial link. It afforded a fine naval base and a refuel- ing station along the route to Asia. In 1893 American

sugar planters overthrew the recently enthroned Queen Liliuokalani, a Hawaiian nation- alist eager to rid the island of Ameri-

can influence. Their success was ensured when a contingent of U.S.

marines arrived ashore on the pretext of protecting American lives. Eager to avoid the McKinley Tariff’s

new tax on sugar imported into the United States, planters lobbied for

the annexation of Hawai’i, but President Cleveland refused. He was no foe of expansion but was, as his secretary of state noted, “unalterably opposed to stealing territory, or of annexing people against

expansion. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Spe- cies (1859) had popularized the notion that among animal species, the fittest survived through a pro- cess of natural selection. Social Darwinists argued that the same laws of survival governed the social order. When applied aggressively, social Darwinism was used to justify theories of white supremacy as well as the slaughter and enslavement of nonwhite native peo- ples who resisted conquest. When combined with the somewhat more humane “White Man’s Burden” of Christian missionaries, American imperialism included uplifting natives by spreading Western ideas, religion, and government.

Perhaps more compelling than either racial or reli- gious motives for American expansion was the need for trade. The business cycle of boom and bust reminded Americans of the unpredictability of their economy. In hard times people sought salvation wherever they could, and one obvious road to redemption lay in mar- kets abroad. With American companies outgrowing the home market, explained the National Association of Manufacturers, “expansion of our foreign trade is [the] only promise of relief.”

Dreams of a Commercial Empire  >> No one did more to initiate the idea of a “New Empire” of commerce for the United States than William Henry Seward, secretary of state under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. Seward believed that “empire has . . . made its way constantly westward . . . until the tides of the renewed and decaying civi- lizations of the world meet on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.” The United States must thus be prepared to win supremacy in the Far East—not by planting colonies or sending troops but by pursuing commerce. Equal access to foreign markets, often called the “open door,” guided American policy in Asia and made Seward’s strategy truly revolutionary.

While he pursued ties to Japan, Korea, and China, Seward promoted a transcontinen- tal railroad at home and a canal across the Central American isthmus. Link by link, he was trying to con- nect eastern factories to western ports in the United States and, from there,

̂̂ When Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, few people would have thought of it as a weapon of conquest. But when Americans and Europeans brought the machine to less technologically advanced societies, native peoples were awestruck by the sounds it made and sometimes cowed by those who controlled it. These white men, it appeared, had the power to conjure up the voices of invisible speakers and sum- mon music from the air.

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Cabot Lodge urged a more forceful policy. In 1896 they succeeded in writing an imperial wish list into the Republican national platform: annexation of Hawai’i, the construction of a Nicaraguan canal, purchase of the Virgin Islands, and more naval expansion. They also called for recognition of Cuban independence, a step that, if taken, would likely provoke war with Spain. When William McKinley entered the White House, however, his Republican supporters found only a moderate expansionist. Cautiously, privately, he lobbied Spain to stop cracking down on the rebels and destroying American property.

In 1897 Spain promised to remove the much-despised Weyler, end the reconcentration policy, and offer Cuba greater autonomy. The shift encouraged McKinley to resist pressure at home for more hostile action. But leaders of the Spanish army in Cuba had no desire to compromise. Although Weyler was removed the mili- tary renewed efforts to crush the rebels and stirred pro-army riots in the streets of Havana. Early in 1898 McKinley dispatched the battleship Maine to show that the United States meant to protect its interests and its citizens.

Then in February 1898 the State Department received a stolen copy of a letter to Cuba sent by the Spanish minister in Washington, Enrique Dupuy de Lôme. So did William Randolph Hearst, a pioneer of sensational- ist, or “yellow,” journalism who was eager for war with Spain. “ WORST INSULT TO THE UNITED STATES IN ITS HISTORY, ” screamed the headline of Hearst’s New York Journal. What had de Lôme actually written? After referring to McKinley as a mere “would-be politician,” the letter admitted that Spain had no intention of changing its policy of crush- ing the rebels. Red-faced Spanish officials immediately recalled de Lôme, but most Americans now believed that Spain had deceived the United States.

