History of the U.S. since Reconstruction

For my mother, Liza Foner (1909–2005), an accomplished artist who lived through most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first

CONTENTS List of Maps, Tables, and Figures xii About the Author xv Preface xvi Acknowledgments xxii

15 “WHAT IS FREEDOM?”: RECONSTRUCTION, 1865–1877 563 The Meaning of Freedom 565 Voices of Freedom From Petition of Committee in Behalf of the Freedmen to Andrew Johnson (1865), and From A Sharecropping Contract (1866) 576 The Making of Radical Reconstruction 578 Who Is an American? From Frederick Douglass, “The Composite Nation” (1869) 588 Radical Reconstruction in the South 591 The Overthrow of Reconstruction 595 16 AMERICA’S GILDED AGE, 1870–1890 603 The Second Industrial Revolution 605 Freedom in the Gilded Age 613 Labor and the Republic 618 The Transformation of the West 626 Voices of Freedom From Speech of Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé Indians, in Washington, D.C. (1879), and From Letter by Saum Song Bo, American Missionary (October 1885) 636 Politics in a Gilded Age 642 17 FREEDOM’S BOUNDARIES, AT HOME AND ABROAD, 1890–1900 648 The Populist Challenge 650 The Segregated South 658 Voices of Freedom From Ida B. Wells, Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1893), and From W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) 666 Redrawing the Boundaries 669 Who Is an American? From William Birney, “Deporting Mohammedans” (1897) 674 Becoming a World Power 676 18 THE PROGRESSIVE ERA, 1900–1916 689 An Urban Age and a Consumer Society 692 Varieties of Progressivism 701 Voices of Freedom From Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (1898), and From John Mitchell, “The Workingman’s Conception of Industrial Liberty” (1910) 708 The Politics of Progressivism 713 The Progressive Presidents 723 Who Is an American? From Mary Church Terrell, “What it Means to be Colored in the Capital of the United States” (1906) 731 19 SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY: THE UNITED STATES AND WORLD WAR Ⅰ, 1916– 1920 734 An Era of Intervention 737 America and the Great War 742 The War at Home 746 Voices of Freedom From Woodrow Wilson, War Message to Congress (1917), and From Eugene V. Debs, Speech to the Jury before Sentencing under the Espionage Act (1918) 754 Who Is an American? 756 Who Is an American? From Randolph S. Bourne, “Trans- National America” (1916) 759 1919 768 20 FROM BUSINESS CULTURE TO GREAT DEPRESSION: THE TWENTIES, 1920– 1932 779 The Business of America 782 Business and Government 789 The Birth of Civil Liberties 793 Voices of Freedom From Lucian W. Parrish, Speech in Congress on Immigration (1921), and From Majority Opinion, Justice James C. McReynolds, in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) 794 The Culture Wars 799 Who Is an American? Immigration Quotas under the Johnson-Reed Act (1924) 805 The Great Depression 810 21 THE NEW DEAL, 1932–1940 818 The First New Deal 821 The Grassroots Revolt 830 The Second New Deal 835 A Reckoning with Liberty 838 Voices of Freedom From Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat” (1934), and From John Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of

Wrath (1938) 840 The Limits of Change 845 A New Conception of America 851 22 FIGHTING FOR THE FOUR FREEDOMS: WORLD WAR Ⅱ, 1941–1945 861 Fighting World War Ⅱ 864 The Home Front 873 Visions of Postwar Freedom 880 The American Dilemma 884 Voices of Freedom From League of United Latin American Citizens, “World War Ⅱ and Mexican Americans” (1945), and From Charles H. Wesley, “The Negro Has Always Wanted the Four Freedoms,” in What the Negro Wants (1944) 888 Who Is an American? From Justice Robert A. Jackson, dissent in Korematsu v. United States (1944) 893 The End of the War 899 23 THE UNITED STATES AND THE COLD WAR, 1945–1953 906 Origins of the Cold War 908 The Cold War and the Idea of Freedom 918 The Truman Presidency 923 The Anticommunist Crusade 928 Who Is an American? From Oscar Handlin, “The Immigration Fight Has Only Begun” (1952) 931 Voices of Freedom From Joseph R. McCarthy, Speech at Wheeling (1950), and From Margaret Chase Smith, Speech in the Senate (1950) 936 24 AN AFFLUENT SOCIETY, 1953–1960 942 The Golden Age 944 The Eisenhower Era 959 The Freedom Movement 970 Voices of Freedom From Martin Luther King Jr., Speech at Montgomery, Alabama (December 5, 1955), and From The Southern Manifesto (1956) 978 The Election of 1960 981 25 THE SIXTIES, 1960–1968 985 The Civil Rights Revolution 987 The Kennedy Years 990 Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency 994 The Changing Black Movement 1002 Vietnam and the New Left 1005 The New Movements and the Rights Revolution 1014 Voices of Freedom From Barry Goldwater, Speech at Republican National Convention (1964), and From Statement of Purpose, National Organization for Women (1966) 1016 1968 1026 26 THE CONSERVATIVE TURN, 1969–1988 1032 President Nixon 1033 Vietnam and Watergate 1041 The End of the Golden Age 1047 The Rising Tide of Conservatism 1055 Who Is an American? Brochure on the Equal Rights Amendment (1970s) 1059 The Reagan Revolution 1063 Voices of Freedom From Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (1971), and From Richard E. Blakemore, Report on the Sagebrush Rebellion (1979) 1064 27 FROM TRIUMPH TO TRAGEDY, 1989–2004 1076 The Post–Cold War World 1078 Voices of Freedom From Bill Clinton, Speech on Signing of NAFTA (1993), and From Global Exchange, Seattle, Declaration for Global Democracy (December 1999) 1084 Globalization and its Discontents 1087 Culture Wars 1092 Who Is an American? Los Tigres del Norte, “Jaula de Oro” (1984) 1094 Impeachment and the Election of 2000 1105 The Attacks of September 11 1108 The War on Terrorism 1109 An American Empire? 1110 The Aftermath of September 11 at Home 1114 28 A DIVIDED NATION 1119 The Winds of Change 1120 The Great Recession 1127 Obama in Office 1134 Voices of Freedom From Opinion of the Court in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), and From Barack Obama, Eulogy at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (2015) 1136 The Obama Presidency 1140 Who Is an American? From Khizr Khan, Speech at Democratic National Convention (2016) 1149 President Trump 1150 Freedom in the Twenty-First Century 1159

Suggested Reading A-1 The Declaration of Independence (1776) A-15 The Constitution of the United States (1787) A-19 Glossary A-39 Credits A-75

Index A-79

LIST OF MAPS, TABLES, AND FIGURES

MAPS CHAPTER 15 The Barrow Plantation 569 Sharecropping in the South, 1880 573 Reconstruction in the South, 1867–1877 599 The Presidential Election of 1876 600 CHAPTER 16 The Railroad Network, 1880 607 U.S. Steel: A Vertically Integrated Corporation 610 The Industrial West 631 Indian Reservations, ca. 1890 639 Political Stalemate, 1876–1892 643 CHAPTER 17 Populist Strength, 1892 654 The Presidential Election of 1896 657 The Spanish-American War: The Pacific 680 The Spanish-American War: The Caribbean 680 American Empire, 1898 682 CHAPTER 18 Socialist Towns and Cities, 1900–1920 703 CHAPTER 19 The Panama Canal Zone 737 The United States in the Caribbean, 1898–1941 738 Colonial Possessions, 1900 740 World War Ⅰ: The Western Front 745 Prohibition, 1915: Counties and States That Banned Liquor before the Eighteenth Amendment (Ratified 1919, Repealed 1933) 751 Europe in 1914 773 Europe in 1919 774 CHAPTER 21 Columbia River Basin Project, 1949 820 The Tennessee Valley Authority 826 The Dust Bowl, 1935–1940 828 CHAPTER 22 World War Ⅱ in the Pacific, 1941–1945 870 World War Ⅱ in Europe, 1942–1945 872 Wartime Army and Navy Bases and Airfields 875 Japanese-American Internment, 1942–1945 891 CHAPTER 23 Cold War Europe, 1956 914 The Korean War, 1950–1953 916 CHAPTER 24 The Interstate Highway System 950 The Presidential Election of 1960 982 CHAPTER 25 The Vietnam War, 1964–1975 1009

CHAPTER 26 Center of Population, 1790–2010 1035 The Presidential Election of 1980 1062 The United States in the Caribbean and Central America, 1954–2004 1071 CHAPTER 27 Eastern Europe after the Cold War 1083 Immigrant Populations in Cities and States, 1900 and 2010 1096 Origin of Largest Immigrant Populations by State, 1910 and 2013 1098 The Presidential Election of 2000 1106 U.S. Presence in the Middle East, 1947–2019 1112 Israel, the West, and Gaza Strip 1113 CHAPTER 28 Percentage of Population below the Poverty Line, 2014 1141

Tables and Figures CHAPTER 16 Table 16.1 Indicators of Economic Change, 1870–1920 606 CHAPTER 17 Table 17.1 States with Over 200 Lynchings, 1889–1918 665 CHAPTER 18 Table 18.1 Immigrants and Their Children as Percentage of Population, Ten Major Cities, 1920 696 Table 18.2 Percentage of Women 14 Years and Older in the Labor Force, 1900–1930 698 CHAPTER 19 Table 19.1 The Great Migration 766 CHAPTER 21 Figure 21.1 Unemployment, 1925–1945 844 CHAPTER 22 Table 22.1 Labor Union Membership 876 CHAPTER 25 Figure 25.1 Percentage of Population below Poverty Level, by Race, 1959–1969 1000 CHAPTER 26 Table 26.1 Rate of Divorce: Divorces of Existing Marriages per 1,000 New Marriages, 1950– 1980 1040 Table 26.2 The Misery Index, 1970–1980 1048 Figure 26.1 Real Average Weekly Wages, 1955–1990 1050 CHAPTER 27 Figure 27.1 Incarceration Rates, 1970s–2010s 1100 Figure 27.2 Adult Men and Women in the Labor Force, 1950–2019 1104 CHAPTER 28 Figure 28.1 Portrait of a Recession 1128

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ERIC FONER is DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, where he earned his B.A. and Ph.D. In his teaching and scholarship, he focuses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and nineteenth-century America. Professor Foner’s publications include Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War; Tom Paine and Revolutionary America; Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy;

Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877; The Story of American Freedom; and Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. His history of Reconstruction won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for History, the Bancroft Prize, and the Parkman Prize. He has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association. In 2006 he received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching from Columbia University. His most recent books are The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, winner of the Bancroft and Lincoln Prizes and the Pulitzer Prize for History, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, winner of the New York Historical Society Book Prize, and The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution.

PREFACE Give Me Liberty! An American History is a survey of American history from the earliest days of European exploration and conquest of the New World to the first decades of the twenty-first century. It offers students a clear, concise narrative whose central theme is the changing contours of American freedom.

I am extremely gratified by the response to the first five editions of Give Me Liberty!, which have been used in survey courses at many hundreds of two- and four-year colleges and universities throughout the country. The comments I have received from instructors and students encourage me to think that Give Me Liberty! has worked well in their classrooms. Their comments have also included many valuable suggestions for revisions, which I greatly appreciate. These have ranged from corrections of typographical and factual errors to thoughts about subjects that needed more extensive treatment. In making revisions for this Sixth Edition, I have tried to take these suggestions into account. I have also incorporated the findings and insights of new scholarship that has appeared since the original edition was written.

The most significant changes in this Sixth Edition involve heightened emphasis on a question as old as the republic and as current as today’s newspapers: Who is an American?

Difference and commonality are both intrinsic parts of the American experience. Our national creed emphasizes democracy and freedom as universal rights, but these rights have frequently been limited to particular groups of people. The United States has long prided itself on being an “asylum for mankind,” as Thomas Paine put it in Common Sense, his great pamphlet calling for American independence. Yet we as a people have long been divided by clashing definitions of “Americanness.” The first Naturalization Act, adopted in 1790, limited the right to become a citizen when immigrating from abroad to white persons. And the right to vote was long denied to many Americans because of race, gender, property holding, a criminal record, or other reasons. Today, in debates over immigration and voting rights, the question of “Who is an American?” continues to roil our society.

In a nation resting, rhetorically at least, on the ideal of equality, the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion take on extreme significance. The greater the rights of American citizenship, the more important the definition of belonging. Groups like African-Americans and women, shut out from full equality from the beginning of the nation’s history, have struggled to gain recognition as full and equal members of the society. The definition of citizenship itself and the rights that come with it have been subject to intense debate throughout American history. And the cry of “second-class citizenship” has provided a powerful language of social protest for those who feel themselves excluded. To be sure, not all groups have made demands for inclusion. In the colonial era and for much of the history of the American nation, many Native Americans have demanded recognition of their own national sovereignty.

There is stronger coverage of this theme throughout the book, and it is reinforced by a new primary- source feature, “Who Is an American?” The sixteen such features, distributed fairly evenly through the text, address the nature of American identity, the definition of citizenship, and controversies over inclusion and exclusion. These documents range from J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s reflections on Americanness toward the end of the War of Independence and the Declaration of Sentiments of the Seneca Falls Convention to Frederick Douglass’s great speech of 1869 in defense of Chinese immigration, “The Composite Nation,” and Mary Church Terrell’s poignant complaint about being

treated as a stranger in her own country.

In the body of the text itself, the major additions that illuminate the history of this theme are as follows:

Chapter 3 contains a new discussion of the formation in colonial America of a British identity linked to a sense of difference from “others”—French and Spanish Catholics, Africans, and Native Americans. Chapter 4 discusses the development of a pan-Indian identity transcending the traditional rivalries between separate Native American nations. In Chapter 7 , I have added an examination of how the U.S. Constitution deals with citizenship and how the lack of a clear definition made disagreement about its boundaries inevitable. A new subsection in Chapter 12 deals with claims by African-Americans before the Civil War to “birthright citizenship,” the principle that anyone born in the country, regardless of race, national origin, or other characteristics, is entitled to full and equal citizenship. Chapter 15 expands the existing discussion of the constitutional amendments of the Reconstruction era to examine how they redrew the definition and boundaries of American citizenship.

In Chapter 17, I have expanded the section on the movement to restrict immigration. Chapter 18 contains a new discussion of Theodore Roosevelt’s understanding of “Americanism” and whom it excluded. Chapter 19 examines the “science” of eugenics, which proposed various ways to “improve” the quality of the American population. Chapter 23 contains a new subsection on how the Cold War and the effort to root out “subversion” affected definitions of loyalty, disloyalty, and American identity. Immigration reform during the administration of Ronald Reagan receives additional attention in Chapter 26. Finally, Chapter 28 discusses the heated debates over immigration that helped elect Donald Trump in 2016, and how his administration in its first two years addressed the issue.

Other revisions, not directly related to the “Who Is an American?” theme, include a reorganization of the chapter on the Gilded Age (16) to give it greater clarity, a new subsection in Chapter 17 discussing the political and philosophical school known as pragmatism, and significant changes in Chapter 26 to take advantage of recent scholarship on modern conservatism. The final chapter (28) has been updated to discuss the election of 2016 and the first two years of the administration of Donald Trump. I have also added a number of new selections to Voices of Freedom to sharpen the juxtaposition of divergent concepts of freedom at particular moments in American history. And this edition contains many new images—paintings, photographs, broadsides, lithographs, and others.

Americans have always had a divided attitude toward history. On the one hand, they tend to be remarkably future-oriented, dismissing events of even the recent past as “ancient history” and sometimes seeing history as a burden to be overcome, a prison from which to escape. On the other hand, like many other peoples, Americans have always looked to history for a sense of personal or group identity and of national cohesiveness. This is why so many Americans devote time and energy to tracing their family trees and why they visit historical museums and National Park Service historical sites in ever-increasing numbers. My hope is that this book will convince readers with all degrees of interest that history does matter to them.

The novelist and essayist James Baldwin once observed that history “does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, . . . [that] history is literally present in all that we do.” As Baldwin recognized, the force of history is evident in our own world. Especially in a political democracy like the United States, whose government is designed to rest on the consent of informed citizens, knowledge of the past is essential

—not only for those of us whose profession is the teaching and writing of history, but for everyone. History, to be sure, does not offer simple lessons or immediate answers to current questions. Knowing the history of immigration to the United States, and all of the tensions, turmoil, and aspirations associated with it, for example, does not tell us what current immigration policy ought to be. But without that knowledge, we have no way of understanding which approaches have worked and which have not—essential information for the formulation of future public policy.

History, it has been said, is what the present chooses to remember about the past. Rather than a fixed collection of facts, or a group of interpretations that cannot be challenged, our understanding of history is constantly changing. There is nothing unusual in the fact that each generation rewrites history to meet its own needs, or that scholars disagree among themselves on basic questions like the causes of the Civil War or the reasons for the Great Depression. Precisely because each generation asks different questions of the past, each generation formulates different answers. The past thirty years have witnessed a remarkable expansion of the scope of historical study. The experiences of groups neglected by earlier scholars, including women, African-Americans, working people, and others, have received unprecedented attention from historians. New subfields—social history, cultural history, and family history among them—have taken their place alongside traditional political and diplomatic history.

Give Me Liberty! draws on this voluminous historical literature to present an up-to-date and inclusive account of the American past, paying due attention to the experience of diverse groups of Americans while in no way neglecting the events and processes Americans have experienced in common. It devotes serious attention to political, social, cultural, and economic history, and to their interconnections. The narrative brings together major events and prominent leaders with the many groups of ordinary people who make up American society. Give Me Liberty! has a rich cast of characters, from Thomas Jefferson to campaigners for woman suffrage, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to former slaves seeking to breathe meaning into emancipation during and after the Civil War.

Aimed at an audience of undergraduate students with little or no detailed knowledge of American history, Give Me Liberty! guides readers through the complexities of the subject without overwhelming them with excessive detail. The unifying theme of freedom that runs through the text gives shape to the narrative and integrates the numerous strands that make up the American experience. This approach builds on that of my earlier book, The Story of American Freedom (1998), although Give Me Liberty! places events and personalities in the foreground and is more geared to the structure of the introductory survey course.

Freedom, and the battles to define its meaning, have long been central to my own scholarship and undergraduate teaching, which focuses on the nineteenth century and especially the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction (1850–1877). This was a time when the future of slavery tore the nation apart and emancipation produced a national debate over what rights the former slaves, and all Americans, should enjoy as free citizens. I have found that attention to clashing definitions of freedom and the struggles of different groups to achieve freedom as they understood it offers a way of making sense of the bitter battles and vast transformations of that pivotal era. I believe that the same is true for American history as a whole.

No idea is more fundamental to Americans’ sense of themselves as individuals and as a nation than freedom. The central term in our political language, freedom—or liberty, with which it is almost always used interchangeably—is deeply embedded in the record of our history and the language of everyday life. The Declaration of Independence lists liberty among mankind’s inalienable rights; the Constitution announces its purpose as securing liberty’s blessings. The United States fought the Civil

War to bring about a new birth of freedom, World War Ⅱ for the Four Freedoms, and the Cold War to defend the Free World. Americans’ love of liberty has been represented by liberty poles, liberty caps, and statues of liberty, and acted out by burning stamps and burning draft cards, by running away from slavery, and by demonstrating for the right to vote. “Every man in the street, white, black, red, or yellow,” wrote the educator and statesman Ralph Bunche in 1940, “knows that this is ‘the land of the free’ . . . ‘the cradle of liberty.’ ”

The very universality of the idea of freedom, however, can be misleading. Freedom is not a fixed, timeless category with a single unchanging definition. Indeed, the history of the United States is, in part, a story of debates, disagreements, and struggles over freedom. Crises like the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Cold War have permanently transformed the idea of freedom. So too have demands by various groups of Americans to enjoy greater freedom. The meaning of freedom has been constructed not only in congressional debates and political treatises, but on plantations and picket lines, in parlors and even bedrooms.

Over the course of our history, American freedom has been both a reality and a mythic ideal—a living truth for millions of Americans, a cruel mockery for others. For some, freedom has been what some scholars call a “habit of the heart,” an ideal so taken for granted that it is lived out but rarely analyzed. For others, freedom is not a birthright but a distant goal that has inspired great sacrifice.

Give Me Liberty! draws attention to three dimensions of freedom that have been critical in American history: (1) the meanings of freedom; (2) the social conditions that make freedom possible; and (3) the boundaries of freedom that determine who is entitled to enjoy freedom and who is not. All have changed over time.

In the era of the American Revolution, for example, freedom was primarily a set of rights enjoyed in public activity—the right of a community to be governed by laws to which its representatives had consented and of individuals to engage in religious worship without governmental interference. In the nineteenth century, freedom came to be closely identified with each person’s opportunity to develop to the fullest his or her innate talents. In the twentieth, the “ability to choose,” in both public and private life, became perhaps the dominant understanding of freedom. This development was encouraged by the explosive growth of the consumer marketplace (a development that receives considerable attention in Give Me Liberty!), which offered Americans an unprecedented array of goods with which to satisfy their needs and desires. During the 1960s, a crucial chapter in the history of American freedom, the idea of personal freedom was extended into virtually every realm, from attire and “lifestyle” to relations between the sexes. Thus, over time, more and more areas of life have been drawn into Americans’ debates about the meaning of freedom.

A second important dimension of freedom focuses on the social conditions necessary to allow freedom to flourish. What kinds of economic institutions and relationships best encourage individual freedom? In the colonial era and for more than a century after independence, the answer centered on economic autonomy, enshrined in the glorification of the independent small producer—the farmer, skilled craftsman, or shopkeeper—who did not have to depend on another person for his livelihood. As the industrial economy matured, new conceptions of economic freedom came to the fore: “liberty of contract” in the Gilded Age, “industrial freedom” (a say in corporate decision-making) in the Progressive era, economic security during the New Deal, and, more recently, the ability to enjoy mass consumption within a market economy.

The boundaries of freedom, the third dimension of this theme, have inspired some of the most intense struggles in American history. Although founded on the premise that liberty is an entitlement

of all humanity, the United States for much of its history deprived many of its own people of freedom. Non-whites have rarely enjoyed the same access to freedom as white Americans. The belief in equal opportunity as the birthright of all Americans has coexisted with persistent efforts to limit freedom by race, gender, and class and in other ways.

Less obvious, perhaps, is the fact that one person’s freedom has frequently been linked to another’s servitude. In the colonial era and nineteenth century, expanding freedom for many Americans rested on the lack of freedom—slavery, indentured servitude, the subordinate position of women—for others. By the same token, it has been through battles at the boundaries—the efforts of racial minorities, women, and others to secure greater freedom—that the meaning and experience of freedom have been deepened and the concept extended into new realms.

Time and again in American history, freedom has been transformed by the demands of excluded groups for inclusion. The idea of freedom as a universal birthright owes much both to abolitionists who sought to extend the blessings of liberty to blacks and to immigrant groups who insisted on full recognition as American citizens. The principle of equal protection of the law without regard to race, which became a central element of American freedom, arose from the antislavery struggle and the Civil War and was reinvigorated by the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, which called itself the “freedom movement.” The battle for the right of free speech by labor radicals and birth-control advocates in the first part of the twentieth century helped to make civil liberties an essential element of freedom for all Americans.

Although concentrating on events within the United States, Give Me Liberty! also situates American history in the context of developments in other parts of the world. Many of the forces that shaped American history, including the international migration of peoples, the development of slavery, the spread of democracy, and the expansion of capitalism, were worldwide processes not confined to the United States. Today, American ideas, culture, and economic and military power exert unprecedented influence throughout the world. But beginning with the earliest days of settlement, when European empires competed to colonize North America and enrich themselves from its trade, American history cannot be understood in isolation from its global setting.

Freedom is the oldest of clichés and the most modern of aspirations. At various times in our history, it has served as the rallying cry of the powerless and as a justification of the status quo. Freedom helps to bind our culture together and exposes the contradictions between what America claims to be and what it sometimes has been. American history is not a narrative of continual progress toward greater and greater freedom. As the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson noted after the Civil War, “revolutions may go backward.” Though freedom can be achieved, it may also be taken away. This happened, for example, when the equal rights granted to former slaves immediately after the Civil War were essentially nullified during the era of segregation. As was said in the eighteenth century, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

In the early twenty-first century, freedom continues to play a central role in American political and social life and thought. It is invoked by individuals and groups of all kinds, from critics of economic globalization to those who seek to secure American freedom at home and export it abroad. I hope that Give Me Liberty! will offer beginning students a clear account of the course of American history, and of its central theme, freedom, which today remains as varied, contentious, and ever-changing as America itself. And I hope that it also enables students to understand the connections between past and current events, the historical context and antecedents of the social, political, cultural, and economic issues that the American people confront today.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS All works of history are, to a considerable extent, collaborative books, in that every writer builds on the research and writing of previous scholars. This is especially true of a textbook that covers the entire American experience, over more than five centuries. My greatest debt is to the innumerable historians on whose work I have drawn in preparing this volume. The Suggested Reading list at the end of the book offers only a brief introduction to the vast body of historical scholarship that has influenced and informed this book. More specifically, however, I wish to thank the following scholars, who offered valuable comments, criticisms, and suggestions after generously reading portions of this work, or using it in their classes.

Jennifer Hudson Allen, Brookhaven College

Joel Benson, Northwest Missouri State University

Lori Bramson, Clark College

Andrea Brinton-Sanches, Cedar Valley College

Monica L. Butler, Motlow State Community College

Tonia Compton, Columbia College

Adam Costanzo, Texas A&M University

Carl Creasman Jr., Valencia College

Ashley Cruseturner, McLennan Community College

Richard Driver, Northwest Vista College

Laura Dunn, Eastern Florida State College

Kathleen DuVal, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Blake Ellis, Lone Star College–CyFair

Carla Falkner, Northeast Mississippi Community College

Robert Glen Findley, Odessa College

Amy L. Fluker, University of Mississippi

Van Forsyth, Clark College

Yvonne Frear, San Jacinto College

Beverly Gage, Yale University

Michael A. Gonzalez, El Paso Community College

Aram Goudsouzian, University of Memphis

Michael Harkins, Harper College

Peter D. Haro, San Diego City College

Sandra Harvey, Lone Star College–CyFair

Robert Hines, Palo Alto College

Traci Hodgson, Chemeketa Community College

Tamora Hoskisson, Salt Lake Community College

William Jackson, Salt Lake Community College

Alfred H. Jones, State College of Florida

Junko Isono Kato, Waseda University

David Kiracofe, Tidewater Community College

Jeremy Lehman, McLennan Community College

Brad Lookingbill, Columbia College

Jennifer Macias, Salt Lake Community College

Scott P. Marler, University of Memphis

Thomas Massey, Cape Fear Community College

Derek Maxfield, Genesee Community College

Lisa McGirr, Harvard University

Marianne McKnight, Salt Lake Community College

Jonson Miller, Drexel University

Ted Moore, Salt Lake Community College

Laura Murphy, Dutchess Community College

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, University of Southern California

Christopher Phelps, University of Nottingham

Robert Pierce, Foothills College

Ernst Pinjing, Minot State University

Harvey N. Plaunt, El Paso Community College

Steve Porter, University of Cincinnati

John Putman, San Diego State University

R. Lynn Rainard, Tidewater Community College, Chesapeake Campus

Janet Rankin, Sierra College

Nicole Ribianszky, Georgia Gwinnett College

Nancy Marie Robertson, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis

Anderson Rouse, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Horacio Salinas Jr., Laredo Community College

John Shaw, Portland Community College

Christina Snyder, Pennsylvania State University

Wendy Soltz, Purdue University Fort Wayne

Danielle Swiontek, Santa Barbara Community College

Chris Tingle, Northwest Mississippi Community College

Richard M. Trimble, Ocean County College

Alan Vangroll, Central Texas College

Karine Walther, Georgetown University

Eddie Weller, San Jacinto College

Ashli White, Miami University

Andrew Wiese, San Diego State University

Matthew Zembo, Hudson Valley Community College

I am particularly grateful to my colleagues in the Columbia University Department of History: Pablo Piccato, for his advice on Latin American history; Evan Haefeli and Ellen Baker, who read and made many suggestions for improvements in their areas of expertise (colonial America and the history of the West, respectively); and Sarah Phillips, who offered advice on treating the history of the environment.

I am also deeply indebted to the graduate students at Columbia University’s Department of History who helped with this project. For this edition, Michael “Mookie” Kideckel offered invaluable

assistance in gathering material related to borderlands and Western history for the Fifth Edition and on citizenship and identity for the current one. For previous editions, Theresa Ventura assisted in locating material for new sections placing American history in a global context, April Holm did the same for new coverage of the history of American religion and debates over religious freedom, James Delbourgo conducted research for the chapters on the colonial era, and Beverly Gage did the same for the twentieth century. In addition, Daniel Freund provided all-around research assistance. Victoria Cain did a superb job of locating images. I also want to thank my colleagues Elizabeth Blackmar and the late Alan Brinkley for offering advice and encouragement throughout the writing of this book. I am also grateful to the numerous students who, while using the textbook, pointed out to me errors or omissions that I have corrected.

Many thanks to Joshua Brown, director of the American Social History Project, whose website, History Matters, lists innumerable online resources for the study of American history. Thanks also to the instructors who helped build our robust digital resource and ancillary package. InQuizitive for History was revised by Cornelia Lambert (University of North Georgia), Jodie Steeley (Fresno City College), Jen Murray (Oklahoma State University), and Joel Tannenbaum (Community College of Philadelphia). The Coursepack Quizzes and Instructor’s Manual were thoroughly updated by Jason Newman (Cosumnes River College). Allison Faber (Texas A&M University) revised the Lecture PowerPoint slides. And our Test Bank was revised to include new questions authored by Robert O’Brien (Lone Star College–CyFair), Emily Pecora, and Carolina Zumaglini, with accuracy checking help from Matt Zembo (Hudson Valley Community College) and Jim Dudlo (Brookhaven College).

At W. W. Norton & Company, Steve Forman was an ideal editor—patient, encouraging, and always ready to offer sage advice. I would also like to thank Steve’s assistant editor Lily Gellman for her indispensable and always cheerful help on all aspects of the project; Ellen Lohman and Mary Kanable for their careful copyediting and proofreading work; Stephanie Romeo and Donna Ranieri for their resourceful attention to the illustrations program; Leah Clark, Ted Szczepanski, and Debra Morton-Hoyt for splendid work on the covers for the Sixth Edition; Jennifer Barnhardt for keeping the many threads of the project aligned and then tying them together; Sean Mintus for his efficiency and care in book production; Carson Russell for orchestrating the rich media package that accompanies the textbook and his colleagues Sarah Rose Aquilina and Alexandra Malakhoff; Sarah England Bartley, Steve Dunn, and Mike Wright for their alert reads of the U.S. survey market and their hard work in helping establish Give Me Liberty! within it; and Drake McFeely, Roby Harrington, and Julia Reidhead for maintaining Norton as an independent, employee-owned publisher dedicated to excellence in its work.

