Discussion #9: How has the automobile impacted American society?

Chapter 21: Realignment at Home and Empire Abroad 1877 to 1900

U.S. A NARRATIVE HISTORY, EIGHTH EDITION

DAVIDSON • DELAY • HEYRMAN• LYTLE • STOFF

Realignment at Home and Empire Abroad 1877 to 1900

• “[M]any 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.”

What’s to Come

The Politics of Paralysis

The Revolt of the Farmers

The New Realignment

Visions of Empire

The Imperial Moment

The Politics of Paralysis (1)

Political Stalemate

• Margins of victory in presidential elections very close
• Nearly 80 percent of eligible voters turned out

The Parties

• Both supported business and condemned radicalism
• Neither offered workers or farmers much help
• Ethnic and religious factors
• Third political parties rallied around a single cause

THE VOTING PUBLIC

Between 1860 and 1910 the population of the United States increased nearly threefold while the number of eligible voters increased over fourfold. But as reforms of the early twentieth century reduced the power of political machines and parties to turn out voters, the percentage of eligible voter participation actually declined in presidential elections through 1912. Photo: Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-DIG-ppmsca-19299]

The Politics of Paralysis (2)

The Issues

• “Bloody shirts”
  • Each side blamed the other for the Civil War
• Pendleton Act
  • reform of civil service
• McKinley Tariff
• Gold, silver, and greenbacks
  • Currency divisive issue
• Bland-Allison Act
  • silver coinage

The Politics of Paralysis (3)

The White House from Hayes to Harrison

• Hayes was the first of the “Ohio dynasty” (1876)
  • Ended reconstruction and pursued civil service reform
• Garfield elected and then assassinated (1880)
• Dirty election of 1884
  • Cleveland won; first Democrat since 1856
• 1888, Harrison lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College
  • First billion-dollar peacetime budget (1892)

The Politics of Paralysis (4)

Ferment in the States and Cities

• State commissions

“Despite growing expenditures and more legislation, most people expected little from the federal government…. Experimental and often effective, state programs began to grapple with the problems of corporate power, discriminatory railroad rates, political corruption, and urban disorder.”

The Revolt of the Farmers (1)

The Harvest of Discontent

• Targets of farm anger
  • Obvious inequalities; credit at the root of their problems

The Origins of the Farmers’ Alliance

• Patrons of Husbandry
• Granger cases
  • Creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887
• Southern Alliance
• Colored Farmers’ Alliance
  • Efforts often violently opposed by white supremacists

The Revolt of the Farmers (2)

The Alliance Peaks

• Ocala Demands
  • Called on government to reduce tariffs, abolish national banks, regulate railroads, coin silver money
• The People’s Party
  • Convention in February 1892

The Election of 1892

• Populists had some success; Cleveland and the Democrats won the White House both houses
• Long-term weakness of the Populists
  • Rhetoric of Populism often violent

The New Realignment (1)

The Depression of 1893

• Burden fell on local charities rather than government to assist the unemployed
• Changing attitudes about poverty

The Rumblings of Unrest

• Coxey’s Army
• Repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890
  • Hurt the economy in the short run
  • Republicans took back the House and Senate in 1894

The New Realignment (2)

The Battle of the Standards

• Free silver
• “Cross of Gold” speech
  • Bryan, 1896: “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

Campaign and Election

• Republican coalition
  • Emerged triumphant in the 1896 presidential election
  • Dominated American politics for the next thirty years

The New Realignment (3)

William Jennings Bryan was passionate in his convictions and devoted to the “plain people,” the “Great Commoner” is depicted in this hostile cartoon as a Populist snake devouring the Democratic Party. Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-53841]

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 dominated the large industrial cities and states, as the returns of the Electoral College show.

The New Realignment (4)

The Rise of Jim Crow Politics

• African Americans typically voted Republican
• Democratic party’s program of disenfranchisement
  • Promoted black disenfranchisement and white supremacy
  • Black lynchings by whites peaked during the 1890s

The African American Response

• Ida B. Wells’s nationwide campaign against lynching
• Booker T. Washington preached accommodation
  • Founded the Tuskegee Institute (1881)
  • Organized the National Negro Business League (1900)

The New Realignment (5)

McKinley in the White House

• Foreshadowed “modern” presidents who also acted as party leaders
• Economy already in recovery
• Dingley Tariff (1897)

Visions of Empire (1)

Imperialism, European and American Style

• Weapons technology and new networks of communication, transportation, and commerce brought the prospect of effective, truly global empires within reach
• European-style imperialism: conquest and possession of colonies, often for their raw materials
• American-style indirect imperialism: export of products, ideas, and influence

Visions of Empire (2)

The Shapers of American Imperialism

• Navalism
  • Mahan calls for a strong navy
• Missionaries
  • Spiritual rationale for imperialism
• “Social Darwinism”
• Commercial factors
  • Creation of new markets

Visions of Empire (3)

Dreams of a Commercial Empire

• William Henry Seward
  • Commercial empire through “open door” policy
  • Promoted transcontinental railroad and a Central American canal to connect eastern factories and western ports
  • Acquisition of Midway and Alaska
• Blaine’s Pan-American Union
• Queen Liliuokalani in Hawai’i overthrown by American planters

BALANCE OF U.S. IMPORTS AND EXPORTS, 1870 to 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. Photo: © jgroup/iStockphoto RF

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.

The Imperial Moment (1)

Cuba in revolt

• José Martí

Mounting Tensions

• Lôme letter
• Sinking of American warship Maine
• Teller Amendment

The Imperial War

• Dewey at Manila
• Santiago harbor in Cuba

The Imperial Moment (2)

The Imperial War

• Army not prepared for war, but recently modernized U.S. Navy was
  • Dewey at Manila
  • Santiago harbor in Cuba

The Imperial Moment (3)

Peace and the Debate over Empire

• Annexing Hawai’i
• Filipinos see Americans as liberators not colonizers
  • McKinley insisted that islands were under American authority
  • Many influential Americans opposed annexation
• Racist ideas shaped both sides of the argument
  • Imperialists’ “white man’s burden” to govern
  • Anti-imperialists feared racial intermixing, Asian workers
• Treaty of Paris

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.

The Imperial Moment (4)

From Colonial War to Colonial Rule

• Philippine-American guerrillawar
  • Racial antagonism spurred brutal fighting in Manila
• Foraker Act of 1900 and Puerto Rico

An Open Door in China

• The open-door notes
  • Keep spheres of influence open to trade
• Boxer Rebellion
  • Unrest threatened to close the door
• Sense of mission guided expansionists

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.