On February 15, 1898, as the Maine lay at anchor in Havana Harbor, explosions ripped through the hull. Within minutes the ship sank to the bottom, kill- ing some 260 American sailors. Much later an offi- cial investigation concluded that the explosion was the result of spontaneous combustion in a coal bun- ker aboard ship. Most Americans at the time, inflamed by hysterical news accounts, concluded that Spanish agents had sabotaged the ship.

Pressures for war proved too great to resist, and on April 11, McKinley asked Congress to autho- rize “forceful intervention” in Cuba. Nine days later Congress recognized Cuban independence, insisted on the withdrawal of Spanish forces, and gave the president authority to use military force. In a flush

their consent, and the people of Hawai’i do not favor annexation.” The idea of incorporating the nonwhite population also troubled Cleveland. For a time, mat- ters stood at a stalemate.

✔ R E V I E W What social, economic, and cultural factors drew the United States into the race for empire?

yellow journalism brand of newspaper reporting that stresses excitement and shock over even- handedness and dull fact.

THE IMPERIAL MOMENT

In 1895, after almost 15 years of planning from exile in the United States, José Martí returned to Cuba to renew the struggle for independence from Spain. With cries of Cuba libre (“free Cuba”), Martí and his rebels cut railroad lines, destroyed sugar mills, and set fire to cane fields. Within a year rebel forces controlled more than half the island. But even as they fought the Spanish, the rebels worried about the United States. Their island, just 90 miles off the coast of Florida, had long been a target of American expansionists and business interests. “I have lived in the bowels of the monster,” Martí said in reference to the United States, “and I know it.”

The Spanish overlords struck back at Martí and his followers with brutal violence. Governor-General Valeriano Weyler herded a half-million Cubans from their homes into fortified camps where filth, disease, and starvation killed perhaps 200,000. Outside these “reconcentration” camps, Weyler chased the rebels across the countryside, polluting drinking water, kill- ing farm animals, burning crops. By 1898 U.S. soldiers were fighting Spaniards in Cuba and the Philippines in what Secretary of State John Hay called “the splen- did little war.” Neither the Cubans nor the Filipinos emerged from the conflict as free as they hoped.

Mounting Tensions  >>   President Cleve- land had little sympathy for the Cuban revolt. He doubted that the mostly black population was capa- ble of self-government and feared that independence from Spain might lead to chaos on the island. Already the revolution had caused widespread destruction of American-owned property. The president settled on a policy that favored neither the Spanish nor the reb- els: opposing the rebellion, but pressing Spain to grant Cuba some freedoms.

In the Republican Party, expansionists such as Theodore Roosevelt and Massachusetts senator Henry

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̂̂ The grisly depiction of the explosion that sank the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898, complete with a panel titled “Recovering the Dead Bodies” ( upper right ). Illustrations such as this one helped jingoists turn the event into a battle cry, “Remember the Maine.”

of idealism, Congress also adopted the Teller Amend- ment, renouncing any aim to annex Cuba.

Certainly both idealism and moral outrage led many Americans down the path to war. But in the end, the “splendid little war” came as a result of less lofty ambitions: empire, trade, glory.

The Imperial War  >>   For the 5,462 men who died there was little splendid about the Spanish- American War. Only 379 gave their lives in battle. The rest succumbed to accidents, disease, and the misman- agement of an unprepared army. Troops were issued winter woolens rather than tropical uniforms and sometimes fed on rations that were diseased, rotten, or poisoned. Some soldiers found themselves fighting with weapons from the Civil War.

The navy fared better. Decisions in the 1880s to modernize the fleet paid handsome dividends. Naval battles largely determined the outcome of the war. As soon as war was declared, Admiral George Dewey ordered his Asiatic battle squadron from China to the Philippines. Just before dawn on May 1, he opened fire

on the Spanish ships in Manila Bay. Five hours later the entire Spanish squadron lay at the bottom of the bay. Dewey had no plans to follow up his stunning victory with an invasion. His fleet carried no marines with which to take Manila. So ill prepared was Pres- ident McKinley for war, let alone victory, that only after learning of Dewey’s success did he order 11,000 American troops to the Philippines.