Many students may have heard stories of how publishing companies alter the language and content of textbooks in an attempt to maximize sales and avoid alienating any potential reader. In this case, I can honestly say that W. W. Norton allowed me a free hand in writing the book and, apart from the usual editorial corrections, did not try to influence its content at all. For this I thank them, while I accept full responsibility for the interpretations presented and for any errors the book may contain. Since no book of this length can be entirely free of mistakes, I welcome readers to send me corrections at [email protected].

My greatest debt, as always, is to my family—my wife, Lynn Garafola, for her good-natured support while I was preoccupied by a project that consumed more than its fair share of my time and energy, and my daughter, Daria, who while a ninth and tenth grader read every chapter of the First Edition as it was written, for a modest payment, and offered invaluable suggestions about improving the book’s clarity, logic, and grammar.

Eric Foner        

New York City

March 2019     

GIVE ME LIBERTY! DIGITAL RESOURCES FOR STUDENTS AND INSTRUCTORS W. W. Norton offers a robust digital package to support teaching and learning with Give Me Liberty! These resources are designed to make students more effective textbook readers, while at the same time developing their critical thinking and history skills.

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CHAPTER 15

“WHAT IS FREEDOM?”: RECONSTRUCTION

1865–1877

FOCUS QUESTIONS What visions of freedom did the former slaves and slaveholders pursue in the postwar South? What were the sources, goals, and competing visions for Reconstruction? What were the social and political effects of Radical Reconstruction in the South? What were the main factors, in both the North and South, for the overthrow of Reconstruction?

On the evening of January 12, 1865, less than a month after Union forces captured Savannah, Georgia, twenty leaders of the city’s black community gathered for a discussion with General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. Mostly Baptist and Methodist ministers, the group included several men who within a few years would assume prominent positions during the era of Reconstruction that followed the Civil War. Ulysses S. Houston, pastor of the city’s Third African Baptist Church, and James Porter, an Episcopal religious leader who had operated a secret school for black children before the war, in a few years would win election to the Georgia legislature. James D. Lynch, who had been born free in Baltimore and educated in New Hampshire, went on to serve as secretary of state of Mississippi.

The conversation revealed that the black leaders brought out of slavery a clear definition of freedom. Asked what he understood by slavery, Garrison Frazier, a Baptist minister chosen as the group’s spokesman, responded that it meant one person’s “receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent.” Freedom he defined as “placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor, and take care of ourselves.” The way to accomplish this was “to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor.” Frazier insisted that blacks possessed “sufficient intelligence” to maintain themselves in freedom and enjoy the equal protection of the laws.

Sherman’s meeting with the black leaders foreshadowed some of the radical changes that would take place during the era known as Reconstruction (meaning, literally, the rebuilding of the shattered nation). In the years following the Civil War, former slaves and their white allies, North and South, would seek to redefine the meaning and boundaries of American freedom and citizenship. Previously an entitlement of whites, these would be expanded to include black Americans. The laws and Constitution would be rewritten to guarantee African-Americans, for the first time in the nation’s history, recognition as citizens and equality before the law. Black men would be granted the right to vote, ushering in a period of interracial democracy throughout the South. Black schools, churches, and other institutions would flourish, laying the foundation for the modern African-American community. Many of the advances of Reconstruction would prove temporary, swept away during a campaign of violence in the South and the North’s retreat from the ideal of equality. But Reconstruction laid the foundation for future struggles to extend freedom to all Americans.

All this, however, lay in the future in January 1865. Four days after the meeting, Sherman responded to the black delegation by issuing Special Field Order 15. This set aside the Sea Islands and a large area along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts for the settlement of black families on forty-acre plots of land. He also offered them broken-down mules that the army could no longer use. In Sherman’s order lay the origins of the phrase “forty acres and a mule,” which would reverberate across the South in the next few years. By June, some 40,000 freed slaves had been settled on “Sherman land.” Among the emancipated slaves, Sherman’s order raised hopes that the end of slavery would be accompanied by the economic independence that they, like other Americans, believed essential to genuine freedom.

• CHRONOLOGY • 1865 Special Field Order 15

Freedmen’s Bureau established

Lincoln assassinated; Andrew Johnson becomes president

1865–1867 Presidential Reconstruction

Black Codes

1866 Civil Rights Bill

Ku Klux Klan established

1867 Reconstruction Act of 1867

Tenure of Office Act

1867–1877 Radical Reconstruction of 1867

1868 Impeachment and trial of President Johnson

Fourteenth Amendment ratified

1869 Inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant

Women’s rights organization splits into two groups

1870 Hiram Revels, first black U.S. senator

Fifteenth Amendment ratified

1870–1871 Enforcement Acts

1872 Liberal Republicans established

1873 Colfax Massacre

Slaughterhouse Cases

National economic depression begins

1876 United States v. Cruikshank

1877 Bargain of 1877

THE MEANING OF FREEDOM With the end of the Civil War, declared an Illinois congressman in 1865, the United States was a “new nation,” for the first time “wholly free.” The destruction of slavery, however, made the definition of freedom the central question on the nation’s agenda. “What is freedom?” asked Congressman James A. Garfield in 1865. “Is it the bare privilege of not being chained? If this is all, then freedom is a bitter mockery, a cruel delusion.” Did freedom mean simply the absence of slavery, or did it imply other rights for the former slaves, and if so, which ones: equal civil rights, the vote, ownership of property? During Reconstruction, freedom became a terrain of conflict, its substance open to different, often contradictory interpretations. Out of the conflict over the meaning of freedom arose new kinds of relations between black and white southerners, and a new definition of the rights of all Americans.

Blacks and the Meaning of Freedom African-Americans’ understanding of freedom was shaped by their experiences as slaves and their observation of the free society around them. To begin with, freedom meant escaping the numerous injustices of slavery—punishment by the lash, the separation of families, denial of access to education, the sexual exploitation of black women by their owners—and sharing in the rights and opportunities of American citizens. “If I cannot do like a white man,” Henry Adams, an emancipated slave in Louisiana, told his former master in 1865, “I am not free.”

Blacks relished the opportunity to demonstrate their liberation from the regulations, significant and trivial, associated with slavery. They openly held mass meetings and religious services free of white supervision, and they acquired dogs, guns, and liquor, all barred to them under slavery. No longer required to obtain a pass from their owners to travel, former slaves throughout the South left the plantations in search of better jobs, family members, or simply a taste of personal liberty. Many moved to southern towns and cities, where, it seemed, “freedom was free-er.”

Families in Freedom With slavery dead, institutions that had existed before the war, like the black family, free blacks’ churches and schools, and the secret slave church, were strengthened, expanded, and freed from white supervision. The family was central to the postemancipation black community. Former slaves made remarkable efforts to locate loved ones from whom they had been separated under slavery. One northern reporter in 1865 encountered a freedman who had walked more than 600 miles from Georgia to North Carolina, searching for the wife and children from whom he had been sold away before the war. Meanwhile, widows of black soldiers successfully claimed survivors’ pensions, forcing the federal government to acknowledge the validity of prewar relationships that slavery had attempted to deny.

But while Reconstruction witnessed the stabilization of family life, freedom subtly altered relationships within the family. Emancipation increased the power of black men and brought to many black families the nineteenth-century notion that men and women should inhabit separate “spheres.” Immediately after the Civil War, planters complained that freedwomen had “withdrawn” from field labor and work as house servants. Many black women preferred to devote more time to their families than had been possible under slavery, and men considered it a badge of honor to see their wives remain at home. Eventually, the dire poverty of the black community would compel a far higher proportion of black women than white women to go to work for wages.

Church and School At the same time, blacks abandoned white-controlled religious institutions to create churches of their own. On the eve of the Civil War, 42,000 black Methodists worshiped in biracial South Carolina churches; by the end of Reconstruction, only 600 remained. The rise of the independent black church, with Methodists and Baptists commanding the largest followings, redrew the religious map of the South. As the major institution independent of white control, the church played a central role in the black community. A place of worship, it also housed schools, social events, and political gatherings. Black ministers came to play a major role in politics. Some 250 held public office during Reconstruction.

Marriage of a Colored Soldier at Vicksburg, a sketch of a wedding ceremony by Alfred R. Waud soon after the end of the Civil War.

Another striking example of the freedpeople’s quest for individual and community improvement was their desire for education. Education, declared a Mississippi freedman, was “the next best thing to liberty.” The thirst for learning sprang from many sources—a desire to read the Bible, the need to prepare for the economic marketplace, and the opportunity, which arose in 1867, to take part in politics. Blacks of all ages flocked to the schools established by northern missionary societies, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and groups of ex-slaves. Northern journalist Sidney Andrews, who toured the South in 1865, was impressed by how much education also took place outside of the classroom: “I had occasion very frequently to notice that porters in stores and laboring men in warehouses, and cart drivers on the streets, had spelling books with them, and were studying them during the time they were not occupied with their work.” Reconstruction also witnessed the creation of the nation’s first black colleges, including Fisk University in Tennessee, Hampton Institute in Virginia, and Howard University in the nation’s capital.

Political Freedom In a society that had made political participation a core element of freedom, the right to vote inevitably became central to the former slaves’ desire for empowerment and equality. As Frederick Douglass put it soon after the South’s surrender in 1865, “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.” In a “monarchial government,” Douglass explained, no “special” disgrace applied to those denied the right to vote. But in a democracy, “where universal suffrage is the rule,” excluding any group meant branding them with “the stigma of inferiority.” As soon as the Civil War ended, and in some parts of the South even earlier, free blacks and emancipated slaves claimed a place in the public sphere. They came together in conventions, parades, and petition drives to demand the right to vote and, on occasion, to organize their own “freedom ballots.” Anything less than full citizenship, black spokesmen insisted, would betray the nation’s democratic promise and the war’s meaning.

Land, Labor, and Freedom Former slaves’ ideas of freedom, like those of rural people throughout the world, were directly related to landownership. Only land, wrote Merrimon Howard, a freedman from Mississippi, would enable “the poor class to enjoy the sweet boon of freedom.” On the land they would develop independent communities free of white control. Many former slaves insisted that through their unpaid labor, they had acquired a right to the land. “The property which they hold,” declared an Alabama black convention, “was nearly all earned by the sweat of our brows.” In some parts of the South, blacks in 1865 seized property, insisting that it belonged to them. On one Tennessee plantation, former slaves claimed to be “joint heirs” to the estate and, the owner complained, took up residence “in the rooms of my house.”

In its individual elements and much of its language, former slaves’ definition of freedom resembled that of white Americans—self-ownership, family stability, religious liberty, political participation, and economic autonomy. But these elements combined to form a vision very much their own. For whites, freedom, no matter how defined, was a given, a birthright to be defended. For African- Americans, it was an open-ended process, a transformation of every aspect of their lives and of the society and culture that had sustained slavery in the first place. Although the freedpeople failed to achieve full freedom as they understood it, their definition did much to shape national debate during the turbulent era of Reconstruction.

Masters without Slaves Most white southerners reacted to military defeat and emancipation with dismay, not only because of the widespread devastation but also because they must now submit to northern demands. “The demoralization is complete,” wrote a Georgia girl. “We are whipped, there is no doubt about it.” The appalling loss of life, a disaster without parallel in the American experience, affected all classes of southerners. Nearly 260,000 men died for the Confederacy—more than one-fifth of the South’s adult male white population. The wholesale destruction of work animals, farm buildings, and machinery ensured that economic revival would be slow and painful. In 1870, the value of property in the South, not counting that represented by slaves, was 30 percent lower than before the war.

THE BARROW PLANTATION

Two maps of the Barrow plantation illustrate the effects of emancipation on rural life in the South. In 1860, slaves lived in communal quarters near the owner’s house. Twenty-one years later, former slaves working as sharecroppers lived scattered across the plantation and had their own church and school.

Planter families faced profound changes in the war’s aftermath. Many lost not only their slaves but also their life savings, which they had patriotically invested in now-worthless Confederate bonds. Some, whose slaves departed the plantation, for the first time found themselves compelled to do

physical labor. General Braxton Bragg returned to his “once prosperous” Alabama home to find “all, all was lost, except my debts.” Bragg and his wife, a woman “raised in affluence,” lived for a time in a slave cabin.

Southern planters sought to implement an understanding of freedom quite different from that of the former slaves. As they struggled to accept the reality of emancipation, most planters defined black freedom in the narrowest manner. As journalist Sidney Andrews discovered late in 1865, “The whites seem wholly unable to comprehend that freedom for the negro means the same thing as freedom for them. They readily enough admit that the government has made him free, but appear to believe that they have the right to exercise the same old control.” To southern leaders, freedom still meant hierarchy and mastery; it was a privilege not a right, a carefully defined legal status rather than an open-ended entitlement. Certainly, it implied neither economic autonomy nor civil and political equality. A Kentucky newspaper summed up the stance of much of the white South: the former slave was “free, but free only to labor.”

The Free Labor Vision Along with former slaves and former masters, the victorious Republican North tried to implement its own vision of freedom. Central to its definition was the antebellum principle of free labor, now further strengthened as a definition of the good society by the Union’s triumph. In the free labor vision of a reconstructed South, emancipated blacks, enjoying the same opportunities for advancement as northern workers, would labor more productively than they had as slaves. At the same time, northern capital and migrants would energize the economy. The South would eventually come to resemble the “free society” of the North, complete with public schools, small towns, and independent farmers. Unified on the basis of free labor, proclaimed Carl Schurz, a refugee from the failed German revolution of 1848 who rose to become a leader of the Republican Party, America would become “a republic, greater, more populous, freer, more prosperous, and more powerful” than any in history.

With planters seeking to establish a labor system as close to slavery as possible, and former slaves demanding economic autonomy and access to land, a long period of conflict over the organization and control of labor followed on plantations throughout the South. It fell to the Freedmen’s Bureau, an agency established by Congress in March 1865, to attempt to establish a working free labor system.

The Freedmen’s Bureau Under the direction of O. O. Howard, a graduate of Bowdoin College in Maine and a veteran of the Civil War, the Bureau took on responsibilities that can only be described as daunting. The Bureau was an experiment in government social policy that seems to belong more comfortably to the New Deal of the 1930s or the Great Society of the 1960s (see Chapters 21 and 25, respectively) than to nineteenth-century America. Bureau agents were supposed to establish schools, provide aid to the poor and aged, settle disputes between whites and blacks and among the freedpeople, and secure for former slaves and white Unionists equal treatment before the courts. “It is not . . . in your power to fulfill one-tenth of the expectations of those who framed the Bureau,” General William T. Sherman wrote to Howard. “I fear you have Hercules’ task.”

Winslow Homer’s 1876 painting The Cotton Pickers, one of a series of studies of rural life in Virginia, portrays two black women as dignified figures, without a trace of the stereotyping so common in the era’s representations of former slaves. The expressions on their faces are ambiguous, perhaps conveying disappointment that eleven years after the end of slavery they are still at work in the fields.

The Bureau lasted from 1865 to 1870. Even at its peak, there were fewer than 1,000 agents in the entire South. Nonetheless, the Bureau’s achievements in some areas, notably education and health care, were striking. While the Bureau did not establish schools itself, it coordinated and helped to finance the activities of northern societies committed to black education. By 1869, nearly 3,000 schools, serving more than 150,000 pupils in the South, reported to the Bureau. Bureau agents also assumed control of hospitals established by the army during the war, and expanded the system into new communities. They provided medical care to both black and white southerners. In economic relations, however, the Bureau’s activities proved far more problematic.

The Failure of Land Reform The idea of free labor, wrote one Bureau agent, was “the noblest principle on earth.” All that was required to harmonize race relations in the South was fair wages, good working conditions, and the opportunity to improve the laborer’s situation in life. But blacks wanted land of their own, not jobs on plantations. One provision of the law establishing the Bureau gave it the authority to divide abandoned and confiscated land into forty-acre plots for rental and eventual sale to the former slaves.

In the summer of 1865, however, President Andrew Johnson, who had succeeded Lincoln, ordered nearly all land in federal hands returned to its former owners. A series of confrontations followed, notably in South Carolina and Georgia, where the army forcibly evicted blacks who had settled on “Sherman land.” When O. O. Howard, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, traveled to the Sea Islands to inform blacks of the new policy, he was greeted with disbelief and protest. A committee of former slaves drew up petitions to Howard and President Johnson. “We want Homesteads,” they declared, “we were promised Homesteads by the government.” Land, the freedmen insisted, was essential to the meaning of freedom. Without it, they declared, “we have not bettered our condition” from the days of slavery—“you will see, this is not the condition of really free men.”

Because no land distribution took place, the vast majority of rural freedpeople remained poor and without property during Reconstruction. They had no alternative but to work on white-owned plantations, often for their former owners. Far from being able to rise in the social scale through hard work, black men were largely confined to farm work, unskilled labor, and service jobs, and black women to positions in private homes as cooks and maids. Their wages remained too low to allow for any accumulation. By the turn of the century, a significant number of southern African-Americans had managed to acquire small parcels of land. But the failure of land reform produced a deep sense of betrayal that survived among the former slaves and their descendants long after the end of Reconstruction. “No sir,” Mary Gaffney, an elderly ex-slave, recalled in the 1930s, “we were not given a thing but freedom.”

Toward a New South Out of the conflict on the plantations, new systems of labor emerged in the different regions of the South. The task system, under which workers were assigned daily tasks, completion of which ended their responsibilities for that day, survived in the rice kingdom of South Carolina and Georgia. Closely supervised wage labor predominated on the sugar plantations of southern Louisiana. Sharecropping came to dominate the Cotton Belt and much of the Tobacco Belt of Virginia and North Carolina.

SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTH, 1880

By 1880, sharecropping had become the dominant form of agricultural labor in large parts of the South. The system involved both white and black farmers.

Sharecropping initially arose as a compromise between blacks’ desire for land and planters’ demand for labor discipline. The system allowed each black family to rent a part of a plantation, with the crop divided between worker and owner at the end of the year. Sharecropping guaranteed the planters a stable resident labor force. Former slaves preferred it to gang labor because it offered them the prospect of working without day-to-day white supervision. But as the years went on, sharecropping became more and more oppressive. Sharecroppers’ economic opportunities were severely limited by a world market in which the price of farm products suffered a prolonged decline.

The White Farmer The plight of the small farmer was not confined to blacks in the postwar South. Wartime devastation set in motion a train of events that permanently altered the independent way of life of white yeomen, leading to what they considered a loss of freedom. Before the war, most small farmers had concentrated on raising food for their families and grew little cotton. With much of their property destroyed, many yeomen saw their economic condition worsened by successive crop failures after the war. To obtain supplies from merchants, farmers were forced to take up the growing of cotton and pledge a part of the crop as collateral (property the creditor can seize if a debt is not paid). This system became known as the crop lien. Since interest rates were extremely high and the price of cotton fell steadily, many farmers found themselves still in debt after marketing their portion of the crop at year’s end. They had no choice but to continue to plant cotton to obtain new loans. By the mid-1870s, white farmers, who cultivated only 10 percent of the South’s cotton crop in 1860, were growing 40 percent, and many who had owned their land had fallen into dependency as sharecroppers, who now rented land owned by others.

Both black and white farmers found themselves caught in the sharecropping and crop-lien systems. A far higher percentage of black than white farmers in the South rented land rather than owned it. But every census from 1880 to 1940 counted more white than black sharecroppers. The workings of sharecropping and the crop-lien system are illustrated by the case of Matt Brown, a Mississippi farmer who borrowed money each year from a local merchant. He began 1892 with a debt of $226 held over from the previous year. By 1893, although he produced cotton worth $171, Brown’s debt had increased to $402, because he had borrowed $33 for food, $29 for clothing, $173 for supplies, and $112 for other items. Brown never succeeded in getting out of debt. He died in 1905; the last entry under his name in the merchant’s account book is a coffin.

The Urban South Even as the rural South stagnated economically, southern cities experienced remarkable growth after the Civil War. As railroads penetrated the interior, they enabled merchants in market centers like Atlanta to trade directly with the North, bypassing coastal cities that had traditionally monopolized southern commerce. A new urban middle class of merchants, railroad promoters, and bankers reaped the benefits of the spread of cotton production in the postwar South.

Thus, Reconstruction brought about profound changes in the lives of southerners, black and white, rich and poor. In place of the prewar world of master, slave, and self-sufficient yeoman, the postwar South was peopled by new social classes—landowning employers, black and white sharecroppers, cotton-producing white farmers, wage-earning black laborers, and urban entrepreneurs. Each of these groups turned to Reconstruction politics in an attempt to shape to its own advantage the aftermath of emancipation.

Aftermath of Slavery The United States, of course, was not the only society to confront the transition from slavery to freedom. Indeed, many parallels exist between the debates during Reconstruction and struggles that followed slavery in other parts of the Western Hemisphere over the same issues of land, control of labor, and political power. In every case, former planters (or, in Haiti, where the planter class had been destroyed, the government itself) tried to encourage or require former slaves to go back to work on plantations to grow the same crops as under slavery. Planters elsewhere held the same stereotypical views of black laborers as were voiced by their counterparts in the United States— former slaves were supposedly lazy, were lacking in ambition, and thought that freedom meant an absence of labor.

Chinese laborers at work on a Louisiana plantation during Reconstruction.

For their part, former slaves throughout the hemisphere tried to carve out as much independence as possible, both in their daily lives and in their labor. They attempted to reconstruct family life by withdrawing women and children from field labor (in the West Indies, women turned to marketing their families’ crops to earn income). Wherever possible, former slaves acquired land of their own and devoted more time to growing food for their families than to growing crops for the international market. In many places, the plantations either fell to pieces, as in Haiti, or continued operating with a new labor force composed of indentured servants from India and China, as in Jamaica, Trinidad, and

British Guiana. Southern planters in the United States brought in a few Chinese laborers in an attempt to replace freedmen, but since the federal government opposed such efforts, the Chinese remained only a tiny proportion of the southern workforce.

VOICES OF FREEDOM

From PETITION OF COMMITTEE IN BEHALF OF THE FREEDMEN TO ANDREW JOHNSON (1865)

In the summer of 1865, President Andrew Johnson ordered land that had been distributed to freed slaves in South Carolina and Georgia returned to its former owners. A committee of freedmen drafted a petition asking for the right to obtain land. Johnson did not, however, change his policy.

We the freedmen of Edisto Island, South Carolina, have learned from you through Major General O. O. Howard . . . with deep sorrow and painful hearts of the possibility of [the] government restoring these lands to the former owners. We are well aware of the many perplexing and trying questions that burden your mind, and therefore pray to god (the preserver of all, and who has through our late and beloved President [Lincoln’s] proclamation and the war made us a free people) that he may guide you in making your decisions and give you that wisdom that cometh from above to settle these great and important questions for the best interests of the country and the colored race.

Here is where secession was born and nurtured. Here is where we have toiled nearly all our lives as slaves and treated like dumb driven cattle. This is our home, we have made these lands what they were, we are the only true and loyal people that were found in possession of these lands. We have been always ready to strike for liberty and humanity, yea to fight if need be to preserve this glorious Union. Shall not we who are freedmen and have always been true to this Union have the same rights as are enjoyed by others? . . . Are not our rights as a free people and good citizens of these United States to be considered before those who were found in rebellion against this good and just government? . . .

[Are] we who have been abused and oppressed for many long years not to be allowed the privilege of purchasing land but be subject to the will of these large land owners? God forbid. Land monopoly is injurious to the advancement of the course of freedom, and if government does not make some provision by which we as freedmen can obtain a homestead, we have not bettered our condition. . . .

We look to you . . . for protection and equal rights with the privilege of purchasing a homestead—a homestead right here in the heart of South Carolina.

From A SHARECROPPING CONTRACT (1866)

Few former slaves were able to acquire land in the post–Civil War South. Most ended up as sharecroppers, working on white-owned land for a share of the crop at the end of the growing season. This contract, typical of thousands of others, originated in Tennessee. The laborers signed with an X, as they were illiterate.

Thomas J. Ross agrees to employ the Freedmen to plant and raise a crop on his Rosstown Plantation. . . . On the following Rules, Regulations and Remunerations.

The said Ross agrees to furnish the land to cultivate, and a sufficient number of mules & horses and feed them to make and house said crop and all necessary farming utensils to carry on the same and to

give unto said Freedmen whose names appear below one half of all the cotton, corn and wheat that is raised on said place for the year 1866 after all the necessary expenses are deducted out that accrues on said crop. Outside of the Freedmen’s labor in harvesting, carrying to market and selling the same the said Freedmen . . . covenant and agrees to and with said Thomas J. Ross that for and in consideration of one half of the crop before mentioned that they will plant, cultivate, and raise under the management control and Superintendence of said Ross, in good faith, a cotton, corn and oat crop under his management for the year 1866. And we the said Freedmen agrees to furnish ourselves & families in provisions, clothing, medicine and medical bills and all, and every kind of other expenses that we may incur on said plantation for the year 1866 free of charge to said Ross. Should the said Ross furnish us any of the above supplies or any other kind of expenses, during said year, [we] are to settle and pay him out of the net proceeds of our part of the crop the retail price of the county at time of sale or any price we may agree upon—The said Ross shall keep a regular book account, against each and every one or the head of every family to be adjusted and settled at the end of the year.

We furthermore bind ourselves to and with said Ross that we will do good work and labor ten hours a day on an average, winter and summer. . . . We further agree that we will lose all lost time, or pay at the rate of one dollar per day, rainy days excepted. In sickness and women lying in childbed are to lose the time and account for it to the other hands out of his or her part of the crop. . . .

We furthermore bind ourselves that we will obey the orders of said Ross in all things in carrying out and managing said crop for said year and be docked for disobedience. All is responsible for all farming utensils that is on hand or may be placed in care of said Freedmen for the year 1866 to said Ross and are also responsible to said Ross if we carelessly, maliciously maltreat any of his stock for said year to said Ross for damages to be assessed out of our wages.

Samuel (X) Johnson, Thomas (X) Richard, Tinny (X) Fitch, Jessie (X) Simmons, Sophe (X) Pruden, Henry (X) Pruden, Frances (X) Pruden, Elijah (X) Smith

QUESTIONS

1. Why do the black petitioners believe that owning land is essential to the enjoyment of freedom? 2. In what ways does the contract limit the freedom of the laborers? 3. What do these documents suggest about competing definitions of black freedom in the

aftermath of slavery?

But if struggles over land and labor united its postemancipation experience with that of other societies, in one respect the United States was unique. Only in the United States were former slaves, within two years of the end of slavery, granted the right to vote and, thus, given a major share of political power. Few anticipated this development when the Civil War ended. It came about as the result of one of the greatest political crises of American history—the battle between President Andrew Johnson and Congress over Reconstruction. The struggle resulted in profound changes in the nature of citizenship, the structure of constitutional authority, and the meaning of American freedom.

Glossary the Freedmen’s Bureau Reconstruction agency established in 1865 to protect the legal rights of former slaves and to assist with their education, jobs, health care, and landowning. sharecropping Type of farm tenancy that developed after the Civil War in which landless workers—often former slaves—farmed land in exchange for farm supplies and a share of the crop. crop lien Credit extended by merchants to tenants based on their future crops; under this system, high interest rates and the uncertainties of farming often led to inescapable debts.

THE MAKING OF RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION

Andrew Johnson To Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, fell the task of overseeing the restoration of the Union. Born in poverty in North Carolina, as a youth Johnson worked as a tailor’s apprentice. After moving to Tennessee, he achieved success through politics. Beginning as an alderman (a town official), he rose to serve in the state legislature, Congress, and for two terms as governor of Tennessee. Johnson identified himself as the champion of his state’s “honest yeomen” and a foe of large planters, whom he described as a “bloated, corrupted aristocracy.” A strong defender of the Union, he became the only senator from a seceding state to remain at his post in Washington, D.C., when the Civil War began. When northern forces occupied Tennessee, Abraham Lincoln named him military governor. In 1864, Republicans nominated him to run for vice president as a symbol of the party’s hope of extending its organization into the South.

In personality and outlook, Johnson proved unsuited for the responsibilities he shouldered after Lincoln’s death. A lonely, stubborn man, he was intolerant of criticism and unable to compromise. He lacked Lincoln’s political skills and keen sense of public opinion. A fervent believer in states’ rights, Johnson insisted that since secession was illegal, the southern states had never actually left the Union or surrendered the right to govern their own affairs. Moreover, while Johnson had supported emancipation once Lincoln made it a goal of the war effort, he held deeply racist views. African- Americans, Johnson believed, had no role to play in Reconstruction.

The Failure of Presidential Reconstruction A little over a month after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and with Congress out of session until December, Johnson in May 1865 outlined his plan for reuniting the nation. He issued a series of proclamations that began the period of Presidential Reconstruction (1865–1867). Johnson offered a pardon (which restored political and property rights, except for slaves) to nearly all white southerners who took an oath of allegiance to the Union. He excluded Confederate leaders and wealthy planters whose prewar property had been valued at more than $20,000. This exemption suggested at first that Johnson planned a more punitive Reconstruction than Lincoln had intended. Most of those exempted, however, soon received individual pardons from the president. Johnson also appointed provisional governors and ordered them to call state conventions, elected by whites alone, that would establish loyal governments in the South. Apart from the requirement that they abolish slavery, repudiate secession, and refuse to pay the Confederate debt—all unavoidable consequences of southern defeat —he granted the new governments a free hand in managing local affairs.

At first, most northerners believed Johnson’s policy deserved a chance to succeed. The conduct of the southern governments elected under his program, however, turned most of the Republican North against the president. By and large, white voters returned prominent Confederates and members of the old elite to power. Reports of violence directed against former slaves and northern visitors in the South further alarmed Republicans.

The Black Codes But what aroused the most opposition to Johnson’s Reconstruction policy were the Black Codes, laws passed by the new southern governments that attempted to regulate the lives of the former slaves. These laws granted blacks certain rights, such as legalized marriage, ownership of property, and limited access to the courts. But they denied them the rights to testify against whites, to serve on juries or in state militias, or to vote. And in response to planters’ demands that the freedpeople be required to work on the plantations, the Black Codes declared that those who failed to sign yearly labor contracts could be arrested and hired out to white landowners. Some states limited the occupations open to blacks and barred them from acquiring land, and others provided that judges could assign black children to work for their former owners without the consent of the parents. “We are not permitted to own the land whereon to build a schoolhouse or a church,” complained a black convention in Mississippi. “Where is justice? Where is freedom?”

Clearly, the death of slavery did not automatically mean the birth of freedom. But the Black Codes so completely violated free labor principles that they called forth a vigorous response from the Republican North. Wars—especially civil wars—often generate hostility and bitterness. But few groups of rebels in history have been treated more leniently than the defeated Confederates. A handful of southern leaders were arrested but most were quickly released. Only one was executed— Henry Wirz, the commander of Andersonville prison, where thousands of Union prisoners of war had died. Most of the Union army was swiftly demobilized. What motivated the North’s turn against Johnson’s policies was not a desire to “punish” the white South, but the inability of the South’s political leaders to accept the reality of emancipation. “We must see to it,” announced Republican senator William Stewart of Nevada, “that the man made free by the Constitution of the United States is a freeman indeed.”

The Radical Republicans When Congress assembled in December 1865, Johnson announced that with loyal governments functioning in all the southern states, the nation had been reunited. In response, Radical Republicans, who had grown increasingly disenchanted with Johnson during the summer and fall, called for the dissolution of these governments and the establishment of new ones with “rebels” excluded from power and black men guaranteed the right to vote. Radicals tended to represent constituencies in New England and the “burned-over” districts of the rural North that had been home to religious revivalism, abolitionism, and other reform movements. Although they differed on many issues, Radicals shared the conviction that Union victory created a golden opportunity to institutionalize the principle of equal rights for all, regardless of race.

The Radicals fully embraced the expanded powers of the federal government born during the Civil War. Traditions of federalism and states’ rights, they insisted, must not obstruct a sweeping national effort to protect the rights of all Americans. The most prominent Radicals in Congress were Charles Sumner, a senator from Massachusetts, and Thaddeus Stevens, a lawyer and iron manufacturer who represented Pennsylvania in the House of Representatives. Before the Civil War, both had been outspoken foes of slavery and defenders of black rights. “The same national authority,” declared Sumner, “that destroyed slavery must see that this other pretension [racial inequality] is not permitted to survive.”

Thaddeus Stevens’s most cherished aim was to confiscate the land of disloyal planters and divide it among former slaves and northern migrants to the South. “The whole fabric of southern society,” he declared, “must be changed. Without this, this Government can never be, as it has never been, a true republic.” But his plan to make “small independent landholders” of the former slaves proved too radical even for many of his Radical colleagues. Congress, to be sure, had already offered free land to settlers in the West in the Homestead Act of 1862. But this land had been in the possession of the federal government, not private individuals (although originally, of course, it had belonged to Indians). Most congressmen believed too deeply in the sanctity of property rights to be willing to take land from one group of owners and distribute it to others. Stevens’s proposal failed to pass.

Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the Radical Republicans in the House of Representatives during Reconstruction.

The Origins of Civil Rights With the South unrepresented, Republicans enjoyed an overwhelming majority in Congress. But the party was internally divided. Most Republicans were moderates, not Radicals. Moderates believed that Johnson’s plan was flawed, but they desired to work with the president to modify it. They feared that neither northern nor southern whites would accept black suffrage. Moderates and Radicals joined in refusing to seat the southerners recently elected to Congress, but moderates broke with the Radicals by leaving the Johnson governments in place.

Early in 1866, Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois proposed two bills, reflecting the moderates’ belief that Johnson’s policy required modification. The first extended the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had originally been established for only one year. The second, the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, was described by one congressman as “one of the most important bills ever presented to the House for its action.” It defined all persons born in the United States as citizens and spelled out rights they were to enjoy without regard to race. Equality before the law was central to the measure—no longer could states enact laws like the Black Codes discriminating between white and black citizens. So were free labor values. According to the law, no state could deprive any citizen of the right to make contracts, bring lawsuits, or enjoy equal protection of one’s person and property. These, said Trumbull, were the “fundamental rights belonging to every man as a free man.” The bill made no mention of the right to vote for blacks. In constitutional terms, the Civil Rights Bill represented the first attempt to give concrete meaning to the Thirteenth Amendment, which had abolished slavery, to define in law the essence of freedom.

To the surprise of Congress, Johnson vetoed both bills. Both, he said, would centralize power in the national government and deprive the states of the authority to regulate their own affairs. Moreover, he argued, blacks did not deserve the rights of citizenship. By acting to secure their rights, Congress was discriminating “against the white race.” The vetoes made a breach between the president and nearly the entire Republican Party inevitable. Congress failed by a single vote to muster the two- thirds majority necessary to override the veto of the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill (although later in 1866, it did extend the Bureau’s life to 1870). But in April 1866, the Civil Rights Bill became the first major law in American history to be passed over a presidential veto.

The Fourteenth Amendment Congress now proceeded to adopt its own plan of Reconstruction. In June, it approved and sent to the states for ratification the Fourteenth Amendment, which placed in the Constitution the principle of birthright citizenship, except for Native Americans subject to tribal authority, and empowered the federal government to protect the rights of all Americans. The amendment prohibited the states from abridging the “privileges or immunities” of citizens or denying any person of the “equal protection of the laws.” This broad language opened the door for future Congresses and the federal courts to breathe meaning into the guarantee of legal equality.

In a compromise between the radical and moderate positions on black suffrage, the amendment did not grant blacks the right to vote. But it did provide that if a state denied the vote to any group of men, that state’s representation in Congress would be reduced. (This provision did not apply when states barred women from voting.) The abolition of slavery threatened to increase southern political power, since now all blacks, not merely three-fifths as in the case of slaves, would be counted in determining a state’s representation in Congress. The Fourteenth Amendment offered the leaders of the white South a choice—allow black men to vote and keep their state’s full representation in the House of Representatives, or limit the vote to whites and sacrifice part of their political power.

The Fourteenth Amendment produced an intense division between the parties. Not a single Democrat in Congress voted in its favor, and only 4 of 175 Republicans were opposed. Radicals, to be sure, expressed their disappointment that the amendment did not guarantee black suffrage. (It was far from perfect, Stevens told the House, but he intended to vote for it, “because I live among men and not among angels.”) Nonetheless, by writing into the Constitution the principle that equality before the law regardless of race is a fundamental right of all American citizens, the amendment made the most important change in that document since the adoption of the Bill of Rights.

The Reconstruction Act The Fourteenth Amendment became the central issue of the political campaign of 1866. Johnson embarked on a speaking tour of the North, called by journalists the “swing around the circle,” to urge voters to elect members of Congress committed to his own Reconstruction program. Denouncing his critics, the president made wild accusations that the Radicals were plotting to assassinate him. His behavior further undermined public support for his policies, as did riots that broke out in Memphis and New Orleans, in which white policemen and citizens killed dozens of blacks.

Reconstruction, an elaborate allegory of national reconciliation, equality, and progress, designed by Horatio Bateman and printed in 1867. The overall message is that Reconstruction, grounded in liberty and equality, will restore good will between the sections and races. The structure at the center symbolizes the federal government; it is being rebuilt as black and white men carry new pillars, representing the states, to support it. The old bases of some of the columns, called “Foundations of Slavery,” are being replaced by new ones representing Liberty, Justice, and Education. Under the dome, former rivals shake hands, including Generals Grant and Lee, and Republican editor Horace Greeley and Jefferson Davis. Scenes surrounding it include a schoolyard, men and women voting, and Indians and whites sitting together. At the top are the heads of great figures of American history, as well as other historical characters including Joan of Arc, John Milton, and Jesus Christ. The eagle at the center carries a streamer reading: “All

men are born free and equal.”

In the northern congressional elections that fall, Republicans opposed to Johnson’s policies won a sweeping victory. Nonetheless, at the president’s urging, every southern state but Tennessee refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. The intransigence of Johnson and the bulk of the white South pushed moderate Republicans toward the Radicals. In March 1867, over Johnson’s veto, Congress adopted the Reconstruction Act, which temporarily divided the South into five military districts and called for the creation of new state governments, with black men given the right to vote. Thus began the period of Radical Reconstruction, which lasted until 1877. But the conflict between President Johnson and Congress did not end with the passage of the Reconstruction Act.

Impeachment and the Election of Grant In March 1867, Congress adopted the Tenure of Office Act, barring the president from removing certain officeholders, including cabinet members, without the consent of the Senate. Johnson considered this an unconstitutional restriction on his authority. In February 1868, he dismissed Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, an ally of the Radicals. The House of Representatives responded by approving articles of impeachment—that is, it presented charges against Johnson to the Senate, which had to decide whether to remove him from office.

That spring, for the first time in American history, a president was placed on trial before the Senate for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” By this point, virtually all Republicans considered Johnson a failure as president. But some moderates disliked Benjamin F. Wade, a Radical who, as temporary president of the Senate, would become president if Johnson were removed. Others feared that conviction would damage the constitutional separation of powers between Congress and the executive. Johnson’s lawyers assured moderate Republicans that, if acquitted, he would stop interfering with Reconstruction policy. The final tally was 35–19 to convict Johnson, one vote short of the two-thirds necessary to remove him. Seven Republicans joined the Democrats in voting to acquit the president.

A few days after the vote, Republicans nominated Ulysses S. Grant, the Union’s most prominent military hero, as their candidate for president. Grant’s Democratic opponent was Horatio Seymour, the former governor of New York. Reconstruction became the central issue of the bitterly fought 1868 campaign. Republicans identified their opponents with secession and treason, a tactic known as “waving the bloody shirt.” Democrats denounced Reconstruction as unconstitutional and condemned black suffrage as a violation of America’s political traditions. They appealed openly to racism. Seymour’s running mate, Francis P. Blair Jr., charged Republicans with placing the South under the rule of “a semi-barbarous race” who longed to “subject the white women to their unbridled lust.”

The Fifteenth Amendment Grant won the election of 1868, although by a margin—300,000 of 6 million votes cast—that many Republicans found uncomfortably slim. The result led Congress to adopt the era’s third and final amendment to the Constitution. In February 1869, it approved the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited the federal and state governments from denying any citizen the right to vote because of race. Bitterly opposed by the Democratic Party, it was ratified in 1870.

Although the Fifteenth Amendment left the door open to suffrage restrictions not explicitly based on race—literacy tests, property qualifications, and poll taxes—and did not extend the right to vote to women, it marked the culmination of four decades of abolitionist agitation. As late as 1868, even after Congress had enfranchised black men in the South, only eight northern states allowed African- American men to vote. With the Fifteenth Amendment, the American Anti-Slavery Society disbanded, its work, its members believed, now complete. “Nothing in all history,” exclaimed veteran abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, equaled “this wonderful, quiet, sudden transformation of four millions of human beings from . . . the auction-block to the ballot-box.”

The Second Founding The laws and amendments of Reconstruction reflected the intersection of two products of the Civil War era—a newly empowered national state and the idea of a national citizenry enjoying equality before the law. What Republican leader Carl Schurz called the “great Constitutional revolution” of Reconstruction transformed the federal system and with it, the language of freedom so central to American political culture.

The laws and amendments of Reconstruction repudiated the pre–Civil War idea that citizenship was an entitlement of whites alone. The principle of equality before the law, moreover, did not apply only to the South. The Reconstruction amendments voided many northern laws discriminating on the basis of race. As one congressman noted, the amendments expanded the liberty of whites as well as blacks, including “the millions of people of foreign birth who will flock to our shores.”

The new amendments also transformed the relationship between the federal government and the states. The Bill of Rights had linked civil liberties to the autonomy of the states. Its language —“Congress shall make no law”—reflected the belief that concentrated national power posed the greatest threat to freedom. The authors of the Reconstruction amendments assumed that rights required national power to enforce them. Rather than a threat to liberty, the federal government, in Charles Sumner’s words, had become “the custodian of freedom.”

The Reconstruction amendments transformed the Constitution from a document primarily concerned with federal-state relations and the rights of property into a vehicle through which members of vulnerable minorities could stake a claim to freedom and seek protection against misconduct by all levels of government. In the twentieth century, many of the Supreme Court’s most important decisions expanding the rights of American citizens were based on the Fourteenth Amendment, including the 1954 Brown ruling that outlawed school segregation and the decision in 2015 preventing states from discriminating against gay Americans in the right to marry.

Together with far-reaching congressional legislation meant to secure to former slaves access to the courts, ballot box, and public accommodations, and to protect them against violence, the Reconstruction amendments transferred much of the authority to define citizens’ rights from the states to the nation. They were crucial in creating the world’s first biracial democracy, in which people only a few years removed from slavery exercised significant political power. Introducing into the Constitution for the first time the words “equal protection of the law” and “the right to vote” (along with “male,” to the outrage of the era’s advocates of women’s rights), the amendments both reflected and reinforced a new era of individual rights consciousness among Americans of all races and backgrounds. They forged a new constitutional relationship between individual Americans and the national government and created a new definition of citizenship.

Today, the legal doctrine of birthright citizenship sets the United States apart. Most countries, including every one in Europe, limit automatic access to citizenship via ethnicity, culture, or religion. Birthright citizenship remains an eloquent statement about the nature of American society and a repudiation of a long history of equating citizenship with whiteness.

So profound were these changes that the amendments are frequently seen not simply as an alteration of an existing structure but as a second founding, which created a fundamentally new document with a new definition of both the status of blacks and the rights of all Americans.

Boundaries of Freedom Reconstruction redrew the boundaries of American freedom. Lines of exclusion that limited the privileges of citizenship to white men had long been central to the practice of American democracy. Only in an unparalleled crisis could they have been replaced, even temporarily, by the vision of a republic of equals embracing black Americans as well as white. That the United States was a “white man’s government” had been a widespread belief before the Civil War. It is not difficult to understand why Andrew Johnson, in one of his veto messages, claimed that federal protection of blacks’ civil rights violated “all our experience as a people.”

Another illustration of the new spirit of racial inclusiveness was the Burlingame Treaty, negotiated by Anson Burlingame, an antislavery congressman from Massachusetts before being named American envoy to China. Other treaties with China had been one-sided, securing trading and political advantages for European powers. The Burlingame Treaty reaffirmed China’s national sovereignty, and provided reciprocal protection for religious freedom and against discrimination for citizens of each country emigrating or visiting the other. When Burlingame died, Mark Twain wrote a eulogy that praised him for “outgrow[ing] the narrow citizenship of a state [to] become a citizen of the world.”

Reconstruction Republicans’ belief in universal rights had its limits. In his remarkable “Composite Nation” speech of 1869, Frederick Douglass condemned prejudice against immigrants from China. America’s destiny, he declared, was to transcend race by serving as an asylum for people from all corners of the globe. A year later, Charles Sumner moved to strike the word “white” from naturalization requirements. Senators from the western states objected. At their insistence, the naturalization law was amended to make Africans eligible to obtain citizenship when immigrating from abroad. But Asians remained ineligible. The racial boundaries of nationality had been redrawn, but not eliminated. The juxtaposition of the amended naturalization law and the Fourteenth Amendment created a significant division in the Asian-American community. Well into the twentieth century, Asian immigrants could not become citizens, but their U.S-born children automatically did.

WHO IS AN AMERICAN?

From FREDERICK DOUGLASS, “THE COMPOSITE NATION” (1869)

In a remarkable speech delivered in Boston, Frederick Douglass condemned anti-Asian discrimination and called for giving Chinese immigrants all the rights of other Americans, including the right to vote. Douglass’s vision of a country made up of people of all races and national origins— and enjoying equal rights—was too radical for the time, and remains controversial today.

We are a country of all extremes, ends and opposites; the most conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world. Our people defy all the ethnological and logical classifications. In races we range all the way from black to white, with intermediate shades which . . . no man can name a number. . . . Our land is capable of supporting one fifth of all the globe. Here, labor is abundant and here labor is better remunerated than anywhere else. All moral, social and geographical causes conspire to bring to us the peoples of all other over-populated countries.

Europe and Africa are already here, and the Indian was here before either. . . . Heretofore the policy of our government has been governed by race pride, rather than by wisdom. . . . Before the relations of [blacks and Indians] are satisfactorily settled, and in spite of all opposition, a new race is making its appearance within our borders, and claiming attention [the Chinese]. . . . Do you ask, if I favor such immigration. I answer I would. Would you have them naturalized, and have them invested with all the rights of American citizenship? I would. Would you allow them to hold office? I would. . . .

There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are external, universal, and indestructible. Among these, is the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular race, but belongs alike to all. . . . We shall mold them all . . . into Americans; Indian and Celt, Negro and Saxon, Latin and Teuton, Mongolian and Caucasian, Jew and Gentile, all shall here bow to the same law, speak the same language, support the same government, enjoy the same liberty.

QUESTIONS

1. What is Douglass’s answer to the question, “Who is an American?” 2. Why does he believe that being able to move freely from one country to another should be

considered a universal human right?

The Rights of Women “The contest with the South that destroyed slavery,” wrote the Philadelphia lawyer Sidney George Fisher in his diary, “has caused an immense increase in the popular passion for liberty and equality.” But advocates of women’s rights encountered the limits of the Reconstruction commitment to equality. Women activists saw Reconstruction as the moment to claim their own emancipation. No less than blacks, proclaimed Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women had arrived at a “transition period, from slavery to freedom.” The rewriting of the Constitution, declared suffrage leader Olympia Brown, offered the opportunity to sever the blessings of freedom from sex as well as race and to “bury the black man and the woman in the citizen.”

The destruction of slavery led feminists to search for ways to make the promise of free labor real for women. Every issue of the new women’s rights journal, The Agitator, edited by Mary Livermore, who had led fund-raising efforts for aid to Union soldiers during the war, carried stories complaining of limited job opportunities and unequal pay for females who entered the labor market. Other feminists debated how to achieve “liberty for married women.” Demands for liberalizing divorce laws (which generally required evidence of adultery, desertion, or extreme abuse to terminate a marriage) and for recognizing “woman’s control over her own body” (including protection against domestic violence and access to what later generations would call birth control) moved to the center of many feminists’ concerns. “Our rotten marriage institution,” one Ohio woman wrote, “is the main obstacle in the way of woman’s freedom.”

Feminists and Radicals In one place, women’s political rights did expand during Reconstruction—not, however, in a bastion of radicalism such as Massachusetts, but in the Wyoming territory. This had less to do with the era’s egalitarian impulse than with the desire to attract female immigrants to an area where men outnumbered women five to one. In 1869, Wyoming’s diminutive legislature (it consisted of fewer than twenty men) extended the right to vote to women, and the bill was then signed by the governor, a federal appointee. Wyoming entered the Union in 1890, becoming the first state since New Jersey in the late eighteenth century to allow women to vote.

In general, however, talk of woman suffrage and redesigning marriage found few sympathetic male listeners. Even Radical Republicans insisted that Reconstruction was the “Negro’s hour” (the hour, that is, of the black male). The Fourteenth Amendment for the first time introduced the word “male” into the Constitution, in its clause penalizing a state for denying any group of men the right to vote. The Fifteenth Amendment outlawed discrimination in voting based on race but not gender. These measures produced a bitter split both between feminists and Radical Republicans, and within feminist circles.

A Delegation of Advocates of Woman Suffrage Addressing the House Judiciary Committee, an engraving from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 4, 1871. The group includes Elizabeth Cady Stanton, seated just to the right of the speaker, and Susan B. Anthony, at the table on the extreme right.

Some leaders, like Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, opposed the Fifteenth Amendment because it did

nothing to enfranchise women. They denounced their former abolitionist allies and moved to sever the women’s rights movement from its earlier moorings in the antislavery tradition. On occasion, they appealed to racial and ethnic prejudices, arguing that native-born white women deserved the vote more than non-whites and immigrants. “Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic,” declared Stanton, had no right to be “making laws for [feminist leader] Lucretia Mott.” But other abolitionist-feminists, like Abby Kelley and Lucy Stone, insisted that despite their limitations, the Reconstruction amendments represented steps in the direction of truly universal suffrage and should be supported. The result was a split in the movement and the creation in 1869 of two hostile women’s rights organizations—the National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Stanton, and the American Woman Suffrage Association, with Lucy Stone as president. They would not reunite until 1890.

Thus, even as it rejected the racial definition of freedom that had emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, Reconstruction left the gender boundary largely intact. When women tried to use the rewritten legal code and Constitution to claim equal rights, they found the courts unreceptive. Myra Bradwell invoked the idea of free labor in challenging an Illinois rule limiting the practice of law to men, but the Supreme Court in 1873 rebuffed her claim. Free labor principles, the justices declared, did not apply to women, since “the law of the Creator” had assigned them to “the domestic sphere.”

Despite their limitations, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 marked a radical departure in American history. “We have cut loose from the whole dead past,” wrote Timothy Howe, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, “and have cast our anchor out a hundred years” into the future. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 inaugurated America’s first real experiment in interracial democracy.

Glossary Black Codes Laws passed from 1865 to 1866 in southern states to restrict the rights of former slaves; to nullify the codes, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment. Civil Rights Bill of 1866 Along with the Fourteenth Amendment, legislation that guaranteed the rights of citizenship to former slaves. Fourteenth Amendment 1868 constitutional amendment that guaranteed rights of citizenship to former slaves, in words similar to those of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Reconstruction Act 1867 law that established temporary military governments in ten Confederate states— excepting Tennessee—and required that the states ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and permit freedmen to vote. Tenure of Office Act 1867 law that required the president to obtain Senate approval to remove any official whose appointment had also required Senate approval; President Andrew Johnson’s violation of the law by firing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton led to Johnson’s impeachment. impeachment Bringing charges against a public official; for example, the House of Representatives can impeach a president for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” by majority vote, and after the trial the Senate can remove the president by a vote of two-thirds. Two presidents, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, have been impeached and tried before the Senate; neither was convicted. Fifteenth Amendment Constitutional amendment ratified in 1870, which prohibited states from discriminating in voting privileges on the basis of race.

RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION IN THE SOUTH

“The Tocsin of Freedom” Among the former slaves, the passage of the Reconstruction Act inspired an outburst of political organization. At mass political meetings—community gatherings attended by men, women, and children—African-Americans staked their claim to equal citizenship. Blacks, declared an Alabama meeting, deserved “exactly the same rights, privileges and immunities as are enjoyed by white men. We ask for nothing more and will be content with nothing less.”

These gatherings inspired direct action to remedy long-standing grievances. Hundreds took part in sit-ins that integrated horse-drawn public streetcars in cities across the South. Plantation workers organized strikes for higher wages. Speakers, male and female, fanned out across the South. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a black veteran of the abolitionist movement, embarked on a two-year tour, lecturing on “Literacy, Land, and Liberation.” James D. Lynch, a member of the group that met with General Sherman in 1865, became known, in the words of a white contemporary, as “a great orator, fluid and graceful,” who “stirred the emotions” of his listeners “as no other man could do.”

Determined to exercise their new rights as citizens, thousands joined the Union League, an organization closely linked to the Republican Party, and the vast majority of eligible African- Americans registered to vote. James K. Green, a former slave in Hale County, Alabama, and a League organizer, went on to serve eight years in the Alabama legislature. In the 1880s, Green looked back on his political career. Before the war, he declared, “I was entirely ignorant; I knew nothing more than to obey my master; and there were thousands of us in the same attitude. . . . But the tocsin [warning bell] of freedom sounded and knocked at the door and we walked out like free men and shouldered the responsibilities.”

By 1870, all the former Confederate states had been readmitted to the Union, and in a region where the Republican Party had not existed before the war, nearly all were under Republican control. Their new state constitutions, drafted in 1868 and 1869 by the first public bodies in American history with substantial black representation, marked a considerable improvement over those they replaced. The constitutions established the region’s first state-funded systems of free public education and created new penitentiaries, orphan asylums, and homes for the insane. They guaranteed equality of civil and political rights and abolished practices of the antebellum era such as whipping as a punishment for crime, property qualifications for officeholding, and imprisonment for debt. A few states initially barred former Confederates from voting, but this policy was quickly abandoned by the new state governments.

The Black Officeholder

From the Plantation to the Senate, an 1883 lithograph celebrating African-American progress during Reconstruction. Among the black leaders pictured at the top are Reconstruction congressmen Benjamin S. Turner, Josiah T. Walls, and Joseph H. Rainey; Hiram Revels of Mississippi, the first African-American senator; religious leader Richard Allen; and abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown. At the center emancipated slaves work in the

cotton fields, and below children attend school and a black family stands outside its home.

Throughout Reconstruction, black voters provided the bulk of the Republican Party’s support. But African-Americans did not control Reconstruction politics, as their opponents frequently charged. The highest offices remained almost entirely in white hands, and only in South Carolina, where blacks made up 60 percent of the population, did they form a majority of the legislature. Nonetheless, the fact that some 2,000 African-Americans occupied public offices during Reconstruction represented a fundamental shift of power in the South and a radical departure in American government.

African-Americans were represented at every level of government. Fourteen were elected to the national House of Representatives. Two blacks served in the U.S. Senate during Reconstruction, both representing Mississippi. Hiram Revels, who had been born free in North Carolina, was educated in Illinois, and served as a chaplain in the wartime Union army, in 1870 became the first black senator in American history. The second, Blanche K. Bruce, a former slave, was elected in 1875. The next African-American elected to the Senate was Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts, who served 1967– 1978.

Pinckney B. S. Pinchback of Louisiana, the Georgia-born son of a white planter and a free black woman, served briefly during the winter of 1872–1873 as America’s first black governor. More than a century would pass before L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia, elected in 1989, became the second. Some 700 blacks sat in state legislatures during Reconstruction, and scores held local offices ranging from justice of the peace to sheriff, tax assessor, and policeman. The presence of black officeholders and their white allies made a real difference in southern life, ensuring that blacks accused of crimes would be tried before juries of their peers and enforcing fairness in such aspects of local government as road repair, tax assessment, and poor relief.

In South Carolina and Louisiana, homes of the South’s wealthiest and best-educated free black communities, most prominent Reconstruction officeholders had never experienced slavery. In addition, a number of black Reconstruction officials, like Pennsylvania-born Jonathan J. Wright, who served on the South Carolina Supreme Court, had come from the North after the Civil War. The majority, however, were former slaves who had established their leadership in the black community by serving in the Union army, working as ministers, teachers, or skilled craftsmen, or engaging in Union League organizing. Among the most celebrated black officeholders was Robert Smalls, who had worked as a slave on the Charleston docks before the Civil War and who won national fame in 1862 by secretly guiding the Planter, a Confederate vessel, out of the harbor and delivering it to Union forces. Smalls became a powerful political leader on the South Carolina Sea Islands and was elected to five terms in Congress.

Carpetbaggers and Scalawags The new southern governments also brought to power new groups of whites. Many Reconstruction officials were northerners who for one reason or another made their homes in the South after the war. Their opponents dubbed them carpetbaggers, implying that they had packed all their belongings in a suitcase and left their homes in order to reap the spoils of office in the South. Some carpetbaggers were undoubtedly corrupt adventurers. The large majority, however, were former Union soldiers who decided to remain in the South when the war ended, before there was any prospect of going into politics. Others were investors in land and railroads who saw in the postwar South an opportunity to combine personal economic advancement with a role in helping to substitute, as one wrote, “the civilization of freedom for that of slavery.” Teachers, Freedmen’s Bureau officers, and others who came to the region genuinely hoping to assist the former slaves represented another large group of carpetbaggers.

Most white Republicans had been born in the South. Former Confederates reserved their greatest scorn for these scalawags, whom they considered traitors to their race and region. Some southern- born Republicans were men of stature and wealth, like James L. Alcorn, the owner of one of Mississippi’s largest plantations and the state’s first Republican governor.

Most scalawags, however, were non-slaveholding white farmers from the southern upcountry. Many had been wartime Unionists, and they now cooperated with the Republicans in order to prevent “rebels” from returning to power. Others hoped Reconstruction governments would help them recover from wartime economic losses by suspending the collection of debts and enacting laws protecting small property holders from losing their homes to creditors. In states like North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, Republicans initially commanded a significant minority of the white vote. Even in the Lower South, the small white Republican vote was important, because the population remained almost evenly divided between blacks (almost all of whom voted for the party of Lincoln) and whites (overwhelmingly Democratic).

Southern Republicans in Power In view of the daunting challenges they faced, the remarkable thing is not that Reconstruction governments in some respects failed, but how much they did accomplish. Perhaps their greatest achievement lay in establishing the South’s first state-supported public schools. The new educational systems served both black and white children, although generally in schools segregated by race. Only in New Orleans were the public schools integrated during Reconstruction, and only in South Carolina did the state university admit black students (elsewhere, separate colleges were established). By the 1870s, in a region whose prewar leaders had made it illegal for slaves to learn and had done little to provide education for poorer whites, more than half the children, black and white, were attending public schools. The new governments also pioneered civil rights legislation. Their laws made it illegal for railroads, hotels, and other institutions to discriminate on the basis of race. Enforcement varied considerably from locality to locality, but Reconstruction established for the first time at the state level a standard of equal citizenship and a recognition of blacks’ right to a share of public services.

Republican governments also took steps to strengthen the position of rural laborers and promote the South’s economic recovery. They passed laws to ensure that agricultural laborers and sharecroppers had the first claim on harvested crops, rather than merchants to whom the landowner owed money. South Carolina created a state Land Commission, which by 1876 had settled 14,000 black families and a few poor whites on their own farms.

The Quest for Prosperity Rather than land distribution, however, the Reconstruction governments pinned their hopes for southern economic growth and opportunity for African-Americans and poor whites alike on regional economic development. Railroad construction, they believed, was the key to transforming the South into a society of booming factories, bustling towns, and diversified agriculture. “A free and living republic,” declared a Tennessee Republican, would “spring up in the track of the railroad.” Every state during Reconstruction helped to finance railroad construction, and through tax reductions and other incentives tried to attract northern manufacturers to invest in the region. The program had mixed results. Economic development in general remained weak. With abundant opportunities existing in the West, few northern investors ventured to the Reconstruction South.

To their supporters, the governments of Radical Reconstruction presented a complex pattern of disappointment and accomplishment. A revitalized southern economy failed to materialize, and most African-Americans remained locked in poverty. On the other hand, biracial democratic government, a thing unknown in American history, for the first time functioned effectively in many parts of the South. Public facilities were rebuilt and expanded, school systems established, and legal codes purged of racism. The conservative elite that had dominated southern government from colonial times to 1867 found itself excluded from political power, while poor whites, newcomers from the North, and former slaves cast ballots, sat on juries, and enacted and administered laws. “We have gone through one of the most remarkable changes in our relations to each other,” declared a white South Carolina lawyer in 1871, “that has been known, perhaps, in the history of the world.” It is a measure of how far change had progressed that the reaction against Reconstruction proved so extreme.

Glossary carpetbaggers Derisive term for northern emigrants who participated in the Republican governments of the Reconstruction South. scalawags Southern white Republicans—some former Unionists—who supported Reconstruction governments.

THE OVERTHROW OF RECONSTRUCTION

Reconstruction’s Opponents The South’s traditional leaders—planters, merchants, and Democratic politicians—bitterly opposed the new governments. They denounced them as corrupt, inefficient, and examples of “black supremacy.” “Intelligence, virtue, and patriotism” in public life, declared a protest by prominent southern Democrats, had given way to “ignorance, stupidity, and vice.” Corruption did exist during Reconstruction, but it was confined to no race, region, or party. The rapid growth of state budgets and the benefits to be gained from public aid led in some states to a scramble for influence that produced bribery, insider dealing, and a get-rich-quick atmosphere. Southern frauds, however, were dwarfed by those practiced in these years by the Whiskey Ring, which involved high officials of the Grant administration, and by New York’s Tweed Ring, controlled by the Democrats, whose thefts ran into the tens of millions of dollars. (These are discussed in the next chapter.) The rising taxes needed to pay for schools and other new public facilities and to assist railroad development were another cause of opposition to Reconstruction. Many poor whites who had initially supported the Republican Party turned against it when it became clear that their economic situation was not improving.