Halfway around the globe, another Spanish fleet had slipped into Santiago harbor in Cuba just before the arrival of the U.S. Navy. The navy blockaded the island, expecting the Spanish to flee under the cover of darkness. Instead, in broad daylight on July 3, the Spanish fleet made a desperate dash for the open seas. So startled were the Americans that several of their ships nearly collided as they rushed to attack their exposed foes. All seven Spanish ships were sunk. With Cuba now cut off from Spain, the war was virtually won.

Without a fleet for cover or any way to escape, the Spanish garrison surrendered on July 17. In the Philippines, a similar brief battle preceded the

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| THE IMPERIAL MOMENT | 437

American taking of Manila on August 13. The “splen- did little war” had ended in less than four months.

Peace and the Debate over Empire >>  Con- quering Cuba and the Philippines proved easier than deciding what to do with them. The Teller Amend- ment had renounced any American claim to Cuba. But clearly the United States had not freed the island to see chaos reign or American business and military interests excluded. And what of the Philippines—and Spanish Puerto Rico, which American forces had taken without a struggle? Powerful public and congressio- nal sentiment pushed McKinley to claim empire as the fruits of victory.

Even the president favored such a course. The battle in the Pacific highlighted the need for naval bases and coaling stations. “To maintain our flag in the Philippines, we must raise our flag in Hawaii,” the New York Sun insisted. On July 7 McKinley signed a joint congressional resolution annexing Hawai’i, as planters had wanted for nearly a decade.

The Philippines presented a more difficult prob- lem. Filipinos had greeted the American forces as liberators, not new colonizers. The popular leader of

the rebel forces fighting Spain, Emilio Aguinaldo, had returned to the islands on an American ship. To the rebels’ dismay, McKinley insisted that the islands were under American authority until the peace treaty set- tled matters.

Many influential Americans—former president Grover Cleveland, steel baron Andrew Carnegie, novel- ist Mark Twain—opposed annexation of the Philippines. Yet even these anti-imperialists favored expansion, if only in the form of trade. Business leaders especially believed that the country could enjoy the economic benefits of the Philippines without the costs of main- taining it as a colony. Annexation would mire the United States too deeply in the quicksands of Asian politics, they argued. More important, a large, costly fleet would be necessary to defend the islands. To the imperialists that was precisely the point: a large fleet was crucial to the interests of a powerful commercial nation.

Racist ideas shaped both sides of the argu- ment. Imperialists believed that the racial inferior- ity of nonwhites made occupation of the Philippines necessary, and they were ready to assume the “white man’s burden” and govern. Gradually, they argued, Filipinos would be taught the virtues of Western

MAP 21.3 : THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR Had the Spanish-American war depended largely on ground forces, the ill-prepared U.S. Army might have fared poorly. But the key to success, in both Cuba and the Philippines, was naval warfare, in which the recently modernized American fleet had a critical edge. Proximity to Cuba also gave the United States an advantage in delivering troops and supplies and in maintaining a naval blockade that isolated Spanish forces. What role did the U.S. Navy play in winning the Spanish-American War?

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civilization, Christianity, 2 democracy, and self-rule. Anti- imperialists, however, feared racial intermix- ing and the possibility that Asian workers would flood the American labor market. They also maintained that dark-skinned people would never develop the capac- ity for self- government. An American government in the Philippines could be sustained only at the point of bayonets—yet the U.S. Constitution made no provision for governing people without representation or equal rights. Such a precedent, the anti-imperialists warned, might one day threaten American liberties at home.

Still, when the Senate debated the Treaty of Paris ending the Spanish-American War in 1898, the impe- rialists had the support of the president, most of Con- gress, and the majority of public opinion. Even such an anti-imperialist as William Jennings Bryan, defeated by McKinley in 1896, supported the treaty. In it Spain surrendered title to Cuba, ceded Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States, and in return for $20 mil- lion turned over the Philippines as well.