The most basic reason for opposition to Reconstruction, however, was that most white southerners could not accept the idea of former slaves voting, holding office, and enjoying equality before the law. In order to restore white supremacy in southern public life and to ensure planters a disciplined, reliable labor force, they believed, Reconstruction must be overthrown. Opponents launched a campaign of violence in an effort to end Republican rule. Their actions posed a fundamental challenge both for Reconstruction governments in the South and for policymakers in Washington, D.C.

“A Reign of Terror” The Civil War ended in 1865, but violence remained widespread in large parts of the postwar South. In the early years of Reconstruction, violence was mostly local and unorganized. Blacks were assaulted and murdered for refusing to give way to whites on city sidewalks, using “insolent” language, challenging end-of-year contract settlements, and attempting to buy land. The violence that greeted the advent of Republican governments after 1867, however, was far more pervasive and more directly motivated by politics. In wide areas of the South, secret societies sprang up with the aim of preventing blacks from voting and destroying the organization of the Republican Party by assassinating local leaders and public officials.

The most notorious such organization was the Ku Klux Klan, which in effect served as a military arm of the Democratic Party in the South. The Klan was a terrorist organization. Led by planters, merchants, and Democratic politicians, men who liked to style themselves the South’s “respectable citizens,” the Klan committed some of the most brutal criminal acts in American history. In many counties, it launched what one victim called a “reign of terror” against Republican leaders, black and white.

The Klan’s victims included white Republicans, among them wartime Unionists and local officeholders, teachers, and party organizers. William Luke, an Irish-born teacher in a black school, was lynched in 1870. But African-Americans—local political leaders, those who managed to acquire land, and others who in one way or another defied the norms of white supremacy—bore the brunt of the violence. In York County, South Carolina, where nearly the entire white male population joined the Klan (and women participated by sewing the robes and hoods Klansmen wore as disguises), the organization committed eleven murders and hundreds of whippings.

On occasion, violence escalated from assaults on individuals to mass terrorism and even local insurrections. In Meridian, Mississippi, in 1871, some thirty blacks were murdered in cold blood, along with a white Republican judge. The bloodiest act of violence during Reconstruction took place in Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873, where armed whites assaulted the town with a small cannon. Scores of former slaves were murdered, including fifty members of a black militia unit after they had surrendered.

Unable to suppress the Klan, the new southern governments appealed to Washington for help. In 1870 and 1871, Congress adopted three Enforcement Acts, outlawing terrorist societies and allowing the president to use the army against them. These laws continued the expansion of national authority during Reconstruction. They defined crimes that aimed to deprive citizens of their civil and political rights as federal offenses rather than violations of state law. In 1871, President Grant dispatched federal marshals, backed up by troops in some areas, to arrest hundreds of accused Klansmen. Many Klan leaders fled the South. After a series of well-publicized trials, the Klan went out of existence. In 1872, for the first time since before the Civil War, peace reigned in most of the former Confederacy.

The Liberal Republicans Despite the Grant administration’s effective response to Klan terrorism, the North’s commitment to Reconstruction waned during the 1870s. Many Radicals, including Thaddeus Stevens, who died in 1868, had passed from the scene. Within the Republican Party, their place was taken by politicians less committed to the ideal of equal rights for blacks. Northerners increasingly felt that the South should be able to solve its own problems without constant interference from Washington. The federal government had freed the slaves, made them citizens, and given them the right to vote. Now, blacks should rely on their own resources, not demand further assistance.

In 1872, an influential group of Republicans, alienated by corruption within the Grant administration and believing that the growth of federal power during and after the war needed to be curtailed, formed their own party. They included Republican founders like Lyman Trumbull and prominent editors and journalists such as E. L. Godkin of The Nation. Calling themselves Liberal Republicans, they nominated Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, for president.

The Liberals’ alienation from the Grant administration initially had little to do with Reconstruction. They claimed that corrupt politicians had come to power in the North by manipulating the votes of immigrants and workingmen, while men of talent and education like themselves had been pushed aside. Democratic criticisms of Reconstruction, however, found a receptive audience among the Liberals. As in the North, they became convinced, the “best men” of the South had been excluded from power while “ignorant” voters controlled politics, producing corruption and misgovernment. Power in the South should be returned to the region’s “natural leaders.” During the campaign of 1872, Greeley repeatedly called on Americans to “clasp hands across the bloody chasm” by putting the Civil War and Reconstruction behind them.

Greeley had spent most of his career, first as a Whig and then as a Republican, denouncing the Democratic Party. But with the Republican split presenting an opportunity to repair their political fortunes, Democratic leaders endorsed Greeley as their candidate. Many rank-and-file Democrats, unable to bring themselves to vote for Greeley, stayed at home on election day. As a result, Greeley suffered a devastating defeat by Grant, whose margin of more than 700,000 popular votes was the largest in a nineteenth-century presidential contest. But Greeley’s campaign placed on the northern agenda the one issue on which the Liberal reformers and the Democrats could agree—a new policy toward the South.

The North’s Retreat The Liberal attack on Reconstruction, which continued after 1872, contributed to a resurgence of racism in the North. Journalist James S. Pike, a leading Greeley supporter, in 1874 published The Prostrate State, an influential account of a visit to South Carolina. The book depicted a state engulfed by political corruption and under the control of “a mass of black barbarism.” The South’s problems, Pike insisted, arose from “Negro government.” The solution was to restore leading whites to political power. Newspapers that had long supported Reconstruction now began to condemn black participation in southern government. Engravings depicting the former slaves as heroic Civil War veterans, upstanding citizens, or victims of violence were increasingly replaced by caricatures presenting them as little more than unbridled animals. Resurgent racism offered blacks’ alleged incapacity as a convenient explanation for the “failure” of Reconstruction.

Other factors also weakened northern support for Reconstruction. In 1873, the country plunged into a severe economic depression. Distracted by economic problems, Republicans were in no mood to devote further attention to the South. The depression dealt the South a severe blow and further weakened the prospect that Republicans could revitalize the region’s economy. Democrats made substantial gains throughout the nation in the elections of 1874. For the first time since the Civil War, their party took control of the House of Representatives. Before the new Congress met, the old one enacted a final piece of Reconstruction legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1875. This outlawed racial discrimination in places of public accommodation like hotels and theaters. But it was clear that the northern public was retreating from Reconstruction.

The Supreme Court whittled away at the guarantees of black rights Congress had adopted. In the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), white butchers excluded from a state-sponsored monopoly in Louisiana went to court, claiming that their right to pursue a livelihood, a privilege of American citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, had been violated. The justices rejected their claim, ruling that the amendment had not altered traditional federalism. Most of the rights of citizens, it declared, remained under state control. Three years later, in United States v. Cruikshank, the Court gutted the Enforcement Acts by throwing out the convictions of some of those responsible for the Colfax Massacre of 1873.

RECONSTRUCTION IN THE SOUTH, 1867–1877

The Triumph of the Redeemers By the mid-1870s, Reconstruction was clearly on the defensive. Democrats had already regained control of states with substantial white voting majorities such as Tennessee, North Carolina, and Texas. The victorious Democrats called themselves Redeemers, since they claimed to have “redeemed” the white South from corruption, misgovernment, and northern and black control.

In those states where Reconstruction governments survived, violence again erupted. This time, the Grant administration showed no desire to intervene. In contrast to the Klan’s activities—conducted at night by disguised men—the violence of 1875 and 1876 took place in broad daylight, as if to underscore Democrats’ conviction that they had nothing to fear from Washington. In Mississippi, in 1875, white rifle clubs drilled in public and openly assaulted and murdered Republicans. When Governor Adelbert Ames, a Maine-born Union general, frantically appealed to the federal government for assistance, President Grant responded that the northern public was “tired out” by southern problems. On election day, armed Democrats destroyed ballot boxes and drove former slaves from the polls. The result was a Democratic landslide and the end of Reconstruction in Mississippi. “A revolution has taken place,” wrote Ames, “and a race are disfranchised—they are to be returned to . . . an era of second slavery.”

Similar events took place in South Carolina in 1876. Democrats nominated for governor former Confederate general Wade Hampton. Hampton promised to respect the rights of all citizens of the state, but his supporters, inspired by Democratic tactics in Mississippi, launched a wave of intimidation. Democrats intended to carry the election, one planter told a black official, “if we have to wade in blood knee-deep.”

The Disputed Election and Bargain of 1877 Events in South Carolina directly affected the outcome of the presidential campaign of 1876. To succeed Grant, the Republicans nominated Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio. Democrats chose as his opponent New York’s governor, Samuel J. Tilden. By this time, only South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana remained under Republican control in the South. The election turned out to be so close that whoever captured these states—which both parties claimed to have carried—would become the next president.

Unable to resolve the impasse on its own, Congress in January 1877 appointed a fifteen-member Electoral Commission, composed of senators, representatives, and Supreme Court justices. Republicans enjoyed an 8–7 majority on the commission, and to no one’s surprise, the members decided by that margin that Hayes had carried the disputed southern states and had been elected president. Even as the commission deliberated, however, behind-the-scenes negotiations took place between leaders of the two parties. Hayes’s representatives agreed to recognize Democratic control of the entire South and to avoid further intervention in local affairs. They also pledged that Hayes would place a southerner in the cabinet position of postmaster general and that he would work for federal aid to the Texas and Pacific railroad, a transcontinental line projected to follow a southern route. For their part, Democrats promised not to dispute Hayes’s right to office and to respect the civil and political rights of blacks.

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1876

Thus was concluded the Bargain of 1877. Not all of its parts were fulfilled. But Hayes became president, and he did appoint David M. Key of Tennessee as postmaster general. Hayes quickly ordered federal troops to stop guarding the state houses in Louisiana and South Carolina, allowing Democratic claimants to become governor. (Contrary to legend, Hayes did not remove the last soldiers from the South—he simply ordered them to return to their barracks.) But the Texas and Pacific never did get its land grant. Of far more significance, the triumphant southern Democrats failed to live up to their pledge to recognize blacks as equal citizens.

The End of Reconstruction As a historical process—the nation’s adjustment to the destruction of slavery—Reconstruction continued well after 1877. Blacks continued to vote and, in some states, hold office into the 1890s. But as a distinct era of national history—when Republicans controlled much of the South, blacks exercised significant political power, and the federal government accepted the responsibility for protecting the fundamental rights of all American citizens—Reconstruction had come to an end. Despite its limitations, Reconstruction was a remarkable chapter in the story of American freedom. Nearly a century would pass before the nation again tried to bring equal rights to the descendants of slaves. The civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s would sometimes be called the Second Reconstruction.

Even while it lasted, however, Reconstruction revealed some of the tensions inherent in nineteenth- century discussions of freedom. The policy of granting black men the vote while denying them the benefits of land ownership strengthened the idea that the free citizen could be a poor, dependent laborer. Reconstruction placed on the national agenda a problem that would dominate political discussion for the next half-century—how, in a modern society, to define the economic essence of freedom.

Glossary Ku Klux Klan Group organized in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866 to terrorize former slaves who voted and held political offices during Reconstruction; a revived organization in the 1910s and 1920s that stressed white, Anglo-Saxon, fundamentalist Protestant supremacy; revived a third time to fight the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the South. Enforcement Acts Three laws passed in 1870 and 1871 that tried to eliminate the Ku Klux Klan by outlawing it and other such terrorist societies; the laws allowed the president to deploy the army for that purpose. Civil Rights Act of 1875 The last piece of Reconstruction legislation, which outlawed racial discrimination in places of public accommodation such as hotels and theaters. Many parts of it were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883. Redeemers Post–Civil War Democratic leaders who supposedly saved the South from Yankee domination and preserved the primarily rural economy. Bargain of 1877 Deal made by a Republican and Democratic special congressional commission to resolve the disputed presidential election of 1876; Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote, was declared the winner in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from involvement in politics in the South, marking the end of Reconstruction.

CHAPTER REVIEW

REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. In 1865, former Confederate general Robert Richardson remarked that “the emancipated

slaves own nothing, because nothing but freedom has been given to them.” Explain whether this would be an accurate assessment of Reconstruction twelve years later.

2. The women’s movement split into two separate national organizations in part because the Fifteenth Amendment did not give women the vote. Explain why the two groups split.

3. In what sense did the Reconstruction amendments mark a second founding of the United States?

4. What is birthright citizenship and why is it important? 5. How did black families, churches, schools, and other institutions contribute to the development

of African-American culture and political activism in this period? 6. Why did ownership of land and control of labor become major points of contention between

former slaves and whites in the South? 7. By what methods did southern whites seek to limit African-American civil rights and liberties?

How did the federal government respond? 8. How did the failure of land reform and continued poverty lead to new forms of servitude for

both blacks and whites? 9. What caused the confrontation between President Johnson and Congress over Reconstruction

policies? 10. What national issues and attitudes combined to bring an end to Reconstruction by 1877? 11. By 1877, how did the condition of former slaves in the United States compare with that of

freedpeople around the globe?

KEY TERMS the Freedmen’s Bureau (p. 570)

sharecropping (p. 573)

crop lien (p. 574)

Black Codes (p. 579)

Civil Rights Bill of 1866 (p. 581)

Fourteenth Amendment (p. 582)

Reconstruction Act (p. 584)

Tenure of Office Act (p. 584)

impeachment (p. 584)

Fifteenth Amendment (p. 585)

carpetbaggers (p. 593)

scalawags (p. 593)

Ku Klux Klan (p. 596)

Enforcement Acts (p. 597)

Civil Rights Act of 1875 (p. 598)

Redeemers (p. 599)

Bargain of 1877 (p. 601)

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Glossary the Freedmen’s Bureau Reconstruction agency established in 1865 to protect the legal rights of former slaves and to assist with their education, jobs, health care, and landowning. sharecropping Type of farm tenancy that developed after the Civil War in which landless workers—often former slaves—farmed land in exchange for farm supplies and a share of the crop. crop lien Credit extended by merchants to tenants based on their future crops; under this system, high interest rates and the uncertainties of farming often led to inescapable debts. Black Codes Laws passed from 1865 to 1866 in southern states to restrict the rights of former slaves; to nullify the codes, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment. Civil Rights Bill of 1866 Along with the Fourteenth Amendment, legislation that guaranteed the rights of citizenship to former slaves. Fourteenth Amendment 1868 constitutional amendment that guaranteed rights of citizenship to former slaves, in words similar to those of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Reconstruction Act 1867 law that established temporary military governments in ten Confederate states— excepting Tennessee—and required that the states ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and permit freedmen to vote. Tenure of Office Act 1867 law that required the president to obtain Senate approval to remove any official whose appointment had also required Senate approval; President Andrew Johnson’s violation of the law by firing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton led to Johnson’s impeachment. impeachment Bringing charges against a public official; for example, the House of Representatives can impeach a president for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” by majority vote, and after the trial the Senate can remove the president by a vote of two-thirds. Two presidents, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, have been impeached and tried before the Senate; neither was convicted. Fifteenth Amendment Constitutional amendment ratified in 1870, which prohibited states from discriminating in voting privileges on the basis of race. carpetbaggers Derisive term for northern emigrants who participated in the Republican governments of the Reconstruction South. scalawags Southern white Republicans—some former Unionists—who supported Reconstruction governments. Ku Klux Klan Group organized in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866 to terrorize former slaves who voted and held political offices during Reconstruction; a revived organization in the 1910s and 1920s that

stressed white, Anglo-Saxon, fundamentalist Protestant supremacy; revived a third time to fight the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the South. Enforcement Acts Three laws passed in 1870 and 1871 that tried to eliminate the Ku Klux Klan by outlawing it and other such terrorist societies; the laws allowed the president to deploy the army for that purpose. Civil Rights Act of 1875 The last piece of Reconstruction legislation, which outlawed racial discrimination in places of public accommodation such as hotels and theaters. Many parts of it were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883. Redeemers Post–Civil War Democratic leaders who supposedly saved the South from Yankee domination and preserved the primarily rural economy. Bargain of 1877 Deal made by a Republican and Democratic special congressional commission to resolve the disputed presidential election of 1876; Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote, was declared the winner in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from involvement in politics in the South, marking the end of Reconstruction.

CHAPTER 16

AMERICA’S GILDED AGE

1870–1890

FOCUS QUESTIONS What factors combined to make the United States a mature industrial society after the Civil War? How did the economic development of the Gilded Age affect American freedom? How did reformers of the period approach the problems of an industrial society? How was the West transformed economically and socially in this period? Was the Gilded Age political system effective in meeting its goals?

An immense crowd gathered in New York harbor on October 28, 1886, for the dedication of Liberty Enlightening the World, a fitting symbol for a nation now wholly free. The idea for the statue originated in 1865 with Édouard de Laboulaye, a French educator and the author of several books on the United States, as a response to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The statue, de Laboulaye hoped, would celebrate both the historic friendship between France and the United States and the triumph, through the Union’s victory in the Civil War, of American freedom. Measuring more than 150 feet from torch to toe and standing atop a huge pedestal, the edifice was the tallest man-made structure in the Western Hemisphere. It exceeded in height, newspapers noted with pride, the Colossus of Rhodes, a wonder of the ancient world.

In time, the Statue of Liberty, as it came to be called, would become Americans’ most revered national icon. For over a century it has stood as a symbol of freedom. The statue has offered welcome to millions of immigrants—the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” celebrated in a poem by Emma Lazarus inscribed on its base in 1903. In the years since its dedication, the statue’s familiar image has been reproduced by folk artists in every conceivable medium and has been used by advertisers to promote everything from cigarettes and lawn mowers to war bonds. As its use by Chinese students demanding democracy in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 showed, it has become a powerful international symbol as well.

Although the Civil War was over, the country in the late nineteenth century was racked by violence, by not only white supremacists in the South but widespread labor conflict, warfare against Native Americans in the West, and political assassinations. Indeed, the year of the statue’s dedication, 1886, also witnessed the “great upheaval,” a wave of strikes and labor protests that touched every part of the nation. The 600 dignitaries (598 of them men) who gathered on what is now called Liberty Island for the dedication hoped the Statue of Liberty would inspire renewed devotion to the nation’s political and economic system. But for all its grandeur, the statue could not conceal the deep social divisions and fears about the future of American freedom that accompanied the country’s emergence as the world’s leading industrial power. Nor did the celebrations address the crucial questions that moved to the center stage of American public life during the 1870s and 1880s and remained there for decades to come: What are the social conditions that make freedom possible, and what role should the national government play in defining and protecting the liberty of its citizens?

• CHRONOLOGY • 1872 Crédit Mobilier scandal

1873 Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age

1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn

1877 Reconstruction ends

Munn v. Illinois

Great Railroad Strike

1879 Henry George’s Progress and Poverty

1883 Civil Service Act

Railroads create time zones

William Graham Sumner’s What Social Classes Owe to Each Other

1884 Elk v. Wilkins

1886 Haymarket affair

Wabash v. Illinois

Standard national railroad gauge

1887 Interstate Commerce Commission created

Dawes Act

1888 Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward

1890 Sherman Antitrust Act

Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives

Massacre at Wounded Knee

1894 Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth against Commonwealth

1895 United States v. E. C. Knight Co.

1896 Utah gains statehood

1899 Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class

1905 Lochner v. New York

THE SECOND INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Between the end of the Civil War and the early twentieth century, the United States underwent one of the most rapid and profound economic revolutions any country has ever experienced. There were numerous causes for this explosive economic growth. The country enjoyed abundant natural resources, a growing supply of labor, an expanding market for manufactured goods, and the availability of capital for investment. In addition, the federal government actively promoted industrial and agricultural development. It enacted high tariffs that protected American industry from foreign competition, granted land to railroad companies to encourage construction, and used the army to remove Indians from western lands desired by farmers and mining companies.

The Industrial Economy The rapid expansion of factory production, mining, and railroad construction in all parts of the country except the South signaled the transition from Lincoln’s America—a world centered on the small farm and artisan workshop—to a mature industrial society. Americans of the late nineteenth century marveled at the triumph of the new economy. “One can hardly believe,” wrote the philosopher John Dewey, “there has been a revolution in history so rapid, so extensive, so complete.”

By 1913, the United States produced one-third of the world’s industrial output—more than the total of Great Britain, France, and Germany combined. Half of all industrial workers now labored in plants with more than 250 employees. On the eve of the Civil War, the first industrial revolution, centered on the textile industry, had transformed New England into a center of manufacturing. But otherwise, the United States was still primarily an agricultural nation. By 1880, for the first time, the Census Bureau found a majority of the workforce engaged in non-farming jobs. The traditional dream of economic independence seemed obsolete. By 1890, two-thirds of Americans worked for wages, rather than owning a farm, business, or craft shop. Drawn to factories by the promise of employment, a new working class emerged in these years. Between 1870 and 1920, almost 11 million Americans moved from farm to city, and another 25 million immigrants arrived from overseas.

Most manufacturing now took place in industrial cities. New York, with its new skyscrapers and hundreds of thousands of workers in all sorts of manufacturing establishments, symbolized dynamic urban growth. After merging with Brooklyn in 1898, its population exceeded 3.4 million. The city, along with Boston, financed industrialization and westward expansion, its banks and stock exchange funneling capital to railroads, mines, and factories. But the heartland of the second industrial revolution was the region around the Great Lakes, with its factories producing iron and steel, machinery, chemicals, and packaged foods. Pittsburgh had become the world’s center of iron and steel manufacturing. Chicago, by 1900 the nation’s second-largest city, with 1.7 million inhabitants, was home to factories producing steel and farm machinery and giant stockyards where cattle were processed into meat products for shipment east in refrigerated railcars. Smaller industrial cities also proliferated, often concentrating on a single industry—cast-iron stoves in Troy, New York, furniture in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Railroads and the National Market The railroad made possible what is sometimes called the “second industrial revolution.” Spurred by private investment and massive grants of land and money by federal, state, and local governments, the number of miles of railroad track in the United States tripled between 1860 and 1880 and tripled again by 1920, opening vast new areas to commercial farming and creating a truly national market for manufactured goods. In 1886, the railroads adopted a standard national gauge (the distance separating the two rails), making it possible for the first time for trains of one company to travel on any other company’s track. By the 1890s, five transcontinental lines transported the products of western mines, farms, ranches, and forests to eastern markets and carried manufactured goods to the West. The railroads reorganized time itself. In 1883, the major companies divided the nation into the four time zones still in use today.

TABLE 16.1 Indicators of Economic Change, 1870–1920

1870 1900 1920

Farms (millions)

Land in farms (million acres)

Wheat grown (million bushels)

2.7

408

254

5.7

841

599

6.4

956

843

Employment (millions)

In manufacturing (millions)

14

2.5

28.5

5.9

44.5

11.2

Percentage in workforcea

Agricultural

Industryb

Trade, service, administrationc

52

29

20

38

31

31

27

44

27

Railroad track (thousands of miles)

Steel produced (thousands of tons)

53

0.8

258

11.2

407

46

Gross national product (billions of dollars)

Per capita (in 1920 dollars)

7.4

371

18.7

707

91.5

920

Life expectancy at birth (years) 42 47 54

a Percentages are rounded and do not total 100.

b Includes manufacturing, transportation, mining, and construction.

c Includes trade, finance, and public administration.

THE RAILROAD NETWORK, 1880

By 1880, the transnational rail network made possible the creation of a truly national market for goods.

The growing population formed an ever-expanding market for the mass production, mass distribution, and mass marketing of goods, essential elements of a modern industrial economy. The spread of national brands like Ivory soap and Quaker Oats symbolized the continuing integration of the economy. So did the growth of national chains, most prominently the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, better known as A & P grocery stores. Based in Chicago, the national mail-order firms Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Co. sold clothing, jewelry, farm equipment, and numerous other goods to rural families throughout the country.

The Spirit of Innovation A remarkable series of technological innovations spurred rapid communication and economic growth. The opening of the Atlantic cable in 1866 made it possible to send electronic telegraph messages instantaneously between the United States and Europe. During the 1870s and 1880s, the telephone, typewriter, and handheld camera came into use.

Scientific breakthroughs poured forth from research laboratories in Menlo Park and West Orange, New Jersey, created by the era’s greatest inventor, Thomas A. Edison. During the course of his life, Edison helped to establish entirely new industries that transformed private life, public entertainment, and economic activity, including the phonograph, lightbulb, motion picture, and a system for generating and distributing electric power. He opened the first electric generating station in Manhattan in 1882 to provide power to streetcars, factories, and private homes, and he established, among other companies, the forerunner of General Electric to market electrical equipment. The spread of electricity was essential to industrial and urban growth, providing a more reliable and flexible source of power than water or steam. However, it was not Edison but another inventor, Nikola Tesla, an ethnic Serb born in modern-day Croatia who emigrated to the United States at the age of twenty-eight, who developed an electric motor using the system of alternating current that overcame many of the challenges of using electricity for commercial and industrial purposes.

Competition and Consolidation Economic growth was dramatic but highly volatile. The combination of a market flooded with goods and the federal monetary policies (discussed later in this chapter) that removed money from the national economy led to a relentless fall in prices. The world economy suffered prolonged downturns in the 1870s and 1890s. Indeed, before the 1930s, the years from 1873 to 1897 were known throughout the world as the Great Depression.

Businesses engaged in ruthless competition. Railroads and other companies tried various means of bringing order to the chaotic marketplace. They formed “pools” that divided up markets between supposedly competing firms and fixed prices. They established trusts—legal devices whereby the affairs of several rival companies were managed by a single director. Such efforts to coordinate the economic activities of independent companies generally proved short-lived, disintegrating as individual firms continued their intense pursuit of profits.

To avoid cutthroat competition, more and more corporations battled to control entire industries. Many companies fell by the wayside or were gobbled up by others. The process of economic concentration culminated between 1897 and 1904, when some 4,000 firms vanished into larger corporations that served national markets and exercised an unprecedented degree of control over the economy. By the time the wave of mergers had been completed, giant corporations like U.S. Steel (created by financier J. P. Morgan in 1901 by combining eight large steel companies into the first billion-dollar economic enterprise), Standard Oil, and International Harvester (a manufacturer of agricultural machinery) dominated major industries.

The Rise of Andrew Carnegie In an era without personal or corporate income taxes, some business leaders accumulated enormous fortunes and economic power. Under the aggressive leadership of Thomas A. Scott, the Pennsylvania Railroad—for a time the nation’s largest corporation—forged an economic empire that stretched across the continent and included coal mines and oceangoing steamships. With an army of professional managers to oversee its far-flung activities, the railroad pioneered modern techniques of business organization.

Another industrial giant was Andrew Carnegie, who emigrated with his family from his native Scotland at the age of thirteen and as a teenager worked in a Pennsylvania textile factory. During the depression that began in 1873, Carnegie set out to establish a steel company that incorporated vertical integration—that is, one that controlled every phase of the business from raw materials to transportation, manufacturing, and distribution. By the 1890s, he dominated the steel industry and had accumulated a fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Carnegie’s complex of steel factories at Homestead, Pennsylvania, was the most technologically advanced in the world.

Carnegie’s father, an immigrant Scottish weaver who had taken part in popular efforts to open the British political system to working-class participation, had instilled in his son a commitment to democracy and social equality. From his mother, Carnegie learned that life was a ceaseless struggle in which one must strive to get ahead or sink beneath the waves. His life reflected the tension between these elements of his upbringing. Believing that the rich had a moral obligation to promote the advancement of society, Carnegie denounced the “worship of money” and distributed much of his wealth to various philanthropies, especially the creation of public libraries in towns throughout the country. But he ran his companies with a dictatorial hand. His factories operated nonstop, with two twelve-hour shifts every day of the year except the Fourth of July.

The Triumph of John D. Rockefeller If any single name became a byword for enormous wealth, it was John D. Rockefeller, who began his working career as a clerk for a Cleveland merchant and rose to dominate the oil industry. He drove out rival firms through cutthroat competition, arranging secret deals with railroad companies, and fixing prices and production quotas. Rockefeller began with horizontal expansion—buying out competing oil refineries. But like Carnegie, he soon established a vertically integrated monopoly, which controlled the drilling, refining, storage, and distribution of oil. By the 1880s, his Standard Oil Company controlled 90 percent of the nation’s oil industry. Like Carnegie, Rockefeller gave much of his fortune away, establishing foundations to promote education and medical research. And like Carnegie, he bitterly fought his employees’ efforts to organize unions.

U.S. STEEL: A VERTICALLY INTEGRATED CORPORATION

These and other industrial leaders inspired among ordinary Americans a combination of awe, admiration, and hostility. Depending on one’s point of view, they were “captains of industry,” whose energy and vision pushed the economy forward, or “robber barons,” who wielded power without any accountability in an unregulated marketplace. Most rose from modest backgrounds and seemed examples of how inventive genius and business sense enabled Americans to seize opportunities for success. But their dictatorial attitudes, unscrupulous methods, repressive labor policies, and exercise of power without any democratic control led to fears that they were undermining political and economic freedom. Concentrated wealth degraded the political process, declared Henry Demarest Lloyd in Wealth against Commonwealth (1894), an exposé of how Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company made a mockery of economic competition and political democracy by manipulating the market and bribing legislators. “Liberty and monopoly,” Lloyd concluded, “cannot live together.”

Workers’ Freedom in an Industrial Age Remarkable as it was, the country’s economic growth distributed its benefits very unevenly. For a minority of workers, the rapidly expanding industrial system created new forms of freedom. In some industries, skilled workers commanded high wages and exercised considerable control over the production process. A worker’s economic independence now rested on technical skill rather than ownership of one’s own shop and tools as in earlier times. What was known as “the miner’s freedom” consisted of elaborate work rules that left skilled underground workers free of managerial supervision on the job. Through their union, skilled iron and steelworkers fixed output quotas and controlled the training of apprentices in the technique of iron rolling. These workers often knew more about the details of production than their employers did.

Such “freedom,” however, applied only to a tiny portion of the industrial labor force and had little bearing on the lives of the growing army of semiskilled workers who tended machines in the new factories. For most workers, economic insecurity remained a basic fact of life. During the depressions of the 1870s and 1890s, millions of workers lost their jobs or were forced to accept reductions of pay. The “tramp” became a familiar figure on the social landscape as thousands of men took to the roads in search of work. Many industrial workers labored sixty-hour weeks with no pensions, compensation for injuries, or protections against unemployment. Although American workers received higher wages than their counterparts in Europe, they also experienced more dangerous working conditions. Between 1880 and 1900, an average of 35,000 workers perished each year in factory and mine accidents, the highest rate in the industrial world.

Much of the working class remained desperately poor and to survive needed income from all family members. In 1888, the Chicago Times published a series of articles by reporter Nell Cusack under the title “City Slave Girls,” exposing wretched conditions among the growing number of women working for wages in the city’s homes, factories, and sweatshops. The articles unleashed a flood of letters to the editor from women workers. One woman singled out domestic service—still the largest employment category for women—as “a slave’s life,” with “long hours, late and early, seven days in the week, bossed and ordered about as before the war.”

Sunshine and Shadow: Increasing Wealth and Poverty At the other end of the economic spectrum, the era witnessed an unprecedented accumulation of wealth. Class divisions became more and more visible. In frontier days, all classes in San Francisco, for example, lived near the waterfront. In the late nineteenth century, upper-class families built mansions on Nob Hill and Van Ness Avenue (known as “millionaire’s row”). In eastern cities as well, the rich increasingly resided in their own exclusive neighborhoods and vacationed among members of their own class at exclusive resorts like Newport, Rhode Island. The growing urban middle class of professionals, office workers, and small businessmen moved to new urban and suburban neighborhoods linked to central business districts by streetcars and commuter railways. “Passion for money,” wrote the novelist Edith Wharton in The House of Mirth (1905), dominated society. Wharton’s book traced the difficulties of Lily Bart, a young woman of modest means pressured by her mother and New York high society to “barter” her beauty for marriage to a rich husband in a world where “to be poor . . . amounted to disgrace.”

By 1890, the richest 1 percent of Americans received the same total income as the bottom half of the population and owned more property than the remaining 99 percent. Many of the wealthiest Americans consciously pursued an aristocratic lifestyle, building palatial homes, attending exclusive social clubs, schools, and colleges, holding fancy-dress balls, and marrying into each other’s families. In 1899, the economist and social historian Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class, a devastating critique of an upper-class culture focused on “conspicuous consumption”—that is, spending money not on needed or even desired goods, but simply to demonstrate the possession of wealth. One of the era’s most widely publicized spectacles was an elaborate costume ball organized in 1897 by Mrs. Bradley Martin, the daughter of a New York railroad financier. The theme was the royal court of prerevolutionary France. The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel was decorated to look like the palace of Versailles, the guests wore the dress of the French nobility, and the hostess bedecked herself with the actual jewels of Queen Marie Antoinette.

Not that far from the Waldorf, much of the working class lived in desperate conditions. Matthew Smith’s 1868 best-seller Sunshine and Shadow in New York opened with an engraving that contrasted department store magnate Alexander T. Stewart’s $2 million mansion with housing in the city’s slums. Two decades later, Jacob Riis, in How the Other Half Lives (1890), offered a shocking account of living conditions among the urban poor, complete with photographs of apartments in dark, airless, overcrowded tenement houses.

Glossary trusts Companies combined to limit competition. vertical integration Company’s avoidance of middlemen by producing its own supplies and providing for distribution of its product. horizontal expansion The process by which a corporation acquires or merges with its competitors. robber barons Also known as “captains of industry”; Gilded Age industrial figures who inspired both admiration, for their economic leadership and innovation, and hostility and fear, due to their unscrupulous business methods, repressive labor practices, and unprecedented economic control over entire industries.

FREEDOM IN THE GILDED AGE The era from 1870 to 1890 is the only period of American history commonly known by a derogatory name—the Gilded Age, after the title of an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. “Gilded” means covered with a layer of gold, but it also suggests that the glittering surface masks a core of little real value and is therefore deceptive. Twain and Warner were referring not only to the remarkable expansion of the economy in this period but also to the corruption caused by corporate dominance of politics and to the oppressive treatment of those left behind in the scramble for wealth. “Get rich, dishonestly if we can, honestly if we must,” was the era’s slogan, according to The Gilded Age.

The Social Problem

Prayer Time in the Nursery, Five Points House of Industry, taken by Jacob Riis around 1889, offers a striking contrast to the bleak homes of New York City’s poor families, depicted in many of his photographs.

As the United States matured into an industrial economy, Americans struggled to make sense of the new social order. Debates over political economy engaged the attention of millions, reaching far beyond the tiny academic world into the public sphere inhabited by self-educated workingmen and farmers, reformers of all kinds, newspaper editors, and politicians. This broad public discussion produced thousands of books, pamphlets, and articles on such technical issues as land taxation and currency reform, as well as widespread debate over the social and ethical implications of economic change.

Many Americans sensed that something had gone wrong in the nation’s social development. Talk of “better classes,” “respectable classes,” and “dangerous classes” dominated public discussion, and bitter labor strife seemed to have become the rule. During the Gilded Age, Congress and a number of states established investigating committees to inquire into the relations between labor and capital. Their hearings produced powerful evidence of distrust between employees and employers. In 1881, the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that virtually every worker it interviewed in Fall River, the nation’s largest center of textile production, complained of overwork, poor housing, and tyrannical employers.

Freedom, Inequality, and Democracy The appearance of what Massachusetts cotton manufacturer Edward Atkinson called “a permanent factory population” living on the edge of poverty alongside a growing class of millionaires posed a sharp challenge to traditional definitions of freedom. “The great curse of the Old World—the division of society into classes,” declared The Nation, had come to America. It became increasingly difficult to view wage labor as a temporary resting place on the road to economic independence.

Given the vast expansion of the nation’s productive capacity, many Americans viewed the concentration of wealth as inevitable, natural, and justified by progress. By the turn of the century, advanced economics taught that wages were determined by the iron law of supply and demand and that wealth rightly flowed not to those who worked the hardest but to men with business skills and access to money. The close link between freedom and equality, forged in the Revolution and reinforced during the Civil War, appeared increasingly out of date. The task of social science, wrote iron manufacturer Abram Hewitt, was to devise ways of making “men who are equal in liberty” content with the “inequality in . . . distribution” inevitable in modern society.

In Palo Alto Spring (1878), a portrait of upper-class life in Gilded Age America by the artist Thomas Hill, the family and friends of railroad magnate Leland Stanford (shown with a painting on his lap), gather at the Stanford farm in Palo Alto, California, today the site Stanford University. The painting originally hung in the Stanfords’ San Francisco mansion, which was destroyed by an earthquake in 1906.

Among the first to take up this challenge were the self-styled “liberal” reformers. (Their beliefs were quite different from those called liberals in modern America, who advocate that an activist

government try to address social needs.) This group of editors and professionals broke with the Republican Party in 1872 and helped to bring about a change in northern opinion regarding Reconstruction. But their program was not confined to the South. Gilded Age liberals feared that with lower-class groups seeking to use government to advance their own interests, democracy was becoming a threat to individual liberty and the rights of property. Some urged a return to the long- abandoned principle that voting should be limited to property owners. During the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville had reported that opponents of democracy “hide their heads.” By the 1870s, wrote one observer, “expressions of doubt and distrust in regard to universal suffrage are heard constantly . . . [at] the top of our society.”

Social Darwinism in America The idea of the natural superiority of some groups to others, which before the Civil War had been invoked to justify slavery in an otherwise free society, now reemerged in the vocabulary of modern science to explain the success and failure of individuals and social classes. In 1859, the British scientist Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. One of the most influential works of science ever to appear, it expounded the theory of evolution whereby plant and animal species best suited to their environment took the place of those less able to adapt.

In a highly oversimplified form, language borrowed from Darwin or developed by his followers, such as “natural selection,” “the struggle for existence,” and “the survival of the fittest,” entered public discussion of social problems. According to what came to be called Social Darwinism, evolution was as natural a process in human society as in nature, and government must not interfere. Especially misguided, in this view, were efforts to uplift those at the bottom of the social order, such as laws regulating conditions of work or public assistance to the poor. The giant industrial corporation, Social Darwinists believed, had emerged because it was better adapted to its environment than earlier forms of enterprise. To restrict its operations by legislation would reduce society to a more primitive level.

Even the depressions of the 1870s and 1890s did not shake the widespread view that the poor were essentially responsible for their own fate. Charity workers and local governments spent much time and energy distinguishing the “deserving” poor (those, like widows and orphans, destitute through no fault of their own) from the “undeserving,” a far larger number. Failure to advance in society was widely thought to indicate a lack of character, an absence of self-reliance and determination in the face of adversity. As late as 1900, half the nation’s largest cities offered virtually no public relief, except to persons living in poorhouses. To improve their lot, according to the philosophy of Social Darwinism, workers should practice personal economy, keep out of debt, and educate their children in the principles of the marketplace, not look to the government for aid.

The era’s most influential Social Darwinist was Yale professor William Graham Sumner. For Sumner, freedom meant “the security given to each man” that he can acquire, enjoy, and dispose of property “exclusively as he chooses,” without interference from other persons or from government. Freedom thus defined required frank acceptance of inequality. Society faced two and only two alternatives: “liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest.” In 1883, Sumner published What Social Classes Owe to Each Other. His answer, essentially, was nothing: “In a free state,” no one was entitled to claim “help from, and cannot be charged to [offer] help to, another.” Government, Sumner believed, existed only to protect “the property of men and the honor of women,” not to upset social arrangements decreed by nature.

Liberty of Contract The growing influence of Social Darwinism helped to popularize an idea that would be embraced by the business and professional classes in the last quarter of the nineteenth century—a “negative” definition of freedom as limited government and an unrestrained free market. Central to this social vision was the idea of contract. “The laws of contract,” wrote one reformer, “are the foundation of civilization.” Labor contracts reconciled freedom and authority in the work-place. So long as labor relations were governed by contracts freely arrived at by independent individuals, neither the government nor unions had a right to interfere with working conditions, and Americans had no grounds to complain of a loss of freedom.

Demands by workers that the government enforce an eight-hour day, provide relief to the unemployed, or in other ways intervene in the economy struck liberals as an example of how the misuse of political power posed a threat to liberty. “The right of each man to labor as much or as little as he chooses, and to enjoy his own earnings, is the very foundation stone of . . . freedom,” wrote Chicago newspaper editor Horace White. The principle of free labor, which originated as a celebration of the independent small producer in a society of broad equality and social harmony, was transformed into a defense of the unrestrained operations of the capitalist marketplace.

The Courts and Freedom In elevating liberty of contract from one element of freedom to its very essence, the courts played a significant role. The Fourteenth Amendment had empowered the federal government to overturn state laws that violated citizens’ rights. By the 1880s, liberty of contract, not equality before the law for former slaves, came to be defined as the amendment’s true meaning. State and federal courts regularly struck down state laws regulating economic enterprise as an interference with the right of the free laborer to choose his employment and working conditions, and of the entrepreneur to utilize his property as he saw fit. For decades, the courts viewed state regulation of business—especially laws establishing maximum hours of work and safe working conditions—as an insult to free labor.

At first, the Supreme Court was willing to accept laws regulating enterprises that represented a significant “public interest.” In Munn v. Illinois, an 1877 decision, it upheld the constitutionality of an Illinois law that established a state board empowered to regulate fees charged by grain storage facilities. Nine years later, however, in Wabash v. Illinois, the Court essentially reversed itself, ruling that only the federal government, not the states, could regulate railroads engaged in interstate commerce, as all important lines were. The decision led directly to the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, discussed below. But on virtually every occasion when cases brought by the ICC against railroads made their way to the Supreme Court, the company emerged victorious.

The courts generally sided with business enterprises that complained of a loss of economic freedom. In 1885, the New York Court of Appeals invalidated a state law that prohibited the manufacture of cigars in tenement dwellings on the grounds that such legislation deprived the worker of the “liberty” to work “where he will.” Although women still lacked political rights, they were increasingly understood to possess the same economic “liberty,” defined in this way, as men. On the grounds that it violated women’s freedom, the Illinois Supreme Court in 1895 declared unconstitutional a state law that outlawed the production of garments in sweatshops and established a maximum forty-eight- hour workweek for women and children. In the same year, in United States v. E. C. Knight Co., the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which barred combinations in restraint of trade, could not be used to break up a sugar refining monopoly, since the Constitution empowered Congress to regulate commerce but not manufacturing. Their unwillingness to allow regulation of the economy, however, did not prevent the courts from acting to impede labor organization. The Sherman Act, intended to prevent business mergers that stifled competition, was used by judges primarily to issue injunctions prohibiting strikes on the grounds that they illegally interfered with the freedom of trade.

In a 1905 case that became almost as notorious as Dred Scott and gave the name “Lochnerism” to the entire body of liberty of contract decisions, the Supreme Court in Lochner v. New York voided a state law establishing ten hours per day or sixty per week as the maximum hours of work for bakers. The law, wrote Associate Justice Rufus Peckham for the 5-4 majority, “interfered with the right of contract between employer and employee” and therefore infringed upon individual freedom. By this time, the Court was invoking “liberty” in ways that could easily seem absurd. In one case, it overturned as a violation of “personal liberty” a Kansas law prohibiting “yellow-dog” contracts, which made nonmembership in a union a condition of employment. In another, it struck down state laws requiring payment of coal miners in money rather than paper usable only at company-owned stores. Workers, observed mine union leader John P. Mitchell, could not but feel that “they are being guaranteed the liberties they do not want and denied the liberty that is of real value to them.”

Glossary the Gilded Age The popular but derogatory name for the period from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century, after the title of the 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. Social Darwinism Application of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection to society; used the concept of the “survival of the fittest” to justify class distinctions and to explain poverty. liberty of contract A judicial concept of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whereby the courts overturned laws regulating labor conditions as violations of the economic freedom of both employers and employees.

LABOR AND THE REPUBLIC

“The Overwhelming Labor Question” As Mitchell’s remark suggests, public debate in the late nineteenth century more than at almost any other moment in American history divided along class lines. The shift from the slavery controversy to what one politician called “the overwhelming labor question” was dramatically illustrated in 1877, the year of both the end of Reconstruction and the first national labor walkout—the Great Railroad Strike. When workers protesting a pay cut paralyzed rail traffic in much of the country, militia units tried to force them back to work. After troops fired on strikers in Pittsburgh, killing twenty people, workers responded by burning the city’s railroad yards, destroying millions of dollars in property. General strikes paralyzed Chicago and St. Louis. The strike revealed both a strong sense of solidarity among workers and the close ties between the Republican Party and the new class of industrialists. President Rutherford B. Hayes, who a few months earlier had ordered federal troops in the South to end their involvement in local politics, ordered the army into the North. The workers, the president wrote in his diary, were “put down by force.”

“The days are over,” declared the New York Times, “in which this country could rejoice in its freedom from the elements of social strife which have long abounded in the old countries.” In the aftermath of 1877, the federal government constructed armories in major cities to ensure that troops would be on hand in the event of further labor difficulties. Henceforth, national power would be used not to protect beleaguered former slaves but to guarantee the rights of property.

The Strike, an 1886 painting by the German-born artist Robert Koehler, who had grown up in a working-class family in Milwaukee. Koehler depicts a confrontation between a factory owner, dressed in a silk top hat, and angry workers. A woman and her children, presumably members of a striker’s family, watch from the side while another woman, at the center, appears to plead

for restraint. The threat of violence hangs in the air, and a striker in the lower right-hand corner reaches for a stone. The painting was inspired by events in Pittsburgh during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.

The Knights of Labor and the “Conditions Essential to Liberty” The 1880s witnessed a new wave of labor organizing. At its center stood the Knights of Labor. The Knights were the first group to try to organize unskilled workers as well as skilled ones, women alongside men, and blacks as well as whites (although even the Knights excluded the despised Asian immigrants on the West Coast). The group reached a peak membership of nearly 800,000 in 1886 (making it the largest labor organization of the nineteenth century) and involved millions of workers in strikes, boycotts, political action, and educational and social activities.

Labor reformers of the Gilded Age put forward a wide array of programs, from the eight-hour day to public employment in hard times, currency reform, anarchism, socialism, and the creation of a vaguely defined “cooperative commonwealth.” All these ideas arose from the conviction that the social conditions of the 1880s needed drastic change. Americans, declared Terence V. Powderly, head of the Knights of Labor, were not “the free people that we imagine we are.”

The labor movement launched a sustained assault on the understanding of freedom grounded in Social Darwinism and liberty of contract. Because of unrestrained economic growth and political corruption, the Knights charged, ordinary Americans had lost control of their economic livelihoods and their own government. Reaching back across the divide of the Civil War, labor defined employers as a new “slave power.” Concentrated capital, warned George E. McNeill, a shoemaker and factory worker who became one of the movement’s most eloquent writers, was now “a greater power than that of the state.” “Extremes of wealth and poverty,” he warned, threatened the very existence of democratic government. The remedy was to “engraft republican principles into our industrial system” by guaranteeing a basic set of economic rights for all Americans.

Labor raised the question whether meaningful freedom could exist in a situation of extreme economic inequality. On July 4, 1886, the Federated Trades of the Pacific Coast rewrote the Declaration of Independence. Workers, the new Declaration claimed, had been subjected not to oppressive government but to “the unjust domination of a special class.” It went on to list among mankind’s inalienable rights, “Life and the means of living, Liberty and the conditions essential to liberty.”

Middle-Class Reformers Dissatisfaction with social conditions in the Gilded Age extended well beyond aggrieved workers. Supreme Court justice John Marshall Harlan in the late 1880s spoke of a “deep feeling of unease,” a widespread fear that the country “was in real danger of another kind of slavery that would result from the aggregation of capital in the hands of a few individuals.” Alarmed by fear of class warfare and the growing power of concentrated capital, social thinkers offered numerous plans for change. In the last quarter of the century, more than 150 utopian or cataclysmic novels appeared, predicting that social conflict would end either in a new, harmonious social order or in total catastrophe. One popular novel of the era, Caesar’s Column (1891) by Ignatius Donnelly, ended with civilized society destroyed in a savage civil war between labor and capital.

Of the many books proposing more optimistic remedies for the unequal distribution of wealth, the most popular were Progress and Poverty (1879) by Henry George, The Cooperative Commonwealth (1884) by Laurence Gronlund, and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888). All three were among the century’s greatest best-sellers, their extraordinary success testifying to what George called “a widespread consciousness . . . that there is something radically wrong in the present social organization.” All three writers, though in very different ways, sought to reclaim an imagined golden age of social harmony and American freedom.

Progress and Poverty Although it had no direct impact on government policy, Progress and Poverty probably commanded more public attention than any book on economics in American history. An antislavery newspaper editor in California in the 1850s and 1860s, Henry George had witnessed firsthand the rapid monopolization of land in the state. His book began with a famous statement of “the problem” suggested by its title—the growth of “squalor and misery” alongside material progress. His solution was the single tax, which would replace other taxes with a levy on increases in the value of real estate. The single tax would be so high that it would prevent speculation in both urban and rural land. No one knows how many of Henry George’s readers actually believed in this way of solving the nation’s ills. But millions responded to his clear explanation of economic relationships and his stirring account of how the “social distress” long thought to be confined to the Old World had made its appearance in the New.

Freedom lay at the heart of George’s analysis. The “proper name” for the political movement spawned by his book, he once wrote, was “freedom men,” who would “do for the question of industrial slavery” what the Republican Party had done for the slavery of blacks. George rejected the traditional equation of liberty with ownership of land (since the single tax in effect made land the “common property” of the entire society). In other ways, however, his definition of freedom was thoroughly in keeping with mainstream thought. Despite calling for a single massive public intervention in the economy, George saw government as a “repressive power,” whose functions in the “co-operative society” of the future would be limited to enhancing the quality of life—building “public baths, museums, libraries, gardens,” and the like.

The Cooperative Commonwealth Quite different in outlook was The Cooperative Commonwealth, the first book to popularize socialist ideas for an American audience. Its author, Laurence Gronlund, was a lawyer who had emigrated from Denmark in 1867. Socialism—the belief that private control of economic enterprises should be replaced by public ownership in order to ensure a fairer distribution of the benefits of the wealth produced—became a major political force in western Europe in the late nineteenth century. In the United States, however, where access to private property was widely considered essential to individual freedom, socialist beliefs at this point were largely confined to immigrants, whose writings, frequently in foreign languages, attracted little attention.

Gronlund began the process of socialism’s Americanization. While Karl Marx, the nineteenth century’s most influential socialist theorist, had predicted that socialism would come into being via a working-class revolution, Gronlund portrayed it as the end result of a process of peaceful evolution, not violent upheaval. He thus made socialism seem more acceptable to middle-class Americans who desired an end to class conflict and the restoration of social harmony.

Bellamy’s Utopia Not until the early twentieth century would socialism become a significant presence in American public life. As Gronlund himself noted, the most important result of The Cooperative Commonwealth was to prepare an audience for Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which promoted socialist ideas while “ignoring that name” (Bellamy wrote of nationalism, not socialism). Bellamy lived virtually his entire life in the small industrial city of Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. In Looking Backward, his main character falls asleep in the late nineteenth century only to awaken in the year 2000, in a world where cooperation has replaced class strife, “excessive individualism,” and cutthroat competition. Inequality has been banished and with it the idea of liberty as a condition to be achieved through individual striving free of governmental restraint. Freedom, Bellamy insisted, was a social condition, resting on interdependence, not autonomy.

From today’s vantage point, Bellamy’s utopia—with citizens obligated to labor for years in an Industrial Army controlled by a single Great Trust—seems a chilling social blueprint. Yet the book inspired the creation of hundreds of nationalist clubs devoted to bringing into existence the world of 2000 and left a profound mark on a generation of reformers and intellectuals. Bellamy held out the hope of retaining the material abundance made possible by industrial capitalism while eliminating inequality. In proposing that the state guarantee economic security to all, Bellamy offered a far- reaching expansion of the idea of freedom.

Protestants and Moral Reform Mainstream Protestants played a major role in seeking to stamp out sin in the late nineteenth century. What one historian calls a “Christian lobby” promoted political solutions to what it saw as the moral problems raised by labor conflict and the growth of cities, and threats to religious faith by Darwinism and other scientific advances.

Unlike the pre–Civil War period, when “moral suasion” was the preferred approach of many reformers, powerful national organizations like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, National Reform Association, and Reform Bureau now campaigned for federal legislation that would “Christianize the government” by outlawing sinful behavior. Among the proposed targets were the consumption of alcohol, gambling, prostitution, polygamy, and birth control. Most of these groups spoke less about improving society than stamping out the sins of individuals. In a striking departure from the prewar situation, southerners joined in the campaign for federal regulation of individual behavior, something whites in the region had previously strongly opposed, fearing it could lead to action against slavery. The key role played by the white South in the campaign for moral legislation helped earn the region a reputation as the Bible Belt—a place where political action revolved around religious principles. Although efforts to enact a national law requiring businesses to close on Sunday failed, the Christian lobby’s efforts in the 1880s and 1890s set the stage for later legislation such as the Mann Act of 1910, banning the transportation of women across state lines for immoral purposes (an effort to suppress prostitution), and Prohibition.

A Social Gospel Most of the era’s Protestant preachers concentrated on attacking individual sins like drinking and Sabbath-breaking and saw nothing immoral about the pursuit of riches. But the outlines of what came to be called the Social Gospel were taking shape in the writings of Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist minister in New York City, Washington Gladden, a Congregational clergyman in Columbus, Ohio, and others. They insisted that freedom and spiritual self-development required an equalization of wealth and power and that unbridled competition mocked the Christian ideal of brotherhood.

The Social Gospel movement originated as an effort to reform Protestant churches by expanding their appeal in poor urban neighborhoods and making them more attentive to the era’s social ills. The movement’s adherents established missions and relief programs in urban areas that attempted to alleviate poverty, combat child labor, and encourage the construction of better working-class housing. They worked with the Knights of Labor and other groups demanding health and safety laws. Some suggested that a more cooperative organization of the economy should replace competitive capitalism. Within American Catholicism, as well, a group of priests and bishops emerged who attempted to alter the church’s traditional hostility to movements for social reform and its isolation from contemporary currents of social thought. With most of its parishioners working men and women, they argued, the church should lend its support to the labor movement. These developments suggested the existence of widespread dissatisfaction with the “liberty of contract” understanding of freedom.

The Haymarket Affair The year of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, 1886, also witnessed an unprecedented upsurge in labor activity. Inspired by a successful strike by western railroad unions against lines controlled by the powerful financier Jay Gould, workers flooded into the Knights of Labor. Its membership, only 100,000 in 1885, rose more than sevenfold in the following year. On May 1, 1886, some 350,000 workers in cities across the country demonstrated for an eight-hour day. Having originated in the United States, May 1, or May Day as it came to be called, soon became an annual date of parades, picnics, and protests, celebrated around the world by organized labor.

The most dramatic events of 1886 took place in Chicago, a city with a large and vibrant labor movement that brought together native-born and immigrant workers, whose outlooks ranged from immigrant socialism and anarchism to American traditions of equality and anti-monopoly. In 1885, the iron moulders union—one of the most powerful organizations of skilled industrial workers in the country—had organized a strike against a wage reduction at the great McCormick plant that produced agricultural machinery. The company brought in strikebreakers and private police, who battled in the streets with the strikers. Fearing chaos, the mayor and prominent business leaders persuaded the company to settle on the union’s terms. But in February 1886, after the company installed new machinery that reduced its dependence on the iron moulders’ traditional skills, it announced that henceforth the factory would operate on a nonunion basis. The result was a bitter, prolonged strike.

This time, Chicago’s city government sided with the company. On May 3, 1886, four strikers were killed by police when they attempted to prevent strikebreakers from entering the factory. The next day, a rally was held in Haymarket Square to protest the killings. Near the end of the speeches, someone—whose identity has never been determined—threw a bomb into the crowd, killing a policeman. The panicked police opened fire, shooting several bystanders and a number of their own force. Soon after, police raided the offices of labor and radical groups and arrested their leaders. Employers took the opportunity presented by the Haymarket affair to paint the labor movement as a dangerous and un-American force, prone to violence and controlled by foreign-born radicals. Eight anarchists were charged with plotting and carrying out the bombing. Even though the evidence against them was extremely weak, a jury convicted the “Haymarket martyrs.” Four were hanged, one committed suicide in prison, and the remaining three were imprisoned until John Peter Altgeld, a pro-labor governor of Illinois, commuted their sentences in 1893.

Most of the eight men accused of plotting the Haymarket bombing were foreign-born—five Germans and an English immigrant. One was of German descent. The last was Albert Parsons, a native of Alabama who had served in the Confederate army in the Civil War and edited a Republican newspaper in Texas during Reconstruction. Fearing violence because of his political views and the fact that his wife, Lucy Parsons, a former slave, was black, Albert Parsons moved to Chicago during the 1870s. Having survived the Ku Klux Klan in Reconstruction Texas, Parsons perished on the Illinois gallows for a crime that he, like the other “Haymarket martyrs,” did not commit. Lucy Parsons went on to become one of the era’s most celebrated radical orators. She probably addressed more Americans than any other black speaker in the nineteenth century except Frederick Douglass.

Labor and Politics The Haymarket affair took place amid an outburst of independent labor political activity. One study has identified more than 100 local political tickets associated with the Knights of Labor between 1886 and 1888, from Anniston, Alabama, to Whitewater, Wisconsin. Their major aim was to end the use of public and private police forces and court injunctions against strikes and labor organizations. At least sixty achieved some kind of electoral success. In Kansas City, a coalition of black and Irish- American workers and middle-class voters elected Tom Hanna as mayor. He proceeded to side with unions rather than employers in industrial disputes.

In a political cartoon from Frank Leslie’s Weekly, November 13, 1886, Uncle Sam congratulates a workingman for the defeat of Henry George’s candidacy for mayor of New York City on the United Labor Party ticket. A disappointed anarchist fulminates in the background. Local labor parties did win many local victories in 1886.

The most celebrated labor campaign took place in New York City, where in 1886, somewhat to his own surprise, Henry George found himself thrust into the role of labor’s candidate for mayor. George’s aim in running was to bring attention to the single tax on land. The labor leaders who organized the United Labor Party had more immediate goals in mind, especially stopping the courts from barring strikes and jailing unionists for conspiracy. George ran a spirited campaign, speaking at factories, immigrant associations, and labor parades and rallies. A few days after the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, New Yorkers flocked to the polls to elect their mayor. Nearly 70,000 voted for George, who finished second, eclipsing the total of the Republican candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, and coming close to defeating Democrat Abram Hewitt.

In a political system that within living memory had witnessed the disappearance of the Whig Party, the rise and fall of the Know-Nothings, and the emergence of the Republicans, the events of 1886 suggested that labor might be on the verge of establishing itself as a permanent political force. In fact, that year marked the high point of the Knights of Labor. Facing increasing employer hostility and linked by employers and the press to the violence and radicalism associated with the Haymarket events, the Knights soon declined. The major parties, moreover, proved remarkably resourceful in appealing to labor voters.

Glossary Great Railroad Strike A series of demonstrations, some violent, held nationwide in support of striking railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, who refused to work due to wage cuts. Knights of Labor Founded in 1869, the first national union; lasted, under the leadership of Terence V. Powderly, only into the 1890s; supplanted by the American Federation of Labor. single tax Concept of taxing only landowners as a remedy for poverty, promulgated by Henry George in Progress and Poverty (1879). Social Gospel Ideals preached by liberal Protestant clergymen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; advocated the application of Christian principles to social problems generated by industrialization. Haymarket affair Violence during an anarchist protest at Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4, 1886; the deaths of eight, including seven policemen, led to the trial of eight anarchist leaders for conspiracy to commit murder.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE WEST Nowhere did capitalism penetrate more rapidly or dramatically than in the trans-Mississippi West, whose “vast, trackless spaces,” as the poet Walt Whitman called them, were now absorbed into the expanding economy. At the close of the Civil War, the frontier of continuous white settlement did not extend very far beyond the Mississippi River. To the west lay millions of acres of fertile and mineral-rich land roamed by giant herds of buffalo whose meat and hides provided food, clothing, and shelter for a population of more than 250,000 Indians.

In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner gave a celebrated lecture, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in which he argued that on the western frontier the distinctive qualities of American culture were forged: individual freedom, political democracy, and economic mobility. The West, he added, acted as a “safety valve,” drawing off those dissatisfied with their situation in the East and therefore counteracting the threat of social unrest. Turner’s was one of the most influential interpretations of American history ever developed. But his lecture summarized attitudes toward the West that had been widely shared among Americans long before 1893. Ever since the beginning of colonial settlement in British North America, the West—a region whose definition shifted as the population expanded—had been seen as a place of opportunity for those seeking to improve their condition in life.

Many Americans did indeed experience the westward movement in the way Turner described it. From farmers moving into Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois in the decades after the American Revolution to prospectors who struck it rich in the California gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century, millions of Americans and immigrants from abroad found in the westward movement a path to economic opportunity. But Turner seemed to portray the West as an empty space before the coming of white settlers. In fact, of course, it was already inhabited by Native Americans, whose dispossession was essential to the opening of land for settlement by others. Moreover, the West was hardly a uniform paradise of small, independent farmers. Landlords, railroads, and mining companies in the West also utilized Mexican migrant and indentured labor, Chinese working on long-term contracts, and, until the end of the Civil War, African-American slaves.