From Colonial War to Colonial Rule  >>   Managing an empire turned out to be even more devilish than acquiring one. As the Senate debated annexation of the Philippines in Washington in 1899, rebels clashed with an American patrol outside Manila, igniting a guerrilla war. The few Americans who paid attention called it the “Filipino insurrection,” but to those who fought, it was the Philippine- American

War. When it ended more than three years later, nearly 5,000 Americans, 25,000 rebels, and perhaps as many as 200,000 civilians lay dead.

After a series of conventional battles ended in their defeat, Filipino insurrectos quickly learned to take advantage of the mountainous, jungle terrain of the Philippine archipelago. From his hideaway in the mountains of Bayombong, Aguinaldo ordered his men to employ guerrilla (literally “little war” in Spanish) tactics. Hit-and-run ambushes by lightly armed reb- els were perfectly suited to the dense landscape. As insurrectos melted into tropical forests and friendly villages, Americans could barely distinguish between enemies and friends. It was the first instance of jungle warfare the United States had ever encountered.

Jungle warfare aggravated racial antagonisms and spurred savage fighting on both sides. Rebel resistance to foreign occupation was accompanied by reports of insurrectos treating American prisoners in “fiend- ish fashion,” burying some alive, dismembering oth- ers, and slaughtering even Filipinos who opposed them. For their part American soldiers dismissed Filipinos as nearly subhuman. “The only good Filipino is a dead one,” declared one U.S. soldier, echoing the infamous anti-Indian cry of the American West.

To combat the insurgents, General Arthur MacArthur imposed a brutal campaign of “pacification” late in 1899. Filipinos were herded into concentration camps for their protection, and food and crops were seized or torched to starve the rebels into surrender. The strategy was embarrassingly reminiscent of “Butcher” Weyler in Cuba. Only after the capture of Agui- naldo and the last gasps of rebel resistance did the war finally come to a close in 1902. It marked the end of the westward march of American empire that began with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

Despite the bitter guerrilla war, the United States ruled its new island territory with relative benevolence. Under William Howard Taft, the first civilian governor, the Americans built schools, roads, sewers, and facto- ries and inaugurated new farming techniques. The aim, said Taft, was to prepare the Philippines for indepen- dence, and to prove it, he granted great authority to local officials. These advances—social, economic, and political—benefited the Filipino elite and thus earned their support. Finally, on July 4, 1946, the Philippines were granted independence.

The United States played a similar role in Puerto Rico. As in the Philippines, executive authority resided in a governor appointed by the U.S. president. Under the Foraker Act of 1900 Puerto Ricans received a voice in their government as well as a nonvoting representa- tive in the U.S. House of Representatives and certain tariff advantages. All the same, many Puerto Ricans chafed at the idea of such second-class citizenship. Some favored eventual admission to the United States

2In point of fact, most Filipinos were already Catholic after many years under Spanish rule.

̂̂ The American decision to occupy the Philippines rather than give it independence compelled Filipino nationalists like these to fight U.S. troops, as they had already been fighting the Spanish since 1896. Sporadic, bloody guerrilla fighting continued until 1902, and other incidents persisted until 1906.

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as a state while others advocated independence, a division of opinion that persists even today.

An Open Door in China  >>   Interest in Asia drove the United States to annex the Philippines; and annexation of the Philippines established the United States as a Pacific power with an eye on Asia. As ever, the possibility of markets in China—whether for Chris- tian souls or consumer goods—proved an irresistible lure.

Both the British, who dominated China’s export trade, and the Americans, who wanted to, worried that China might soon be carved up by other powers. Japan had defeated China in 1895, encouraging Russia, Germany, and France to join in demanding trade conces- sions. Each nation sought to establish an Asian sphere of influence in which its com- mercial and military interests

reigned. Such spheres often ended in commercial and other restrictions against rival powers. Since Britain and the United States wanted the benefits of trade rather than actual colonies, they tried to limit foreign demands while leaving China open to all commerce.