A Diverse Region

Having been granted millions of acres of land by the federal and state governments, railroads sought to encourage emigration to the West by both Americans and immigrants so that they could sell real estate to settlers. This brochure by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company, circulated in Europe, advertises land in Nebraska in Danish.

The West, of course, was hardly a single area. West of the Mississippi River lay a variety of regions, all marked by remarkable physical beauty—the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the desert of the Southwest, the Sierra Nevada, and the valleys and coastline of California and the Pacific Northwest. It would take many decades before individual settlers and corporate business enterprises penetrated all these areas. But the process was far advanced by the end of the nineteenth century.

The political and economic incorporation of the American West was part of a global process. In many parts of the world, indigenous inhabitants—the Mapuche in Chile, the Zulu in South Africa, Aboriginal peoples in Australia, American Indians—were pushed aside (often after fierce resistance) as centralizing governments brought large interior regions under their control. In the United States, the incorporation of the West required the active intervention of the federal government, which acquired Indian land by war and treaty, administered land sales, regulated territorial politics, and distributed land and money to farmers, railroads, and mining companies. Western states used land donated by the federal government, in accordance with the Morrill Land-Grant Act passed during the Civil War, to establish public universities. And, of course, the abolition of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment decided the long contest over whether the West would be a society based on free or slave labor.

Newly created western territories such as Arizona, Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas remained under federal control far longer than had been the pattern in the East. Eastern territories had taken an average of thirteen years to achieve statehood; it took New Mexico sixty-two years to do so, Arizona forty-nine, and Utah forty-six. Many easterners were wary of granting statehood to the territories until white and non-Mormon settlers counterbalanced the large Latino and Mormon populations.

In the twentieth century, the construction of federally financed irrigation systems and dams would open large areas to commercial farming. Ironically, the West would become known (not least to its own inhabitants) as a place of rugged individualism and sturdy independence. But without active governmental assistance, the region could never have been settled and developed.

Farming on the Middle Border Even as sporadic Indian wars raged, settlers poured into the West. Territorial and state governments eager for population, and railroad companies anxious to sell land they had acquired from the government, flooded European countries and eastern cities with promotional literature promising easy access to land. More land came into cultivation in the thirty years after the Civil War than in the previous two and a half centuries of American history. Hundreds of thousands of families acquired farms under the Homestead Act, and even more purchased land from speculators and from railroad companies that had been granted immense tracts of public land by the federal government. A new agricultural empire producing wheat and corn for national and international markets arose on the Middle Border (Minnesota, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas), whose population rose from 300,000 in 1860 to 5 million in 1900. The farmers were a diverse group, including native-born easterners, blacks escaping the post-Reconstruction South, and immigrants from Canada, Germany, Scandinavia, and Great Britain. Although ethnic diversity is generally associated with eastern cities, in the late nineteenth century the most multicultural state in the Union was North Dakota.

Despite the promises of promotional pamphlets, farming on the Great Plains was not an easy task. Difficulties came in many forms—from the poisonous rattlesnakes that lived in the tall prairie grass to the blizzards and droughts that periodically afflicted the region. Much of the burden fell on women. Farm families generally invested in the kinds of labor-saving machinery that would bring in cash, not machines that would ease women’s burdens in the household (like the backbreaking task of doing laundry). While husbands and sons tended to devote their labor to cash crops, farm wives cared for animals, grew crops for food, and cooked and cleaned. A farm woman in Arizona described her morning chores in her diary: “Get up, turn out my chickens, draw a pail of water . . . make a fire, put potatoes to cook, brush and sweep half inch of dust off floor, feed three litters of chickens, then mix biscuits, get breakfast, milk, besides work in the house, and this morning had to go half mile after calves.” On far-flung homesteads, many miles from schools, medical care, and sources of entertainment, farm families suffered from loneliness and isolation—a problem especially severe for women when their husbands left, sometimes for weeks at a time, to market their crops.

Bonanza Farms John Wesley Powell, the explorer and geologist who surveyed the Middle Border in the 1870s, warned that because of the region’s arid land and limited rainfall, development there required large- scale irrigation projects. The model of family farming envisioned by the Homestead Act of 1862 could not apply: no single family could do all the work required on irrigated farms—only cooperative, communal farming could succeed, Powell maintained.

Despite the emergence of a few bonanza farms that covered thousands of acres and employed large numbers of agricultural wage workers, family farms still dominated the trans-Mississippi West. Even small farmers, however, became increasingly oriented to national and international markets, specializing in the production of single crops for sale in faraway places. At the same time, railroads brought factory-made goods to rural people, replacing items previously produced in farmers’ homes. Farm families became more and more dependent on loans to purchase land, machinery, and industrial products, and more and more vulnerable to the ups and downs of prices for agricultural goods in the world market. Agriculture reflected how the international economy was becoming more integrated. The combination of economic depressions and expanding agricultural production in places like Argentina, Australia, and the American West pushed prices of farm products steadily downward. From Italy and Ireland to China, India, and the American South, small farmers throughout the world suffered severe difficulties in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Many joined the migration to cities within their countries or the increasing international migration of labor.

The future of western farming ultimately lay with giant agricultural enterprises relying heavily on irrigation, chemicals, and machinery—investments far beyond the means of family farmers. A preview of the agricultural future was already evident in California, where, as far back as Spanish and Mexican days, landownership had been concentrated in large units. In the late nineteenth century, California’s giant fruit and vegetable farms, owned by corporations like the Southern Pacific Railroad, were tilled not by agricultural laborers who could expect to acquire land of their own, but by migrant laborers from China, the Philippines, Japan, and Mexico, who tramped from place to place following the ripening crops.

In the 1870s, California’s “wheat barons,” who owned ranches of 30,000 or more acres, shipped their grain from San Francisco all the way to Great Britain, while large-scale growers in the new “Orange Empire” of the southern part of the state sent fruit east by rail, packaged in crates bedecked with images of an Edenic landscape filled with lush orchards.

The Cowboy and the Corporate West The two decades following the Civil War also witnessed the golden age of the cattle kingdom. The Kansas Pacific Railroad’s stations at Abilene, Dodge City, and Wichita, Kansas, became destinations for the fabled drives of millions of cattle from Texas. A collection of white, Mexican, and black men who conducted the cattle drives, the cowboys became symbols of a life of freedom on the open range. Their exploits would later serve as the theme of many a Hollywood movie, and their clothing inspired fashions that remain popular today. But there was nothing romantic about the life of the cowboys, most of whom were low-paid wage workers. (Texas cowboys even went on strike for higher pay in 1883.) The days of the long-distance cattle drive ended in the mid-1880s, as farmers enclosed more and more of the open range with barbed-wire fences, making it difficult to graze cattle on the grasslands of the Great Plains, and two terrible winters destroyed millions of cattle. When the industry recuperated, it was reorganized in large, enclosed ranches close to rail connections.

The West was more than a farming empire. By 1890, a higher percentage of its population lived in cities than was the case in other regions. The economic focus of California’s economy remained San Francisco, a major manufacturing center and one of the world’s great trading ports. The explosive growth of southern California began in the 1880s, first with tourism, heavily promoted by railroad companies, followed by the discovery of oil in Los Angeles in 1892. Large corporate enterprises appeared throughout the West. The lumber industry, dominated by small-scale producers in 1860, came under the control of corporations that acquired large tracts of forest and employed armies of loggers. Lumbermen had cut trees in the Far West’s vast forests since the days of Spanish and Mexican rule. Now, with rising demand for wood for buildings in urban centers and with new railroads making it possible to send timber quickly to the East, production expanded rapidly. Sawmills sprang up near rail lines, and lumber companies acquired thousands of acres of timber land. Loggers who had migrated from the East and Midwest and were used to cutting pine trees had to develop new techniques for felling the far larger giant redwoods of northern California. Once they did, coastal forests were decimated, with the high-quality wood being used to construct many of the buildings in San Francisco and other communities. In the early twentieth century, the desire to save the remaining redwoods would become one inspiration for the conservation movement.

THE INDUSTRIAL WEST

Western mining, from Michigan iron ore and copper to gold and silver in California, Nevada, and Colorado, fell under the sway of companies that mobilized eastern and European investment to introduce advanced technology. Gold and silver rushes took place in the Dakotas in 1876, Idaho in 1883, Colorado in the 1890s, and Alaska at the end of the century. Railroad hubs like Albuquerque, Denver, El Paso, and Tucson flourished as gateways to the new mineral regions. But as in California after 1848, the independent prospector working a surface mine with his pick and shovel quickly gave way to deep-shaft corporate mining employing wage workers. As with other western industries, the coming of the railroad greatly expanded the possibilities for mining, making it possible to ship minerals from previously inaccessible places. Moreover, professionally trained engineers from the East and Europe introduced new scientific techniques of mining and smelting ore. For example, the town of Leadville, Colorado, which did not exist before the mid-1870s, became one of the world’s great centers of lead production after August R. Meyer, a European mining engineer, analyzed the precise content of silver and lead in the area’s minerals. The economic crosscurrents at work in post– Civil War mining were illustrated at Butte, Montana. In the 1880s, absentee owners from San Francisco poured millions of dollars into what they thought was a silver mine, only to learn that they had acquired one of the world’s richest deposits of copper. A new town, Anaconda, quickly arose, with a population of 2,000 miners, smelters, engineers, and others, from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds. In the early twentieth century, the company would be acquired by bankers and other investors from the East.

A similar process occurred in New Mexico, where traditional life based on sheep farming on land owned in common by Mexican villagers had continued more or less unchanged after the United States acquired the area in the Mexican War. The existence of these Spanish and Mexican communal landholdings may have influenced John Wesley Powell’s recommendations concerning communal farming. Railroads reached the area in the 1870s, bringing with them eastern mining companies and commercial ranchers and farmers. Because courts only recognized Mexican-era land titles to individual plots of land, communal landholdings were increasingly made available for sale to newcomers. By 1880, three-quarters of New Mexico’s sheep belonged to just twenty families. Unable to continue as sheep raisers, more and more Hispanic residents went to work for the new mines and railroads.

The Chinese Presence Chinese immigration, which had begun at the time of the California gold rush, continued in the postwar years. Before the Civil War, nearly all Chinese newcomers had been unattached men, brought in by labor contractors to work in western gold fields, railroad construction, and factories. In the early 1870s, entire Chinese families began to immigrate. By 1880, 105,000 persons of Chinese descent lived in the United States. Three-quarters lived in California, where Chinese made up over half of the state’s farm workers. But Chinese immigrants were present throughout the West and in all sorts of jobs. After the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, many worked in construction on other railroad lines that sprang up throughout the region. Chinese could be found in mines in Idaho, Colorado, and Nevada, as domestic workers in urban households, and in factories producing cigars, clothing, and shoes in western cities. They built levees, drained agricultural fields, and worked on fishing boats. Many men had wives and children in China, and like members of other immigrant groups, they kept in touch by sending letters and money to their families at home and reading magazines aimed at emigrants that reported on local events in China. As will be related in the next chapter, their growing presence sparked an outpouring of anti-Chinese sentiment, leading to laws excluding virtually all Chinese from entering the country.

Conflict on the Mormon Frontier The Mormons had moved to the Great Salt Lake Valley in the 1840s, hoping to practice their religion free of the persecution that they had encountered in the East. They envisioned their community in Utah as the foundation of a great empire they called Deseret. Given the widespread unpopularity of Mormon polygamy and the close connection of church and state in Mormon theology, conflict with both the federal government and the growing numbers of non-Mormons moving west became inevitable. In 1857, after receiving reports that the work of federal judges in Utah was being obstructed by the territorial governor, the Mormon leader Brigham Young, President James Buchanan removed Young and appointed a non-Mormon to replace him. Young refused to comply, and federal troops entered the Salt Lake Valley, where they remained until the beginning of the Civil War. During this time of tension, a group of Mormons attacked a wagon train of non-Mormon settlers traveling through Utah and intending to settle in California. What came to be called the Mountain Meadows Massacre resulted in the death of all the adults and older children in the wagon train—over 100 persons. Only a handful of young children survived. Nearly twenty years later, one leader of the assault was convicted of murder and executed.

After the Civil War, Mormon leaders sought to avoid further antagonizing the federal government. In the 1880s, Utah banned the practice of polygamy, a prohibition written into the state constitution as a requirement before Utah gained admission as a state in 1896.

The Subjugation of the Plains Indians The transcontinental railroad, a symbol of the reunited nation, brought tens of thousands of newcomers to the West and stimulated the expansion of farming, mining, and other enterprises. The incorporation of the West into the national economy spelled the doom of the Plains Indians and their world. Their lives had already undergone profound transformations. In the eighteenth century, the spread of horses, originally introduced by the Spanish, led to a wholesale shift from farming and hunting on foot to mounted hunting of buffalo. New Indian groups migrated to the Great Plains to take advantage of the horse, coalescing into the great tribes of the nineteenth century—the Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Kiowa, and Sioux. Persistent warfare took place between the more established tribes and newcomers, including Indians removed from the East, who sought access to their hunting grounds.

This pencil-and-crayon drawing by a Cheyenne Indian from the 1880s depicts a Native American fighting two black members of the U.S. military. After the Civil War, black soldiers, whose presence was resented by many whites, in the North as well as the South, were reassigned to the West.

Most migrants on the Oregon and California trails before the Civil War encountered little hostility from Indians, often trading with them for food and supplies. But as settlers encroached on Indian lands, bloody conflict between the army and Plains tribes began in the 1850s and continued for decades.

In 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant announced a new “peace policy” in the West, but warfare soon resumed. Drawing on methods used to defeat the Confederacy, Civil War generals like Philip H. Sheridan set out to destroy the foundations of the Indian economy—villages, horses, and especially the buffalo. Hunting by mounted Indians had already reduced the buffalo population—estimated at 30 million in 1800—but it was army campaigns and the depredations of hunters seeking buffalo hides that rendered the vast herds all but extinct. By 1886, an expedition from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington had difficulty finding twenty-five “good specimens.” “A cold wind blew across the prairie when the last buffalo fell,” said the Sioux leader Sitting Bull, “a death-wind for my people.”

“Let Me Be a Free Man” The army’s relentless attacks broke the power of one tribe after another. In 1877, troops commanded by former Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner O. O. Howard pursued the Nez Percé Indians and their leader, Chief Joseph, on a 1,700-mile chase across the Far West. The Nez Percé (whose name was given them by Lewis and Clark in 1805 and means “pierced nose” in French) were seeking to escape to Canada after fights with settlers who had encroached on tribal lands in Oregon and Idaho. After four months, Howard forced the Indians to surrender, and they were removed to Oklahoma and later to a reservation in Washington Territory. Until his death in 1904, Joseph would unsuccessfully petition successive presidents for his people’s right to return to their beloved Oregon homeland.

Indians occasionally managed to inflict costly delay and even defeat on army units. The most famous Indian victory took place in June 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, when General George A. Custer and his entire command of 250 men perished. The Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, were defending tribal land in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory. Reserved for them in an 1868 treaty “for as long as the grass shall grow,” their lands had been invaded by whites after the discovery of gold. Eventually the Sioux were worn down, partly because of the decimation of the buffalo, and relinquished their claim to the Black Hills. In the Southwest, Cochise, Geronimo, and other leaders of the Apache, who had been relocated by the government a number of times, led bands that crossed and recrossed the border with Mexico, evading the army and occasionally killing civilians. They would not surrender until the mid-1880s.

Another casualty was the Comanche empire, centered in modern-day New Mexico and Colorado. Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, the Comanche dominated much of the Great Plains and Southwest. The Comanche subordinated local Indian groups to their power, imposed a toll on trade routes like the Santa Fe Trail, and dealt for a time as an equal with the Spanish, French, and American governments. Their power was not finally broken until the 1870s.

Remaking Indian Life “The life my people want is a life of freedom,” Sitting Bull declared. The Indian idea of freedom, however, which centered on preserving their cultural and political autonomy and control of ancestral lands, conflicted with the interests and values of most white Americans. Nearly all officials believed that the federal government should persuade or force the Plains Indians to surrender most of their land and to exchange their religion, communal property, nomadic way of life, and gender relations for Christian worship, private ownership, and small farming on reservations with men tilling the fields and women working in the home.

In 1871, Congress eliminated the treaty system that dated back to the revolutionary era, by which the federal government negotiated agreements with Indians as if they were independent nations. This step was supported by railroad companies that found tribal sovereignty an obstacle to construction and by Republicans who believed that it contradicted the national unity born of the Civil War. The federal government pressed forward with its assault on Indian culture. The Bureau of Indian Affairs established boarding schools where Indian children, removed from the “negative” influences of their parents and tribes, were dressed in non-Indian clothes, given new names, and educated in white ways.

VOICES OF FREEDOM

From SPEECH OF CHIEF JOSEPH OF THE NEZ PERCÉ INDIANS, IN WASHINGTON, D.C. (1879)

Chief Joseph, leader of the Nez Percé Indians, led his people on a 1,700-mile trek through the Far West in 1877 in an unsuccessful effort to escape to Canada. Two years later, he addressed an audience in Washington, D.C., that included President Rutherford B. Hayes, appealing for the freedom and equal rights enshrined in the law after the Civil War.

I have heard talk and talk, but nothing is done. Good words do not last long unless they amount to something. Words do not pay for my dead people. They do not pay for my country, now overrun by white men. . . . Good words will not get my people a home where they can live in peace and take care of themselves. I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I remember all the . . . broken promises. . . .

If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian he can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike. Give them the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. . . .

When I think of our condition my heart is heavy. I see men of my race treated as outlaws and driven from country to country, or shot down like animals. I know that my race must change. We cannot hold our own with the white men as we are. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. . . .

Let me be a free man—free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself—and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.

From LETTER BY SAUM SONG BO, AMERICAN MISSIONARY (OCTOBER 1885)

During the 1880s, Chinese-Americans were subjected to discrimination in every phase of their lives. In 1882, Congress temporarily barred further immigration from China. In 1885, when funds were being raised to build a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty, Saum Song Bo, a Chinese-American writer, contrasted the celebration of liberty with the treatment of the Chinese.

A paper was presented to me yesterday for inspection, and I found it to be specially drawn up for subscription among my countrymen toward the Pedestal Fund of the . . . Statue of Liberty. . . . But the word liberty makes me think of the fact that this country is the land of liberty for men of all nations except the Chinese. I consider it as an insult to us Chinese to call on us to contribute toward building in this land a pedestal for a statue of Liberty. That statue represents Liberty holding a torch which lights the passage of those of all nations who come into this country. But are the Chinese

allowed to come? As for the Chinese who are here, are they allowed to enjoy liberty as men of all other nationalities enjoy it? Are they allowed to go about everywhere free from the insults, abuses, assaults, wrongs, and injuries from which men of other nationalities are free? . . .

And this statue of Liberty is a gift from another people who do not love liberty for the Chinese. [To] the Annamese and Tonquinese Chinese [colonial subjects of the French empire in Indochina], . . . liberty is as dear as to the French. What right have the French to deprive them of their liberty?

Whether this statute against the Chinese or the statue to Liberty will be the most lasting monument to tell future ages of the liberty and greatness of this country, will be known only to future generations.

QUESTIONS

1. What are Chief Joseph’s complaints about the treatment of his people? 2. Why does Saum Song Bo believe that the Chinese do not enjoy liberty in the United States? 3. What are the similarities and differences in the definition of freedom in the two documents?

The Dawes Act The crucial step in attacking “tribalism” came in 1887 with the passage of the Dawes Act, named for Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, chair of the Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee. The Act broke up the land of nearly all tribes into small parcels to be distributed to Indian families, with the remainder auctioned off to white purchasers. Indians who accepted the farms and “adopted the habits of civilized life” would become full-fledged American citizens. The policy proved to be a disaster, leading to the loss of much tribal land and the erosion of Indian cultural traditions. Whites, however, benefited enormously. When the government made 2 million acres of Indian land available in Oklahoma, 50,000 white settlers poured into the territory to claim farms on the single day of April 22, 1889. Further land rushes followed in the 1890s. In the half century after the passage of the Dawes Act, Indians lost 86 million of the 138 million acres of land in their possession in 1887. Overall, according to one estimate, between 1776 and today, via the “right of discovery,” treaties, executive orders, court decisions, and outright theft, the United States has acquired over 1.5 billion acres of land from Native Americans, an area twenty-five times as large as Great Britain.

Are Native Americans American?

This photograph depicts Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho leaders who visited the White House in 1877.

Many laws and treaties in the nineteenth century offered Indians the right to become American citizens if they left the tribal setting and assimilated into American society. But tribal identity was the one thing nearly every Indian wished to maintain, and very few took advantage of these offers. Thus, few Native Americans were recognized as American citizens. Western courts ruled that the rights guaranteed in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments did not apply to them. In one of its most controversial rulings, Elk v. Wilkins (1884), the Supreme Court agreed.

John Elk was born in Indian Territory (in present-day Oklahoma), but gave up his tribal affiliation and moved to Omaha, where he worked and paid taxes. He tried, unsuccessfully, to claim American citizenship and register to vote. The Civil Rights Act had excluded only Indians “not taxed” from birthright citizenship, and the Fourteenth Amendment, as noted in Chapter 15, recognized as citizens all persons born in the United States and subject to its “jurisdiction.” John Elk certainly seemed to meet all these criteria. Yet the Supreme Court rejected his appeal. It questioned whether any Indian had achieved the degree of “civilization” required of American citizens.

INDIAN RESERVATIONS, ca. 1890

By 1890, the vast majority of the remaining Indian population had been removed to reservations scattered across the western states.

By 1900, roughly 53,000 Indians had become American citizens by accepting land allotments under the Dawes Act. The following year, Congress granted citizenship to 100,000 residents of Indian Territory. The remainder would have to wait until 1919 (for those who fought in World War Ⅰ). In that year there were around 300,000 Indians in the United States, of whom 125,000 were not citizens. Finally, in 1924, Congress extended citizenship to all Native Americans. But their right to cast ballots remained contested. As late as 1948, Arizona and New Mexico did not allow Indians to vote.

The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee Some Indians sought solace in the Ghost Dance, a religious revitalization campaign. Its leaders foretold a day when whites would disappear, the buffalo would return, and Indians could once again practice their ancestral customs “free from misery, death, and disease.” Large numbers of Indians gathered for days of singing, dancing, and religious observances. Fearing a general uprising, the government sent troops to the reservations. On December 29, 1890, soldiers opened fire on Ghost Dancers encamped near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, killing between 150 and 200 Indians, mostly women and children.

The Wounded Knee massacre was widely applauded in the press. An Army Court of Inquiry essentially exonerated the troops and their commander, and twenty soldiers were later awarded the Medal of Honor, a recognition of exceptional heroism in battle, for their actions at Wounded Knee. Like federal efforts to exert control over the Mormons in Utah, the suppression of the Ghost Dance revealed the limits on Americans’ efforts to seek in the West the freedom to practice nonmainstream religions.

Although violent skirmishes from Oklahoma to Minnesota in the early twentieth century showed that small-scale Indian resistance continued, the Wounded Knee massacre marked the end of four centuries of armed conflict between the continent’s native population and European settlers and their descendants. By 1900, the Indian population had fallen to 250,000, the lowest point in American history. A children’s book about Indians published around this time stated flatly, “The Indian pictured in these pages no longer exists.” Yet despite everything, Indians survived, and in the twentieth century their numbers once again would begin to grow.

Settler Societies and Global Wests The conquest of the American West was part of a global process whereby settlers moved boldly into the interior of regions in temperate climates around the world, bringing their familiar crops and livestock and establishing mining and other industries. Countries such as Argentina, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, as well as the United States, are often called “settler societies,” because immigrants from overseas quickly outnumbered and displaced the original inhabitants—unlike in India and most parts of colonial Africa, where fewer Europeans ventured and those who did relied on the labor of the indigenous inhabitants.

In the late nineteenth century, even as the population of the American West grew dramatically, Canada marked the completion of its first transcontinental railroad, although the more severe climate limited the number of western settlers to a much smaller population than in the American West (and as a result, the displacement of Indians did not produce as much conflict and bloodshed). In many settler societies, native peoples were subjected to cultural reconstruction similar to policies in the United States. In Australia, the government gathered the Aboriginal populations—their numbers devastated by disease—in “reserves” reminiscent of American Indian reservations. Australia went further than the United States in the forced assimilation of surviving Aboriginal peoples. The government removed large numbers of children from their families to be adopted by whites—a policy only abandoned in the 1970s and for which the prime minister formally apologized in 2008 in a national moment of reconciliation called Sorry Day.

Myth, Reality, and the Wild West The West has long played many roles in Americans’ national self-consciousness. It has been imagined as a place of individual freedom and unbridled opportunity for those dissatisfied with their lives in the East and as a future empire that would dominate the continent and the world. Even as farms, mines, and cities spread over the landscape in the post–Civil War years, a new image of the West began to circulate—the Wild West, a lawless place ruled by cowboys and Indians (two groups by this time vastly outnumbered by other westerners), and marked by gunfights, cattle drives, and stagecoach robberies.

This image of a violent yet romantic frontier world would later become a staple of Hollywood movies. In the late nineteenth century, it was disseminated in vaudeville shows that achieved immense popularity. Although not the first, William “Buffalo Bill” Cody was the most important popularizer of this idea of the West. A former hunter and scout for the U.S. Army, Cody developed an elaborate theatrical presentation that toured for decades across the United States and Europe. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show included reenactments of battles with Indians (including Custer’s Last Stand), buffalo hunts, Indian rituals, and feats by the sharpshooter Annie Oakley. Along with Cody, other persons who had actually participated in these events appeared in the show, including the Indian warrior Sitting Bull and a group of Sioux fighters. The image of the Wild West also circulated in cheap popular books known as dime novels and sensational journalistic accounts.

Theater audiences and readers found fantasies of adventure in observing western violence from a safe distance and marveled at the skills of horseback riding, roping, and shooting on display. They imagined the West as a timeless place immune to the corruptions of civilization, which offered a striking contrast to the increasingly sedentary lives of men in eastern cities. Indeed, despite the inclusion of Oakley, this West of the imagination was emphatically a male preserve. The real West— for example, the struggles of farm families—played no role in this depiction. Nor did pervasive labor conflict in mining centers, or the role of the federal government and eastern capital in the region’s development. The West’s multiracial, multiethnic population also disappeared, although different groups added their own elements to the mythical west. Mexican-Americans, for example, made a folk hero of Gregorio Cortez, a Texas outlaw renowned for his ability to outwit pursuers. The West Coast also had no place in the picture—the imagined West seemed to stop at the Rocky Mountains.

Glossary bonanza farms Large farms that covered thousands of acres and employed hundreds of wage laborers in the West in the late nineteenth century. Dawes Act Law passed in 1887 meant to encourage adoption of white norms among Indians; broke up tribal holdings into small farms for Indian families, with the remainder sold to white purchasers. Ghost Dance A spiritual and political movement among Native Americans whose followers performed a ceremonial “ghost dance” intended to connect the living with the dead and make the Indians bulletproof in battles intended to restore their homelands. Wounded Knee massacre Last incident of the Indian Wars; it took place in 1890 in the Dakota Territory, where the U.S. Cavalry killed over 200 Sioux men, women, and children. the Little Bighorn, Battle of Most famous battle of the Great Sioux War; took place in 1876 in the Montana Territory; combined Sioux and Cheyenne warriors massacred a vastly outnumbered U.S. Cavalry commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer.

POLITICS IN A GILDED AGE

The Corruption of Politics As they had earlier in the nineteenth century, Americans during the Gilded Age saw their nation as an island of political democracy in a world still dominated by undemocratic governments. In Europe, only France and Switzerland enjoyed universal male suffrage. Even in Britain, which prided itself on its tradition of political liberty, most of the working class could not vote until the passage of the Reform Act of 1884.

Nonetheless, the power of the new corporations, seemingly immune to democratic control, raised disturbing questions for the American understanding of political freedom as popular self- government. In 1873, the chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court warned that a “new and dark power” threatened American democracy. “Which shall rule,” he asked, “wealth or man; which shall lead, money or intellect; who shall fill public stations, educated and patriotic freemen, or the feudal slaves of corporate capital?” Political corruption was rife. “The galleries and lobbies of every legislature,” observed an Illinois Republican leader, “are thronged with men seeking to procure an advantage” for one corporation or another. In Pennsylvania’s legislature, the “third house” of railroad lobbyists was said to enjoy as much influence as the elected chambers. In the West, many lawmakers held stock or directorships in lumber companies and railroads that received public aid.

Urban politics fell under the sway of corrupt political machines like New York’s Tweed Ring, which plundered the city of tens of millions of dollars. “Boss” William M. Tweed’s organization reached into every neighborhood. He forged close ties with railroad men and labor unions, and he won support from the city’s immigrant poor by fashioning a kind of private welfare system that provided food, fuel, and jobs in hard times. A combination of political reformers and businessmen tired of paying tribute to the ring ousted Tweed in the early 1870s, although he remained popular among the city’s poor, who considered him an urban Robin Hood.

At the national level, many lawmakers supported bills aiding companies in which they had invested money or from which they received stock or salaries. The most notorious example of corruption came to light during Grant’s presidency. This was Crédit Mobilier, a corporation formed by an inner ring of Union Pacific Railroad stockholders to oversee the line’s government-assisted construction. Essentially, it enabled the participants to sign contracts with themselves, at an exorbitant profit, to build the new line. The arrangement was protected by the distribution of stock to influential politicians, including Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax, who was elected vice president in 1868. In another example of corruption, the Whiskey Ring of the Grant administration united Republican officials, tax collectors, and whiskey manufacturers in a massive scheme that defrauded the federal government of millions of tax dollars.

The Politics of Dead Center In national elections, party politics bore the powerful imprint of the Civil War. Republicans controlled the industrial North and Midwest and the agrarian West and were particularly strong among members of revivalist churches, Protestant immigrants, and blacks. Organizations of Union veterans formed a bulwark of Republican support. Every Republican candidate for president from 1868 to 1900 except James G. Blaine had fought in the Union army. (In the 1880 campaign, all four candidates—Republican James A. Garfield, Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock, Prohibitionist Neal Dow, and James B. Weaver of the Greenback-Labor Party—had been Union generals during the war.) By 1893, a lavish system of pensions for Union soldiers and their widows and children consumed more than 40 percent of the federal budget. Democrats, after 1877, dominated the South and did well among Catholic voters, especially Irish-Americans, in the nation’s cities.

POLITICAL STALEMATE, 1876–1892

The parties were closely divided. In three of the five presidential elections between 1876 and 1892, the margin separating the major candidates was less than 1 percent of the popular vote. Twice, in

1876 and 1888, the candidate with an electoral-college majority trailed in the popular ballot. The congressional elections of 1874, when Democrats won control of the House of Representatives, ushered in two decades of political stalemate. A succession of one-term presidencies followed: Rutherford B. Hayes (elected in 1876), James A. Garfield (succeeded, after his assassination in 1881, by Chester A. Arthur), Grover Cleveland in 1884, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and Cleveland, elected for the second time, in 1892. Only for brief periods did the same party control the White House and both houses of Congress. More than once, Congress found itself paralyzed as important bills shuttled back and forth between the House and Senate, and special sessions to complete legislation became necessary. Gilded Age presidents made little effort to mobilize public opinion or exert executive leadership. Their staffs were quite small. Grover Cleveland himself answered the White House doorbell.

In some ways, American democracy in the Gilded Age seemed remarkably healthy. Elections were closely contested, party loyalty was intense, and 80 percent or more of eligible voters turned out to cast ballots. It was an era of massive party rallies and spellbinding political oratory. James G. Blaine was among the members of Congress tainted by the Crédit Mobilier scandal, but Robert G. Ingersoll’s speech before the Republican national convention of 1876 nearly secured Blaine’s nomination for president by depicting him as a “plumed knight” who had raised his “shining lance” against the country’s enemies.

Government and the Economy The nation’s political structure, however, proved ill equipped to deal with the problems created by the economy’s rapid growth. Despite its expanded scope and powers arising from the Civil War, the federal government remained remarkably small by modern standards. Activities from education to medical care, business regulation, civil and criminal prosecutions, and many others were almost entirely under the control of local and state governments or private institutions. The federal workforce in 1880 numbered 100,000 (today, it exceeds 2.5 million).

Nationally, both parties came under the control of powerful political managers with close ties to business interests. Republicans strongly supported a high tariff to protect American industry, and throughout the 1870s they pursued a fiscal policy based on reducing federal spending, repaying much of the national debt, and withdrawing greenbacks—the paper money issued by the Union during the Civil War—from circulation. Democrats opposed the high tariff, but the party’s national leadership remained closely linked to New York bankers and financiers and resisted demands from debt-ridden agricultural areas for an increase in the money supply. In 1879, for the first time since the war, the United States returned to the gold standard—that is, paper currency became exchangeable for gold at a fixed rate.

By reducing competition from foreign manufactured goods and leaving the banks, not the government, in control of issuing money, Republican economic policies strongly favored the interests of eastern industrialists and bankers. These policies worked to the disadvantage of southern and western farmers, who had to pay a premium for manufactured goods while the prices they received for their produce steadily declined.

Reform Legislation Gilded Age national politics did not entirely lack accomplishments. Inspired in part by President Garfield’s assassination by a disappointed office seeker, the Civil Service Act of 1883 created a merit system for federal employees, with appointment via competitive examinations rather than political influence. Although it applied at first to only 10 percent of government workers, the act marked the first step in establishing a professional civil service and removing officeholding from the hands of political machines. (However, since funds raised from political appointees had helped to finance the political parties, civil service reform had the unintended result of increasing politicians’ dependence on donations from business interests.)

In 1887, in response to public outcries against railroad practices, Congress established the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to ensure that the rates railroads charged farmers and merchants to transport their goods were “reasonable” and did not offer more favorable treatment to some shippers. The ICC was the first federal agency intended to regulate economic activity, but since it lacked the power to establish rates on its own—it could only sue companies in court—it had little impact on railroad practices. Three years later, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, which banned all combinations and practices that restrained free trade. The measure posed a significant threat to corporate efforts to dominate sectors of the economy. But the courts primarily used it as a way to suppress labor unions. Nonetheless, these laws helped to establish the precedent that the national government could regulate the economy to promote the public good.

Political Conflict in the States The nation had to weather the effects of drastic economic change and periodic economic crises without leadership from Washington. At the state and local levels, however, the Gilded Age was an era of political ferment and conflict over the proper uses of governmental authority. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, state governments in the North, like those in the Reconstruction South, greatly expanded their responsibility for public health, welfare, and education, and cities invested heavily in public works such as park construction and improved water and gas services. Those who suffered from economic change called on the activist state created by the war to redress their own grievances.

Third parties enjoyed significant if short-lived success in local elections. The Greenback-Labor Party proposed that the federal government stop taking “greenback” money out of circulation. This, it argued, would make more funds available for investment and give the government, not private bankers, control of the money supply. It also condemned the use of militias and private police against strikes. In the late 1870s, the party controlled local government in a number of industrial and mining communities and contributed to the election of twenty-one members of Congress independent of the two major parties.

The policies of railroad companies produced a growing chorus of protest, especially in the West. Farmers and local merchants complained of excessively high freight rates, discrimination in favor of large producers and shippers, and high fees charged by railroad-controlled grain warehouses. Critics of the railroads came together in the Patrons of Husbandry, or Grange, which moved to establish cooperatives for storing and marketing farm output in the hope of forcing the carriers “to take our produce at a fair price.” Founded in 1867, the Grange claimed more than 700,000 members by the mid-1870s. It called on state governments to establish fair freight rates and warehouse charges. In several states, the Grange succeeded in having commissions established to investigate—and, in some cases, regulate—railroad practices.

Thus, America’s Gilded Age witnessed deep and sometimes violent divisions over the definition of freedom in a rapidly industrializing society. The battle between upholders of Social Darwinism and laissez-faire, who saw freedom as the right of individuals to pursue their economic interests without outside restraint, and those who believed in collective efforts to create “industrial freedom” for ordinary Americans, would continue for many decades. In the early twentieth century, reformers would turn to new ways of addressing the social conditions of freedom and new means of increasing ordinary Americans’ political and economic liberty. But before this, in the 1890s, the nation would face its gravest crisis since the Civil War, and the boundaries of freedom would once again be redrawn.

Glossary gold standard Policy at various points in American history by which the value of a dollar is set at a fixed price in terms of gold (in the post–World War Ⅱ era, for example, $35 per ounce of gold). Civil Service Act of 1883 Law that established the Civil Service Commission and marked the end of the spoils system. Interstate Commerce Commission Organization established by Congress, in reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Wabash Railroad v. Illinois (1886), in order to curb abuses in the railroad industry by regulating rates. Sherman Antitrust Act Passed in 1890, first law to restrict monopolistic trusts and business combinations; extended by the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914.

CHAPTER REVIEW

REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. The American economy thrived because of federal involvement, not the lack of it. How did the

federal government actively promote industrial and agricultural development in this period? 2. Why were railroads so important to America’s second industrial revolution? What events

demonstrate their influence on society and politics as well as the economy? 3. Why did organized efforts of farmers, workers, and local reformers largely fail to achieve

substantive change in the Gilded Age? 4. Explain how social thinkers misapplied Charles Darwin’s ideas to justify massive disparities

in wealth and power and to deny government a role in equalizing opportunity. 5. How did social reformers such as Edward Bellamy, Henry George, and advocates of the

Social Gospel conceive of liberty and freedom differently than the proponents of the liberty of contract ideal and laissez-faire?

6. In what ways did the West provide a “safety valve” for the problems in the industrial East? In what ways did it reveal some of the same problems?

7. Describe the involvement of American family farmers in the global economy after 1870 and its effects on their independence.

8. How did American political leaders seek to remake Indians and change the ways they lived? 9. What were some of the obstacles that made it difficult for Native Americans to claim American

citizenship in the nineteenth century? 10. According to The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, the era’s slogan

was “Get rich, dishonestly if we can, honestly if we must.” Explain how this was true of the politics of the era.

KEY TERMS trusts (p. 608)

vertical integration (p. 609)

horizontal expansion (p. 610)

robber barons (p. 611)

the Gilded Age (p. 613)

Social Darwinism (p. 615)

liberty of contract (p. 617)

Great Railroad Strike (p. 618)

Knights of Labor (p. 619)

single tax (p. 621)

Social Gospel (p. 623)

Haymarket affair (p. 624)

bonanza farms (p. 629)

Battle of the Little Bighorn (p. 635)

Dawes Act (p. 638)

Ghost Dance (p. 640)

Wounded Knee massacre (p. 640)

gold standard (p. 644)

Civil Service Act of 1883 (p. 645)

Interstate Commerce Commission (p. 645)

Sherman Antitrust Act (p. 645)

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Glossary trusts Companies combined to limit competition. vertical integration Company’s avoidance of middlemen by producing its own supplies and providing for distribution of its product. horizontal expansion The process by which a corporation acquires or merges with its competitors. robber barons Also known as “captains of industry”; Gilded Age industrial figures who inspired both admiration, for their economic leadership and innovation, and hostility and fear, due to their unscrupulous business methods, repressive labor practices, and unprecedented economic control over entire industries. the Gilded Age The popular but derogatory name for the period from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century, after the title of the 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. Social Darwinism Application of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection to society; used the concept of the “survival of the fittest” to justify class distinctions and to explain poverty. liberty of contract A judicial concept of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whereby the courts overturned laws regulating labor conditions as violations of the economic freedom of both employers and employees. Great Railroad Strike A series of demonstrations, some violent, held nationwide in support of striking railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, who refused to work due to wage cuts. Knights of Labor Founded in 1869, the first national union; lasted, under the leadership of Terence V. Powderly, only into the 1890s; supplanted by the American Federation of Labor. single tax Concept of taxing only landowners as a remedy for poverty, promulgated by Henry George in Progress and Poverty (1879). Social Gospel Ideals preached by liberal Protestant clergymen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; advocated the application of Christian principles to social problems generated by industrialization. Haymarket affair Violence during an anarchist protest at Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4, 1886; the deaths of eight, including seven policemen, led to the trial of eight anarchist leaders for conspiracy to commit murder. bonanza farms Large farms that covered thousands of acres and employed hundreds of wage laborers in the West in the late nineteenth century. Dawes Act Law passed in 1887 meant to encourage adoption of white norms among Indians; broke up tribal holdings into small farms for Indian families, with the remainder sold to white

purchasers. Ghost Dance A spiritual and political movement among Native Americans whose followers performed a ceremonial “ghost dance” intended to connect the living with the dead and make the Indians bulletproof in battles intended to restore their homelands. Wounded Knee massacre Last incident of the Indian Wars; it took place in 1890 in the Dakota Territory, where the U.S. Cavalry killed over 200 Sioux men, women, and children. gold standard Policy at various points in American history by which the value of a dollar is set at a fixed price in terms of gold (in the post–World War Ⅱ era, for example, $35 per ounce of gold). Civil Service Act of 1883 Law that established the Civil Service Commission and marked the end of the spoils system. Interstate Commerce Commission Organization established by Congress, in reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Wabash Railroad v. Illinois (1886), in order to curb abuses in the railroad industry by regulating rates. Sherman Antitrust Act Passed in 1890, first law to restrict monopolistic trusts and business combinations; extended by the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914. the Little Bighorn, Battle of Most famous battle of the Great Sioux War; took place in 1876 in the Montana Territory; combined Sioux and Cheyenne warriors massacred a vastly outnumbered U.S. Cavalry commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer.

CHAPTER 17

FREEDOM’S BOUNDARIES, AT HOME AND ABROAD

1890–1900

FOCUS QUESTIONS What were the origins and the significance of Populism? How did the liberties of blacks after 1877 give way to legal segregation across the South? In what ways did the boundaries of American freedom grow narrower in this period? How did the United States emerge as an imperial power in the 1890s?

One of the most popular songs of 1892 bore the title “Father Was Killed by a Pinkerton Man.” It was inspired by an incident during a bitter strike at Andrew Carnegie’s steelworks at Homestead, Pennsylvania, the nineteenth century’s most widely publicized confrontation between labor and capital. The strike pitted one of the nation’s leading industrial corporations against a powerful union, the Amalgamated Association, which represented the skilled iron and steelworkers among the complex’s 3,800 employees.

Homestead’s twelve steel mills were the most profitable and technologically advanced in the world. The union contract gave the Amalgamated Association a considerable say in their operation, including the right to approve the hiring of new workers and to regulate the pace of work. To Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, his partner and chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company, the union’s power increasingly seemed an intolerable infringement on management’s rights. In 1892, they decided to operate the plant on a nonunion basis. Frick surrounded the factory with a fence topped by barbed wire, constructed barracks to house strikebreakers, and fired the entire workforce. Henceforth, only workers who agreed not to join the union could work at Homestead. In response, the workers, including the unskilled laborers not included in the Amalgamated Association, blockaded the steelworks and mobilized support from the local community. The battle memorialized in song took place on July 6, 1892, when armed strikers confronted 300 private policemen from the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Seven workers and three Pinkerton agents were killed, and the Pinkertons were forced to retreat. Four days later, the governor of Pennsylvania dispatched 8,000 militiamen to open the complex on management’s terms. The strikers held out until November, but the union’s defeat was now inevitable. In the end, the Amalgamated Association was destroyed.

The Carnegie corporation’s tactics and the workers’ solidarity won the strikers widespread national sympathy. “Ten thousand Carnegie libraries,” declared the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “would not compensate the country for the evils resulting from Homestead.” The strike became an international cause célèbre as well. British newspapers pointed out that their country restricted the use of private police forces far more severely than the United States. Britons, they claimed, understood economic liberty better than Americans.

Homestead demonstrated that neither a powerful union nor public opinion could influence the conduct of the largest corporations. The writer Hamlin Garland, who visited Homestead two years after the strike, found the workforce sullen and bitter. He described a town “as squalid and unlovely as could be imagined,” with dingy houses over which hung dense clouds of black smoke. It was “American,” he wrote, “only in the sense in which [it] represents the American idea of business.”

In fact, two American ideas of freedom collided at Homestead—the employers’ definition, based on the idea that property rights, unrestrained by union rules or public regulation, sustained the public good, and the workers’ conception, which stressed economic security and independence from what they considered the “tyranny” of employers. The strife at Homestead also reflected broader battles over American freedom during the 1890s. Like the Homestead workers, many Americans came to

believe that they were being denied economic independence and democratic self-government, long central to the popular understanding of freedom.

During the 1890s, millions of farmers joined the Populist movement in an attempt to reverse their declining economic prospects and to rescue the government from what they saw as control by powerful corporate interests. The 1890s witnessed the imposition of a new racial system in the South that locked African-Americans into the status of second-class citizenship, denying them many of the freedoms white Americans took for granted. Increasing immigration produced heated debates over whether the country should reconsider its traditional self-definition as a refuge for foreigners seeking greater freedom on American shores. At the end of the 1890s, in the Spanish-American War, the United States for the first time acquired overseas possessions and found itself ruling over subject peoples from Puerto Rico to the Philippines. Was the democratic republic, many Americans wondered, becoming an empire like those of Europe? Rarely has the country experienced at one time so many debates over both the meaning and boundaries of freedom.

• CHRONOLOGY • 1867 Alaska purchased

1874 Women’s Christian Temperance Union founded

1879–1880 Kansas Exodus

1882 Chinese Exclusion Act

1883 Civil Rights Cases

1885 Josiah Strong’s Our Country

1886 AFL established

1890 National American Woman Suffrage Association organized

1891 Populist Party organized

1892 Homestead strike

1893 Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani overthrown

Economic depression begins

1894 Coxey’s Army marches to Washington

Pullman Strike

Immigration Restriction League established

1895 Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta speech

1896 Plessy v. Ferguson

The National Association of Colored Women established

1897 William McKinley inaugurated president

1898 Spanish-American War

Anti-Imperialist League

1899–1903 Philippine War

1900 Gold Standard Act

1901–1904 Insular Cases

THE POPULIST CHALLENGE

The Farmers’ Revolt Even as labor unrest crested, a different kind of uprising was ripening in the South and the trans- Mississippi West, a response to falling agricultural prices and growing economic dependency in rural areas. Like industrial workers, small farmers faced increasing economic insecurity. In the South, the sharecropping system, discussed in Chapter 15, locked millions of tenant farmers, white and black, into perpetual poverty. The interruption of cotton exports during the Civil War had led to the rapid expansion of production in India, Egypt, and Brazil. The glut of cotton on the world market when southern production resumed led to declining prices (from 11 cents a pound in 1881 to 4.6 cents in 1894), throwing millions of small farmers deep into debt and threatening them with the loss of their land. In the West, farmers who had mortgaged their property to purchase seed, fertilizer, and equipment faced the prospect of losing their farms when unable to repay their bank loans. Farmers increasingly believed that their plight derived from the high freight rates charged by railroad companies, excessive interest rates for loans from merchants and bankers, and the fiscal policies of the federal government (discussed in the previous chapter) that reduced the supply of money and helped to push down farm prices.

Through the Farmers’ Alliance, the largest citizens’ movement of the nineteenth century, farmers sought to remedy their condition. Founded in Texas in the late 1870s, the Alliance spread to forty- three states by 1890. The farmers’ alternatives, said J. D. Fields, a Texas Alliance leader, were “success and freedom, or failure and servitude.” At first, the Alliance remained aloof from politics, attempting to improve rural conditions by the cooperative financing and marketing of crops. Alliance “exchanges” would loan money to farmers and sell their produce. But it soon became clear that farmers on their own could not finance this plan, and banks refused to extend loans to the exchanges. The Alliance therefore proposed that the federal government establish warehouses where farmers could store their crops until they were sold. Using the crops as collateral, the government would then issue loans to farmers at low interest rates, thereby ending their dependence on bankers and merchants. Since it would have to be enacted by Congress, the “subtreasury plan,” as this proposal was called, led the Alliance into politics.

The People’s Party In the early 1890s, the Alliance evolved into the People’s Party (or Populists), the era’s greatest political insurgency. The party did not just appeal to farmers. It sought to speak for all the “producing classes” and achieved some of its greatest successes in states like Colorado and Idaho, where it won the support of miners and industrial workers. But its major base lay in the cotton and wheat belts of the South and West.

Building on the Farmers’ Alliance network of local institutions, the Populists embarked on a remarkable effort of community organization and education. To spread their message they published numerous pamphlets on political and economic questions, established more than 1,000 local newspapers, and sent traveling speakers throughout rural America. Wearing “a huge black sombrero and a black Prince Albert coat,” Texas Populist orator “Cyclone” Davis traveled the Great Plains accompanied by the writings of Thomas Jefferson, which he quoted to demonstrate the evils of banks and large corporations. At great gatherings on the western plains, similar in some ways to religious revival meetings, and in small-town southern country stores, one observer wrote, “people commenced to think who had never thought before, and people talked who had seldom spoken. . . . Little by little they commenced to theorize upon their condition.”

Here was the last great political expression of the nineteenth-century vision of America as a commonwealth of small producers whose freedom rested on the ownership of productive property and respect for the dignity of labor. “Day by day,” declared the People’s Party Paper of Georgia in 1893, “the power of the individual sinks. Day by day the power of the classes, or the corporations, rises. . . . In all essential respects, the republic of our fathers is dead.”

In an 1891 cartoon from a Texas Populist newspaper, northern and southern Civil War veterans clasp hands across the “bloody chasm” (a phrase first used by the New York editor Horace Greeley during his campaign for president in 1872). Beneath each figure is an explanation of why voting alignments have previously been based on sectionalism—the North fears “rebel” rule, the white South “Negro supremacy.”

But although the Populists used the familiar language of nineteenth-century radicalism, they were hardly a backward-looking movement. They embraced the modern technologies that made large- scale cooperative enterprise possible—the railroad, the telegraph, and the national market—while looking to the federal government to regulate them in the public interest. They promoted agricultural education and believed farmers should adopt modern scientific methods of cultivation. They believed the federal government could move beyond partisan conflict to operate in a businesslike manner to promote the public good—a vision soon to be associated with the Progressive movement and, many years later, politicians like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.

The Populist Platform The Populist platform of 1892, adopted at the party’s Omaha convention, remains a classic document of American reform. Written by Ignatius Donnelly, a Minnesota editor and former Radical Republican congressman during Reconstruction, it spoke of a nation “brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin” by political corruption and economic inequality. “The fruits of the toil of millions,” the platform declared, “are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes . . . while their possessors despise the republic and endanger liberty.” The platform put forth a long list of proposals to restore democracy and economic opportunity, many of which would be adopted during the next half-century: the direct election of U.S. senators, government control of the currency, a graduated income tax, a system of low-cost public financing to enable farmers to market their crops, and recognition of the right of workers to form labor unions. In addition, Populists called for public ownership of the railroads to guarantee farmers inexpensive access to markets for their crops. A generation would pass before a major party offered so sweeping a plan for political action to create the social conditions of freedom.

The Populist Coalition In some southern states, the Populists made remarkable efforts to unite black and white small farmers on a common political and economic program. The obstacles to such an alliance were immense—not merely the heritage of racism and the political legacy of the Civil War, but the fact that many white Populists were landowning farmers while most blacks were tenants and agricultural laborers. Unwelcome in the southern branches of the Farmers’ Alliance, black farmers formed their own organization, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance. In 1891, it tried to organize a strike of cotton pickers on plantations in South Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas. The action was violently suppressed by local authorities and landowners, some of them sympathetic to the white Alliance but unwilling to pay higher wages to their own laborers.

In general, southern white Populists’ racial attitudes did not differ significantly from those of their non-Populist neighbors. Nonetheless, recognizing the need for allies to break the Democratic Party’s stranglehold on power in the South, some white Populists insisted that black and white farmers shared common grievances and could unite for common goals. Tom Watson, Georgia’s leading Populist, worked the hardest to forge a black-white alliance. “You are kept apart,” he told interracial audiences, “that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. . . . This race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.” While many blacks refused to abandon the party of Lincoln, others were attracted by the Populist appeal. In 1894, a coalition of white Populists and black Republicans won control of North Carolina, bringing to the state a “second Reconstruction” complete with increased spending on public education and a revival of black officeholding. In most of the South, however, Democrats fended off the Populist challenge by resorting to the tactics they had used to retain power since the 1870s—mobilizing whites with warnings about “Negro supremacy,” intimidating black voters, and stuffing ballot boxes on election day.

The Populist movement also engaged the energies of thousands of reform-minded women from farm and labor backgrounds. Some, like Mary Elizabeth Lease, a former homesteader and one of the first female lawyers in Kansas, became prominent organizers, campaigners, and strategists. Lease was famous for her speeches urging farmers to “raise less corn and more hell” (although she apparently never uttered those exact words, which would have been considered inappropriate for a woman in public). “We fought England for our liberty,” Lease declared, “and put chains on four million blacks. We wiped out slavery and . . . began a system of white wage slavery worse than the first.” During the 1890s, referendums in Colorado and Idaho approved extending the vote to women, while in Kansas and California the proposal went down in defeat. Populists in all these states endorsed women’s suffrage.

POPULIST STRENGTH, 1892

Populist presidential candidate James Weaver received more than 1 million votes in 1892. The party carried five western states, with twenty-two electoral votes, and elected three governors and fifteen members of Congress. In his inaugural address in 1893, Lorenzo Lewelling, the new Populist governor of Kansas, anticipated a phrase made famous seventy years later by Martin Luther King Jr.: “I have a dream. . . . In the beautiful vision of a coming time I behold the abolition of poverty. A time is foreshadowed when . . . liberty, equality, and justice shall have permanent abiding places in the republic.”

The Government and Labor Were the Populists on the verge of replacing one of the two major parties? The severe depression that began in 1893 led to increased conflict between capital and labor and seemed to create an opportunity for expanding the Populist vote. Time and again, employers brought state or federal authority to bear to protect their own economic power or put down threats to public order. Even before the economic downturn, in 1892, the governor of Idaho declared martial law and sent militia units and federal troops into the mining region of Coeur d’Alene to break a strike. In May 1894, the federal government deployed soldiers to disperse Coxey’s Army—a band of several hundred unemployed men led by Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey, who marched to Washington demanding economic relief.

Also in 1894, workers in the company-owned town of Pullman, Illinois, where railroad sleeping cars were manufactured, called a strike to protest a reduction in wages. The American Railway Union, whose 150,000 members included both skilled and unskilled railroad laborers, announced that its members would refuse to handle trains with Pullman cars. When the boycott crippled national rail service, President Grover Cleveland’s attorney general, Richard Olney (himself on the board of several railroad companies), obtained a federal court injunction ordering the strikers back to work. Federal troops and U.S. marshals soon occupied railroad centers like Chicago and Sacramento.

The strike collapsed when the union’s leaders, including its charismatic president, Eugene V. Debs, were jailed for contempt of court for violating the judicial order. In the case of In re Debs, the Supreme Court unanimously confirmed the sentences and approved the use of injunctions against striking labor unions. On his release from prison in November 1895, more than 100,000 persons greeted Debs at a Chicago railroad depot.

Populism and Labor In 1894, Populists made determined efforts to appeal to industrial workers. Populist senators supported the demand of Coxey’s Army for federal unemployment relief, and Governor Davis Waite of Colorado, who had edited a labor newspaper before his election, sent the militia to protect striking miners against company police. In the state and congressional elections of that year, as the economic depression deepened, voters by the millions abandoned the Democratic Party of President Cleveland.

In rural areas, the Populist vote increased in 1894. But urban workers did not rally to the Populists, whose core issues—the subtreasury plan and lower mortgage interest rates—had little meaning for them and whose demand for higher prices for farm goods would raise the cost of food and reduce the value of workers’ wages. Moreover, the revivalist atmosphere of many Populist gatherings and the biblical cadences of Populist speeches were alien to the largely immigrant and Catholic industrial working class. Urban working-class voters in 1894 instead shifted en masse to the Republicans, who claimed that raising tariff rates (which Democrats had recently reduced) would restore prosperity by protecting manufacturers and industrial workers from the competition of imported goods and cheap foreign labor. In one of the most decisive shifts in congressional power in American history, the Republicans gained 117 seats in the House of Representatives.

Bryan and Free Silver In 1896, Democrats and Populists joined to support William Jennings Bryan for the presidency. A thirty-six-year-old congressman from Nebraska, Bryan won the Democratic nomination after delivering to the national convention an electrifying speech that crystallized the farmers’ pride and grievances. “Burn down your cities and leave our farms,” Bryan proclaimed, “and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.” Bryan called for the “free coinage” of silver—the unrestricted minting of silver money. In language ringing with biblical imagery, Bryan condemned the gold standard: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

At various points in the nineteenth century, from debates over “hard” versus “soft” money in the Jacksonian era to the greenback movement after the Civil War, the “money question” had played a central role in American politics. Bryan’s demand for “free silver” was the latest expression of the view that increasing the amount of currency in circulation would raise the prices farmers received for their crops and make it easier to pay off their debts. His nomination wrested control of the Democratic Party from long-dominant leaders like President Grover Cleveland, who were closely tied to eastern businessmen.

There was more to Bryan’s appeal, however, than simply free silver. A devoutly religious man, he was strongly influenced by the Social Gospel movement (discussed in the previous chapter) and tried to apply the teachings of Jesus Christ to uplifting the “little people” of the United States. He championed a vision of the government helping ordinary Americans that anticipated provisions of the New Deal of the 1930s, including a progressive income tax, banking regulation, and the right of workers to form unions.

Many Populists were initially cool to Bryan’s campaign. Their party had been defrauded time and again by Democrats in the South. Veteran Populists feared that their broad program was in danger of being reduced to “free silver.” But realizing that they could not secure victory alone, the party’s leaders endorsed Bryan’s candidacy. Bryan broke with tradition and embarked on a nationwide speaking tour, seeking to rally farmers and workers to his cause.

The Campaign of 1896 Republicans met the silverite challenge head on, insisting that gold was the only “honest” currency. Abandoning the gold standard, they insisted, would destroy business confidence and prevent recovery from the depression by making creditors unwilling to extend loans, since they could not be certain of the value of the money in which they would be repaid. The party nominated for president Ohio governor William McKinley, who as a congressman in 1890 had shepherded to passage the strongly protectionist McKinley Tariff.

The election of 1896 is sometimes called the first modern presidential campaign because of the amount of money spent by the Republicans and the efficiency of their national organization. Eastern bankers and industrialists, thoroughly alarmed by Bryan’s call for monetary inflation and his fiery speeches denouncing corporate arrogance, poured millions of dollars into Republican coffers. (McKinley’s campaign raised some $10 million; Bryan’s around $300,000.) While McKinley remained at his Ohio home, where he addressed crowds of supporters from his front porch, his political manager Mark Hanna created a powerful national machine that flooded the country with pamphlets, posters, and campaign buttons.

The results revealed a nation as divided along regional lines as in 1860. Bryan carried the South and West and received 6.5 million votes. McKinley swept the more populous industrial states of the Northeast and Midwest, attracting 7.1 million. The Republican candidate’s electoral margin was even greater: 271 to 176. The era’s bitter labor strife did not carry over into the electoral arena; indeed, party politics seemed to mute class conflict rather than to reinforce it. Industrial America, from financiers and managers to workers, now voted solidly Republican, a loyalty reinforced when prosperity returned after 1897.

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1896

McKinley’s victory shattered the political stalemate that had persisted since 1876 and created one of the most enduring political majorities in American history. During McKinley’s presidency, Republicans placed their stamp on economic policy by passing the Dingley Tariff of 1897, raising rates to the highest level in history, and passing the Gold Standard Act of 1900. Not until 1932, in the midst of another economic depression, would the Democrats become the nation’s majority party. The election of 1896 also proved to be the last presidential election with extremely high voter turnout (in some states, over 90 percent of those eligible). From then on, with the South solidly Democratic and the North overwhelmingly Republican, few states witnessed vigorous two-party campaigns. Voter participation began a downhill trend, although it rose again from the mid-1930s through the 1960s. Today, only around half the electorate casts ballots.

Glossary Populists Founded in 1892, a group that advocated a variety of reform issues, including free coinage of silver, income tax, postal savings, regulation of railroads, and direct election of U.S. senators. Coxey’s Army A march on Washington organized by Jacob Coxey, an Ohio member of the People’s Party. Coxey believed in abandoning the gold standard and printing enough legal tender to reinvigorate the economy. The marchers demanded that Congress create jobs and pay workers in paper currency not backed by gold.

THE SEGREGATED SOUTH

The Redeemers in Power The failure of Populism in the South opened the door for the full imposition of a new racial order. The coalition of merchants, planters, and business entrepreneurs who dominated the region’s politics after 1877, who called themselves Redeemers, had moved to undo as much as possible of Reconstruction. State budgets were slashed, taxes, especially on landed property, reduced, and public facilities like hospitals and asylums closed. Hardest hit were the new public school systems. Louisiana spent so little on education that it became the only state in the Union in which the percentage of whites unable to read and write actually increased between 1880 and 1900. Black schools, however, suffered the most, as the gap between expenditures for black and white pupils widened steadily. “What I want here is Negroes who can make cotton,” declared one planter, “and they don’t need education to help them make cotton.”