In 1899, at the urging of the British, Secretary of State John Hay circulated the first of two “open door” notes among the imperial powers. He did not ask them to relinquish their spheres of influence in China, only to keep them open to free trade with other nations. Japan and most of the European powers agreed in broad outline with Hay’s policy, out of fear that the Americans might tip the delicate balance by sid- ing with a rival. Hay seized on the tepid response and brashly announced that the open door in China was international policy.

Unrest soon threatened to close the door. Chinese nationalists, known to Westerners as Boxers for their clenched-fist symbol, formed secret societies to drive

sphere of influence geo- graphic region beyond its border over which a nation exerts political or economic control.

MAP 21.4 : THE UNITED STATES IN THE PACIFIC In the late nineteenth century Germany and the United States emerged as Pacific naval powers and contestants for influence and trade in China. The island groups of the Central and Southwest Pacific were of little economic value but had great strategic worth as bases and coaling stations along the route to Asia. In what year did the United States gain more Pacific possessions than in any other? Which islands were its earliest acquisitions?

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out the fon kwei, or “foreign devils.” Encouraged by the Chinese empress, Boxers murdered hundreds of Christian missionaries and their followers and besieged foreign diplomats and citizens at the British Embassy in Beijing. European nations quickly dispatched troops to quell the uprising and free the diplomats, while President McKinley sent 2,500 Americans to join the march to the capital city. Along the way, the angry foreign armies plundered the countryside and killed civilians before reaching Beijing and breaking the siege.

Hay feared that once in control of Beijing the conquerors might never leave, so he sent a second open-door note in 1900, this time asking foreign pow- ers to respect China’s territorial and administrative integrity. They endorsed the proposal in principle only. In fact the open-door notes together amounted to lit- tle more than an announcement of American desires to maintain stability and trade in Asia. Yet they reflected a fundamental purpose to which the United States dedicated itself across the globe: to open closed mar- kets and to keep open those markets that other empires had yet to close. The new American empire would have its share of colonies, but in Asia as elsewhere it would be built primarily on trade.

“Send forth the best ye breed— / Go bind your sons to exile / To serve your captives’ need.”

European critics, like those in the United States, rejected imperialism on the grounds that it delivered few economic benefits, compromised the moral stand- ing of the colonizers, and distracted the public from undertaking much-needed reforms at home. Just as Populists in the United States called on “toilers” to band together and on government to play a more active role in managing the excesses of the new industrial order, radicals in Europe such as the German-born Karl Marx exhorted “workers of the world” to unite and “throw off your chains” by abandoning capitalism and embracing socialism.

✔ R E V I E W Why did imperialists launch their quest for empire, and why did anti-imperialists oppose them?

In the end, the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposi- tion of 1893 proved an apt reflection of the world at home and abroad. Though the exposition showed off its exhibits within gleaming white buildings, at the same time the political system cracked under the strain of a depression. As the exposition gath- ered exhibits from all over the globe, the scramble for resources and markets culminated in an age of imperialism. National greatness walked hand in hand with empire in the gleaming plaster buildings of the White City. Employing the gendered language of the day, one German historian proclaimed: “Every virile people has established colonial power.” The United States joined the rush somewhat late, trailing behind the French, British, Germans, and Dutch in part because it was still extracting raw materials from its own “colonial” regions in the defeated South and the booming West.

As in the United States, European imperialists sometimes justified their rule over nonwhite peoples in Darwinian fashion. “The path of progress is strewn with the wreck . . . of inferior races,” proclaimed one English professor in 1900. British poet Rudyard Kipling even suggested that Europeans were making a noble sacrifice on behalf of their colonial subjects. “Take up the White Man’s Burden,” he exhorted his fellow Britons in 1899.

CHAPTER SUMMARY The last third of the nineteenth century witnessed the culmination of years of political stalemate at home and the realization of dreams of empire abroad. " Republicans and Democrats ground politics into

near gridlock over the well-worn issues of regional conflict, tariff, and monetary reform.

" Discontented Americans often fashioned political instruments of their own, whether for woman suf- frage, temperance, monetary change, antilynching and civil rights, or farm issues.

" The political deadlock came finally to an end in the turbulent 1890s, when depression-spawned labor strife and a revolt of farmers produced the People’s, or Populist, Party and a political realignment that left the Republicans in control of national politics.

" By the 1890s, too, the tradition of Manifest Des- tiny combined powerfully with the needs of the new industrial order for raw materials and markets and the closing of the American frontier to produce a powerful drive toward empire, which rested on these two principles of American foreign policy:

► The old Monroe Doctrine (1823), which warned European powers to stay out of the Americas.

► The newer open-door notes of Secretary of State John Hay (1899–1900), which stressed the importance of equal commercial access to the markets of Asia.

" Most Americans favored an overseas empire for the United States but disagreed over whether it should be territorial or commercial.

" In the end America’s overseas empire was both ter- ritorial and commercial. A victory in the Spanish- American War (1898) capped an era of territorial and commercial expansion by furnishing colonial possessions in the Caribbean and the Pacific and at the same time providing more stepping-stones to the markets of Asia.

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Confirming Pages

| THE IMPERIAL MOMENT | 441

Additional Reading Heather Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (2007), is a good overview. Republican Party politics from Lincoln to the election of George W. Bush is covered in Lewis L. Gould’s Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans (2003). John Hicks’s classic The Populist Revolt (1931) emphasizes poverty as the driving force behind Populism; while Lawrence Goodwyn portrays Populists as crusaders for radical democratic change in Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America (1976). Also useful is Robert C. McMath Jr., American Populism: A Social History, 1877–1898 (1993); and Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (2007). Michael Kazin stresses William Jennings Bryan’s reli- gious moorings and liberal instincts in A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (2006). Charles Hoffman, The Depression of the Nineties: An Eco- nomic History (1970), provides a lucid profile of the crisis. Theda Skocpol’s Protecting Soldiers and Moth- ers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (1994), stresses the nineteenth-century origins of the welfare state and the interplay between the state and nongovernmental political groups.

On the spread of segregation, see C. Vann Wood- ward’s classic The Strange Career of Jim Crow (4th ed., 2002). Woodward focuses on changes in the law, while John Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy (1982), points to the role of the city. Con- trasting approaches to race relations can be seen in Louis Harlan’s two-volume Booker T. Washington (1972 and 1983); and David Levering Lewis’s W.E.B. DuBois: Biography of a Race (1993). James West Davidson uses Ida B. Wells to provide a cultural portrait of the first generation of freed African Americans in “ They Say”: Ida B. Wells and the Reconstruction of Race (2007).

For broad interpretive views of American for- eign policy, see Michael Hunt, Ideology and American Foreign Policy (1984); John Dobson, America’s Ascent: The United States Becomes a Great Power, 1880–1914 (1978); and Walter LaFeber, The American Age (1989). A. G. Hopkins, ed., Global History: Inter- actions between the Universal and the Local (2006), provides useful cultural perspectives. For regional approaches, see LaFeber’s Inevitable Revolutions (3rd ed., 1993) on Central America; and Hunt’s The Making of a Special Relationship (1983) on China. On the role of missionaries, see Jane Hunter’s The Gospel of Gen- tility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of- the-Century China (1984). Ivan Musicant, Empire by Default (1998), covers the Spanish-American War and its consequences. For the Philippines, see Stanley Kar- now’s In Our Image (1989); and Brian McAlister Linn’s thorough study of The Philippine War (2000).

Significant Events 1867 Patrons of Husbandry (“Grange”) founded; Alaska acquired

1874 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union formed

1877 Munn v. Illinois

1887 Interstate Commerce Commission created

1892 Populist Party formed;

Grover Cleveland elected president

1894 Coxey’s army marches on

Washington

1899 First open-door notes

1900 Boxer Rebellion

1881 Garfield assassinated; Booker T. Washington founds Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute

1890 Sherman Antitrust Act; Ocala Demands

1893 Panic of 1893

1898 Sinking of the USS Maine; war with Spain; Dewey captures the Philippines; Hawai’i annexed

1899–1902 Philippine-American War

1869 Massachusetts

establishes first state regulatory commission

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