New laws authorized the arrest of virtually any person without employment and greatly increased the penalties for petty crimes. “They send [a man] to the penitentiary if he steals a chicken,” complained a former slave in North Carolina. As the South’s prison population rose, the renting out of convicts became a profitable business. Every southern state placed at least a portion of its convicted criminals, the majority of them blacks imprisoned for minor offenses, in the hands of private businessmen. Railroads, mines, and lumber companies competed for this new form of cheap, involuntary labor. Conditions in labor camps were often barbaric, with disease rife and the death rates high. “One dies, get another” was the motto of the system’s architects. The Knights of Labor made convict labor a major issue in the South. In 1892, miners in Tennessee burned the stockade where convict workers were housed and shipped them out of the region. Tennessee abolished the convict lease system three years later but replaced it with a state-owned coal mine using prison labor that reaped handsome profits for decades.

The Failure of the New South Dream During the 1880s, Atlanta editor Henry Grady tirelessly promoted the promise of a New South, an era of prosperity based on industrial expansion and agricultural diversification. In fact, while planters, merchants, and industrialists prospered, the region as a whole sank deeper and deeper into poverty. Some industry did develop, including mining in the Appalachians, textile production in the Carolinas and Georgia, and furniture and cigarette manufacturing in certain southern cities. The new upcountry cotton factories offered jobs to entire families of poor whites from the surrounding countryside. But since the main attractions for investors were the South’s low wages and taxes and the availability of convict labor, these enterprises made little contribution to regional economic development. With the exception of Birmingham, Alabama, which by 1900 had developed into an important center for the manufacture of iron and steel, southern cities were mainly export centers for cotton, tobacco, and rice, with little industry or skilled labor. Overall, the region remained dependent on the North for capital and manufactured goods. In 1900, southern per capita income amounted to only 60 percent of the national average. As late as the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt would declare the South the nation’s “number one” economic problem.

Black Life in the South As the most disadvantaged rural southerners, black farmers suffered the most from the region’s condition. In the Upper South, economic development offered some opportunities—mines, iron furnaces, and tobacco factories employed black laborers, and a good number of black farmers managed to acquire land. In the rice kingdom of coastal South Carolina and Georgia, planters found themselves unable to acquire the capital necessary to repair irrigation systems and machinery destroyed by the war. By the turn of the century, most of the great plantations had fallen to pieces, and many blacks acquired land and took up self-sufficient farming. In most of the Lower South, however, African-Americans owned a smaller percentage of the land in 1900 than they had at the end of Reconstruction.

The black educator Mary McLeod Bethune with girls from the school she established in Florida in a photograph from around 1905.

In southern cities, the network of institutions created after the Civil War—schools and colleges, churches, businesses, women’s clubs, and the like—served as the foundation for increasingly diverse black urban communities. They supported the growth of a black middle class, mostly professionals like teachers and physicians, or businessmen like undertakers and shopkeepers serving the needs of black customers. But the labor market was rigidly divided along racial lines. Black men were excluded from supervisory positions in factories and workshops and white-collar jobs such as clerks in offices. A higher percentage of black women than white worked for wages, but mainly as domestic servants. They could not find employment among the growing numbers of secretaries, typists, and department store clerks.

The Kansas Exodus

A photograph of townspeople in Nicodemus, a community established by members of the 1879–1880 “Exodus” of southern African-Americans to Kansas.

Overall, one historian has written, the New South was “a miserable landscape dotted only by a few rich enclaves that cast little or no light upon the poverty surrounding them.” Trapped at the bottom of a stagnant economy, some blacks sought a way out through emigration from the South. In 1879 and 1880, an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 African-Americans migrated to Kansas, seeking political equality, freedom from violence, access to education, and economic opportunity. The name participants gave to this migration—the Exodus, derived from the biblical account of the Jews escaping slavery in Egypt—indicated that its roots lay in deep longings for the substance of freedom. Those promoting the Kansas Exodus, including former fugitive slave Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, the organizer of a real estate company, distributed flyers and lithographs picturing Kansas as an idyllic land of rural plenty. Lacking the capital to take up farming, however, most black migrants ended up as unskilled laborers in towns and cities. But few chose to return to the South. In the words of one minister active in the movement, “We had rather suffer and be free.”

Despite deteriorating prospects in the South, most African-Americans had little alternative but to stay in the region. The real expansion of job opportunities was taking place in northern cities. But most northern employers refused to offer jobs to blacks in the expanding industrial economy, preferring to hire white migrants from rural areas and immigrants from Europe. Not until the outbreak of World War Ⅰ in Europe in 1914 cut off immigration did northern employers open industrial jobs to blacks, setting in motion the Great Migration discussed in Chapter 19. Until then, the vast majority of African-Americans remained in the South.

The Transformation of Black Politics Neither black voting nor black officeholding came to an abrupt end in 1877. Blacks continued to cast ballots in large numbers, although Democrats solidified their control of state and local affairs by redrawing district lines and substituting appointive for elective officials in counties with black majorities. A few blacks even served in Congress in the 1880s and 1890s. Nonetheless, political opportunities became more and more restricted. Not until the 1990s would the number of black legislators in the South approach the level seen during Reconstruction.

For black men of talent and ambition, other avenues—business, the law, the church—increasingly seemed to offer greater opportunities for personal advancement and community service than politics. The banner of political leadership passed to black women activists. The National Association of Colored Women, founded in 1896, brought together local and regional women’s clubs to press for both women’s rights and racial uplift. Most female activists emerged from the small urban black middle class and preached the necessity of “respectable” behavior as part and parcel of the struggle for equal rights. They aided poor families, offered lessons in home life and childrearing, and battled gambling and drinking in black communities. Some poor blacks resented middle-class efforts to instruct them in proper behavior. But by insisting on the right of black women to be considered as “respectable” as their white counterparts, the women reformers challenged the racial ideology that consigned all blacks to the status of degraded second-class citizens.

The Emergence of Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington, advocate of industrial education and economic self-help.

The social movements that had helped to expand the nineteenth-century boundaries of freedom now redefined their objectives so that they might be realized within the new economic and intellectual framework. Prominent black leaders, for example, took to emphasizing economic self-help and

individual advancement into the middle class as an alternative to political agitation.

Symbolizing the change was the juxtaposition, in 1895, of the death of Frederick Douglass with Booker T. Washington’s widely praised speech, titled the “Atlanta Compromise,” at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition that urged blacks to adjust to segregation and abandon agitation for civil and political rights. Born a slave in 1856, Washington had studied as a young man at Hampton Institute, Virginia. He adopted the outlook of Hampton’s founder, General Samuel Armstrong, who emphasized that obtaining farms or skilled jobs was far more important to African-Americans emerging from slavery than the rights of citizenship. Washington put this view into practice when he became head of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a center for vocational education (education focused on training for a job rather than broad learning).

In his Atlanta speech, Washington repudiated the abolitionist tradition that stressed ceaseless agitation for full equality. He urged blacks not to try to combat segregation: “In all the things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Washington advised his people to seek the assistance of white employers who, in a land racked by labor turmoil, would prefer a docile, dependable black labor force to unionized whites. Washington’s ascendancy rested in large part on his success in channeling aid from wealthy northern whites to Tuskegee and to black politicians and newspapers who backed his program. But his support in the black community also arose from a widespread sense that in the world of the late nineteenth century, frontal assaults on white power were impossible and that blacks should concentrate on building up their segregated communities.

The Elimination of Black Voting For nearly a generation after the end of Reconstruction, despite fraud and violence, black southerners continued to cast ballots. In some states, the Republican Party remained competitive. Despite the limits of the Populists’ interracial alliance, the threat of a biracial political insurgency frightened the ruling Democrats and contributed greatly to the disenfranchisement movement.

Between 1890 and 1906, every southern state enacted laws or constitutional provisions meant to eliminate the black vote. Since the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited the use of race as a qualification for the suffrage, how were such measures even possible? Southern legislatures drafted laws that on paper appeared color-blind but that were actually designed to end black voting. The most popular devices were the poll tax (a fee that each citizen had to pay in order to retain the right to vote), literacy tests, and the requirement that a prospective voter demonstrate to election officials an “understanding” of the state constitution. Six southern states also adopted a grandfather clause, exempting from the new requirements descendants of persons eligible to vote before the Civil War (when only whites, of course, could cast ballots in the South). The racial intent of the grandfather clause was so clear that the Supreme Court in 1915 invalidated such laws for violating the Fifteenth Amendment. The other methods of limiting black voting, however, remained on the books.

Some white leaders presented disenfranchisement as a “good government” measure—a means of purifying politics by ending the fraud, violence, and manipulation of voting returns regularly used against Republicans and Populists. But ultimately, as a Charleston newspaper declared, the aim was to make clear that the white South “does not desire or intend ever to include black men among its citizens.” Although election officials often allowed whites who did not meet the new qualifications to register, numerous poor and illiterate whites also lost the right to vote, a result welcomed by many planters and urban reformers. Louisiana, for example, reduced the number of blacks registered to vote from 130,000 in 1894 to 1,342 a decade later. But 80,000 white voters also lost the right. Disenfranchisement led directly to the rise of a generation of southern “demagogues,” who mobilized white voters by extreme appeals to racism. Tom Watson, who as noted above had tried to forge an interracial Populist coalition in the 1890s, reemerged early in the twentieth century as a power in Georgia public life through vicious speeches whipping up prejudice against blacks, Jews, and Catholics.

As late as 1940, only 3 percent of adult black southerners were registered to vote. The elimination of black and many white voters, which reversed the nineteenth-century trend toward more inclusive suffrage, could not have been accomplished without the acquiescence of the North. In 1891, the Senate defeated a proposal for federal protection of black voting rights in the South. Apart from the grandfather clause, the Supreme Court gave its approval to disenfranchisement laws. According to the Fourteenth Amendment, any state that deprived male citizens of the franchise was supposed to lose part of its representation in Congress. But like much of the Constitution, this provision was consistently violated so far as African-Americans were concerned. As a result, southern congressmen wielded far greater power on the national scene than their tiny electorates warranted. As for blacks, for decades thereafter, they would regard “the loss of suffrage as being the loss of freedom.”

The Law of Segregation Along with disenfranchisement, the 1890s saw the widespread imposition of segregation in the South. Laws and local customs requiring the separation of the races had numerous precedents. They had existed in many parts of the pre–Civil War North. Southern schools and many other institutions had been segregated during Reconstruction. In the 1880s, however, southern race relations remained unsettled. Some railroads, theaters, and hotels admitted blacks and whites on an equal basis while others separated them by race or excluded blacks altogether.

In 1883, in the Civil Rights Cases, the Supreme Court invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had outlawed racial discrimination by hotels, theaters, railroads, and other public facilities. The Fourteenth Amendment, the Court insisted, prohibited unequal treatment by state authorities, not private businesses. In 1896, in the landmark decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court gave its approval to state laws requiring separate facilities for blacks and whites. The case arose in Louisiana, where the legislature had required railroad companies to maintain a separate car or section for black passengers. A Citizens Committee of black residents of New Orleans came together to challenge the law. To create a test case, Homer Plessy, a light-skinned African-American, refused a conductor’s order to move to the “colored only” part of his railroad car and was arrested.

To argue the case before the Supreme Court, the Citizens Committee hired Albion W. Tourgée, who as a judge in North Carolina during Reconstruction had waged a courageous battle against the Ku Klux Klan. “Citizenship is national and knows no color,” he insisted, and racial segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection before the law. But in a 7-1 decision, the Court upheld the Louisiana law, arguing that segregated facilities did not discriminate so long as they were “separate but equal.” The lone dissenter, John Marshall Harlan, reprimanded the majority with an oft-quoted comment: “Our constitution is color-blind.” Segregation, he insisted, sprang from whites’ conviction that they were the “dominant race” (a phrase used by the Court’s majority), and it violated the principle of equal liberty. To Harlan, freedom for the former slaves meant the right to participate fully and equally in American society.

Segregation and White Domination As Harlan predicted, states reacted to the Plessy decision by passing laws mandating racial segregation in every aspect of southern life, from schools to hospitals, waiting rooms, toilets, and cemeteries. Some states forbade taxi drivers to carry members of different races at the same time. Despite the “thin disguise” (Harlan’s phrase) of equality required by the Court’s “separate but equal” doctrine, facilities for blacks were either nonexistent or markedly inferior. In 1900, no public high school for blacks existed in the entire South. Black elementary schools, one observer reported, occupied buildings “as bad as stables.”

More than a form of racial separation, segregation was one part of an all-encompassing system of white domination, in which each component—disenfranchisement, unequal economic status, inferior education—reinforced the others. The point was not so much to keep the races apart as to ensure that when they came into contact with each other, whether in politics, labor relations, or social life, whites held the upper hand. For example, many blacks could be found in “whites-only” railroad cars. But they entered as servants and nurses accompanying white passengers, not as paying customers entitled to equal treatment.

An elaborate social etiquette developed, with proper behavior differentiated by race. One sociologist who studied the turn-of-the-century South reported that in places of business, blacks had to stand back and wait until whites had been served. They could not raise their voices or in other ways act assertively in the presence of whites, and they had to “give way” on the streets. In shops, whites but not blacks were allowed to try on clothing.

TABLE 17.1 States with Over 200 Lynchings, 1889–1918

State Number of Lynchings

Georgia 386

Mississippi 373

Texas 335

Louisiana 313

Alabama 276

Arkansas 214

Segregation affected other groups as well as blacks. In some parts of Mississippi where Chinese laborers had been brought in to work the fields after the Civil War, three separate school systems— white, black, and Chinese—were established. In California, black, Hispanic, and American Indian children were frequently educated alongside whites, but state law required separate schools for those of “mongolian or Chinese descent.” In Texas and California, although Mexicans were legally considered “white,” they found themselves barred from many restaurants, places of entertainment, and other public facilities.

The Rise of Lynching Those blacks who sought to challenge the system, or who refused to accept the demeaning behavior that was a daily feature of southern life, faced not only overwhelming political and legal power but also the threat of violent reprisal. In every year between 1883 and 1905, more than fifty persons, the vast majority of them black men, were lynched in the South—that is, murdered by a mob. Lynching continued well into the twentieth century. By mid-century, the total number of victims since 1880 had reached over 4,000. Some lynchings occurred secretly at night; others were advertised in advance and attracted large crowds of onlookers. Mobs engaged in activities that shocked the civilized world. In 1899, Sam Hose, a plantation laborer who killed his employer in self-defense, was brutally murdered near Newman, Georgia, before 2,000 onlookers, some of whom arrived on a special excursion train from Atlanta. A crowd including young children watched as his executioners cut off Hose’s ears, fingers, and genitals, burned him alive, and then fought over pieces of his bones as souvenirs. Law enforcement authorities made no effort to prevent the lynching or to bring those who committed the crime to justice.

Like many victims of lynchings, Hose was accused after his death of having raped a white woman. Many white southerners considered preserving the purity of white womanhood a justification for extralegal vengeance. Yet in nearly all cases, as activist Ida B. Wells argued in a newspaper editorial after a Memphis lynching in 1892, the charge of rape was a “bare lie.” Born a slave in Mississippi in 1862, Wells had become a schoolteacher and editor. Her essay condemning the lynching of three black men in Memphis led a mob to destroy her newspaper, the Memphis Free Press, while she was out of the city. Wells moved to the North, where she became the nation’s leading antilynching crusader. She bluntly insisted that given the conditions of southern blacks, the United States had no right to call itself the “land of the free.”

VOICES OF FREEDOM

From IDA B. WELLS, LYNCH LAW IN ALL ITS PHASES (1893)

After being driven from Memphis because of her outspoken opposition to lynching, Ida B. Wells campaigned to awaken the public to racial terrorism. This is an excerpt from a speech she delivered in Boston in 1893.

I am before the American people today through no inclination of my own, but because of a deep- seated conviction that the country at large does not know the extent to which lynch law prevails in parts of the republic. . . .

Although the impression has gone abroad that most of the lynchings take place because of assaults on white women only one-third of the number lynched in the past ten years have been charged with that offense, to say nothing of those who were not guilty of the charge. . . . But the unsupported word of any white person for any cause is sufficient to cause a lynching. . . . Governors of states and officers of the law stand by and see the work well done.

And yet this Christian nation, the flower of the nineteenth century civilization, says it can do nothing to stop this inhuman slaughter. The general government is willingly powerless to send troops to protect the lives of its black citizens. . . . The lawlessness which has been here described is like unto that which prevailed under slavery. The very same forces are at work now as then. [They] can be traced to the very first year Lee’s conquered veterans marched from Appomattox to their homes in the southland. They were conquered in war, but not in spirit. They believed as firmly as ever that it was their right to rule black men and dictate to the national government. . . . All their laws are shaped to this end—school laws, railroad car regulations . . . every device is adopted to make slaves of free men. . . . The rule of the mob is absolute. . . .

Do you ask the remedy? A public sentiment strong against lawlessness must be aroused [to demand] that equal and exact justice be accorded to every citizen of whatever race, who finds a home within the borders of the land of the free and the home of the brave.

From W. E. B. DU BOIS, THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK (1903)

Like Wells, the black educator and activist W. E. B. Du Bois demanded equal treatment for black Americans. In The Souls of Black Folk, he sought to revive the tradition of agitation for basic civil, political, and educational rights, and for recognition of blacks as full members of American society.

The silently growing assumption of this age is that . . . the backward races of to-day are of proven inefficiency and not worth the saving. Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward time and ignorant of the deeds of men. A thousand years ago such an assumption, easily possible, would have made it difficult for the Teuton to prove his right to life. Two thousand years ago such dogmatism, readily welcome, would have [refuted] the idea of blond races ever leading civilization. . . .

Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song—soft, stirring melody in an ill-

harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit. Around us the history of the land has centered for thrice a hundred years. . . . Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation,—we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse. Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and striving? Would America have been America without her Negro people?

QUESTIONS

1. Whom does Wells blame for lynching? 2. In what ways does Du Bois criticize and in what ways does he seem to embrace the idea of

inborn racial characteristics and abilities? 3. How do Wells and Du Bois appeal to history to bolster their claims?

A crowd at the aftermath of the lynching of Laura Nelson and her teenage son L. D. Nelson, African-American residents of Okemah, Oklahoma, in 1911. They were accused of shooting to death a deputy sheriff who had come to the Nelson home to investigate the theft of livestock. A week after being lodged in jail, they were removed by a mob and taken to the bridge. Members of the mob raped Mrs. Nelson before the lynching. The photograph was reproduced as a postcard, sold at local stores. As in most lynchings, no one was prosecuted for the crime.

Although many countries have witnessed outbreaks of violence against minority racial, ethnic, or religious groups, widespread lynching of individuals over so long a period was a phenomenon unknown elsewhere. Canada, for example, has experienced only one lynching in its history—in 1884, when a mob from the United States crossed the border into British Columbia to lynch an Indian teenager who had fled after being accused of murder.

Years later, black writer Blyden Jackson recalled growing up in early-twentieth-century Louisville,

Kentucky, a city in many ways typical of the New South. It was a divided society. There was the world “where white folks lived . . . the Louisville of the downtown hotels, the lower floors of the big movie houses . . . the inner sanctums of offices where I could go only as a humble client or a menial custodian.” Then there was the black world, “the homes, the people, the churches, and the schools,” where “everything was black.” “I knew,” Jackson later recalled, “that there were two Louisvilles and . . . two Americas.”

Politics, Religion, and Memory As the white North and South moved toward reconciliation in the 1880s and 1890s, one cost was the abandonment of the dream of racial equality written into the laws and Constitution during Reconstruction. In popular literature and memoirs by participants, at veterans’ reunions and in public memorials, the Civil War came to be remembered as a tragic family quarrel among white Americans in which blacks had played no significant part. It was a war of “brother against brother” in which both sides fought gallantly for noble causes—local rights on the part of the South, preservation of the Union for the North. Slavery increasingly came to be viewed as a minor issue, not the war’s fundamental cause, and Reconstruction as a regrettable period of “Negro rule” when former slaves had power thrust upon them by a vindictive North. This outlook gave legitimacy to southern efforts to eliminate black voting, lest the region once again suffer the alleged “horrors” of Reconstruction.

At the same time as they reduced blacks to second-class citizenship, southern governments erected monuments to the Lost Cause, a romanticized version of slavery, the Old South, and the Confederate experience. Religion was central to the development of Lost Cause mythology—it offered a way for white southerners to come to terms with defeat in the Civil War without abandoning white supremacy. The death of the Confederacy, in many sermons, was equated with the death of Christ, who gave his life for the sins of mankind.

Even as white northern Protestants abandoned concern for racial justice and embraced the idea of sectional reconciliation, southern churches played a key role in keeping the values of the Old South alive by refusing to reunite with northern counterparts. In the 1840s, the Methodist and Baptist churches had divided into northern and southern branches. Methodists would not reunite until well into the twentieth century; Baptists have yet to do so. In both North and South, school history textbooks emphasized happy slaves and the evils of Reconstruction, and the role of black soldiers in winning the war was all but forgotten. When a group of black veterans attempted to participate in a Florida ceremony commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War in 1911, a white mob tore the military insignias off their jackets and drove them away.

Glossary Kansas Exodus A migration in 1879 and 1880 by some 40,000–60,000 blacks to Kansas to escape the oppressive environment of the New South. Atlanta Compromise Speech to the Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895 by educator Booker T. Washington, the leading black spokesman of the day; black scholar W. E. B. Du Bois gave the speech its derisive name and criticized Washington for encouraging blacks to accommodate segregation and disenfranchisement. grandfather clause Loophole created by southern disenfranchising legislatures of the 1890s for illiterate white males whose grandfathers had been eligible to vote before the Civil War. disenfranchisement Depriving a person or persons of the right to vote; in the United States, exclusionary policies were used to deny groups, especially African-Americans and women, their voting rights. Plessy v. Ferguson U.S. Supreme Court decision supporting the legality of Jim Crow laws that permitted or required “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites. lynching Practice, particularly widespread in the South between 1890 and 1940, in which persons (usually black) accused of a crime were murdered by mobs before standing trial. Lynchings often took place before large crowds, with law enforcement authorities not intervening. Lost Cause A romanticized view of slavery, the Old South, and the Confederacy that arose in the decades following the Civil War. New South Atlanta Constitution editor Henry W. Grady’s 1886 term for the prosperous post–Civil War South he envisioned: democratic, industrial, urban, and free of nostalgia for the defeated plantation South. “separate but equal” Principle underlying legal racial segregation, upheld in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and struck down in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

REDRAWING THE BOUNDARIES The effective nullification of the laws and amendments of Reconstruction reflected nationwide patterns of thought and policy. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, American society seemed to be fracturing along lines of both class and race. The result, commented economist Simon Patten, was a widespread obsession with redrawing the boundary of freedom by identifying and excluding those unworthy of the blessings of liberty. “The South,” he wrote, “has its negro, the city has its slums. . . . The friends of American institutions fear the ignorant immigrant, and the workingman dislikes the Chinese.” As Patten suggested, many Americans embraced a more and more restricted definition of nationhood.

The New Immigration and the New Nativism The 1890s witnessed a major shift in the sources of immigration to the United States. Despite the prolonged depression, 3.5 million newcomers entered the United States during the decade, seeking jobs in the industrial centers of the North and Midwest. Over half arrived not from Ireland, England, Germany, and Scandinavia, the traditional sources of immigration, but from southern and eastern Europe, especially Italy and the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. The new immigrants were widely described by native-born Americans as members of distinct “races,” whose lower level of civilization explained everything from their willingness to work for substandard wages to their supposed inborn tendency toward criminal behavior. They were “beaten men from beaten races,” wrote economist Francis Amasa Walker, representing “the worst failures in the struggle for existence.” American cities, said an Ohio newspaper, were being overrun by foreigners who “have no true appreciation of the meaning of liberty” and therefore posed a danger to democratic government.

Immigration Restriction The new immigration helped to trigger a resurgence of racial nationalism in the United States and elsewhere in the world. Talk of “race suicide” abounded as critics of immigration warned about the declining birth rate among native-born “Anglo-Saxon” women. Exclusion was central to efforts to build political communities, especially as older sources of unity splintered with the advent of industrialization and globalization. Many Americans who felt aggrieved because of economic changes sought to re-create a sense of belonging, juxtaposing “our” identity against people deemed “other” because of color, religion, political views, or some other characteristic. Restricting immigration was widely seen as a way to determine who was fit to be an American and thus to upgrade the “quality” of the population.

Founded in 1894 by a group of Boston professionals, the Immigration Restriction League spread rapidly across the country. It made a sharp distinction between “old” and “new” immigrants and, echoing the Know-Nothings of the 1850s, blamed the latter for problems ranging from urban crime and poverty to mass unemployment. The League insisted that newcomers from southern and eastern Europe were incapable of taking part intelligently in democratic politics, and called for reducing immigration by barring the illiterate from entering the United States. Such a measure was adopted by Congress early in 1897 but vetoed by President Grover Cleveland shortly before he left office. A law of 1903 did bar a long list of persons from entering the United States, among them “idiots, insane persons, epileptics, . . . [and] paupers,” as well as anarchists, the first time those holding a specific political viewpoint were denied the right to immigrate. And with the enactment of measures to exclude the Chinese, the United States pioneered the development of a racialized immigration policy.

Northern and western states, like those in the South, experimented with ways to eliminate “undesirable” voters. Nearly all the states during the 1890s adopted the secret, or “Australian,” ballot, meant both to protect voters’ privacy and to limit the participation of illiterates (who could no longer receive help from party officials at polling places). Several states ended the practice of allowing immigrants to vote before becoming citizens and adopted stringent new residency and literacy requirements. None of these measures approached the scope of black disfranchisement in the South, or the continued denial of voting rights to women in nearly all the states. But throughout the country, suffrage was increasingly becoming a privilege, not a right.

Chinese Exclusion and Chinese Rights The boundaries of nationhood, expanded so dramatically in the aftermath of the Civil War, slowly contracted. Leaders of both parties expressed vicious opinions regarding immigrants from China— they were “odious, abominable, dangerous, revolting,” declared Republican leader James G. Blaine. In 1875, Congress excluded Chinese women from entering the country. California congressman Horace Page, the bill’s author, insisted that it was intended to preserve the health of white citizens by barring Chinese prostitutes. But immigration authorities enforced the Page law so as to keep out as well the wives and daughters of arriving men and of those already in the country.

Beginning in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act, Congress abrogated the Burlingame Treaty ratified during Reconstruction and temporarily excluded all immigrants from China from entering the country. Although non-whites had long been barred from becoming naturalized citizens, this was the first time that race had been used to exclude from the country an entire group of people. Congress renewed the restriction ten years later and made it permanent in 1902. Chinese in the United States were required to register with the government and carry identification papers or face deportation. Indeed, the use of photographs for personal identification first came into widespread use as a means of enforcing Chinese exclusion. One Chinese activist complained that the photos, which bore a striking resemblance to “mug shots” of persons under arrest, criminalized people “innocent of any crime” and created a “national rogues’ gallery” of Chinese residents. In 2012, Congress passed a Resolution of Regret apologizing for the exclusion laws and acknowledging their role in exacerbating racial discrimination. It was sponsored by Judy Chu, a Chinese-American member of the House of Representatives from California.

By 1930, because of exclusion, the number of Chinese had declined to 75,000. On the West Coast, the Chinese suffered intense discrimination and periodic mob violence. In the late-nineteenth-century West, thousands of Chinese immigrants were expelled from towns and mining camps, and mobs assaulted Chinese residences and businesses.

Chinese fought these measures with methods both illegal and legal. Many refused to carry identification as a protest against what they called the “dog tag” law. Some obtained fraudulent documents that created “paper identities” showing them to be a family member of a U.S. resident, or a member of a group exempted from exclusion, and thus eligible to enter the country. After the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, some claimed their citizenship papers had been destroyed in the fire that devastated much of the city.

Beginning in 1909, as part of the enforcement of Chinese exclusion, all Chinese in the United States were required to carry a government-issued certificate, the first widespread use of photographs as proof of identity. This certificate, issued in 1924, belonged to Anna May Wong, an American-born movie star.

Drawing on the legislation of the Reconstruction era, Chinese victims sued local governments for redress when their rights were violated and petitioned Congress for indemnity. Their demands for equal rights forced the state and federal courts to define the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment. For example, between 1871 and 1885, San Francisco provided no public education for Chinese children. In 1885, the California Supreme Court, in Tape v. Hurley, ordered the city to admit Chinese students to public schools. The state legislature responded by passing a law authorizing segregated education, and the city established a school for Chinese. But Joseph and Mary Tape, who had lived in the United States since the 1860s, insisted that their daughter be allowed to attend her neighborhood school like other children. “Is it a disgrace to be born a Chinese?” Mary Tape wrote. “Didn’t God make us all!” But her protest failed. Not until 1947 did California repeal the law authorizing separate schools for the Chinese.

The U.S. Supreme Court also considered the legal status of Chinese-Americans. In Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), the Court unanimously ordered San Francisco to grant licenses to Chinese-operated laundries, which the city government had refused to do. To deny a person the opportunity to earn a living, the Court declared, was “intolerable in any country where freedom prevails.” Twelve years later, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment awarded citizenship to children of Chinese immigrants born on American soil.

Yet the justices also affirmed the right of Congress to set racial restrictions on immigration. And in its decision in Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893), the Court authorized the federal government to expel Chinese aliens without due process of law. In his dissent, Justice David J. Brewer acknowledged that the power was now directed against a people many Americans found “obnoxious.” But “who shall say,” he continued, “it will not be exercised tomorrow against other classes and other people?” Brewer proved to be an accurate prophet. In 1904, the Court cited Fong Yue Ting in upholding the law barring anarchists from entering the United States, demonstrating how restrictions on the rights of one group can become a precedent for infringing on the rights of others.

Exclusion profoundly shaped the experience of Chinese-Americans, long stigmatizing them as incapable of assimilation and justifying their isolation from mainstream society. Congress for the

first time also barred groups of whites from entering the country, beginning in 1875 with prostitutes and convicted felons. “Are we still a [place of refuge] for the oppressed of all nations?” wondered James B. Weaver, the Populist candidate for president in 1892.

The Rise of the AFL The social movements that had helped to expand the nineteenth-century boundaries of freedom now redefined their objectives so that they might be realized within the new economic and intellectual framework. Within the labor movement, the demise of the Knights of Labor and the ascendancy of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) during the 1890s reflected this shift away from a broadly reformist past to more limited goals. As the Homestead and Pullman strikes demonstrated, direct confrontations with the large corporations were likely to prove suicidal. Unions, declared Samuel Gompers, the AFL’s founder and longtime president, should not seek economic independence, pursue the Knights’ utopian dream of creating a “cooperative commonwealth,” or form independent parties with the aim of achieving power in government. Rather, the labor movement should devote itself to negotiating with employers for higher wages and better working conditions for its members. Like Booker T. Washington, Gompers spoke the language of the era’s business culture. Indeed, the AFL policies he pioneered were known as “business unionism.” Gompers embraced the idea of “freedom of contract,” shrewdly turning it into an argument against interference by judges with workers’ right to organize unions.

WHO IS AN AMERICAN?

FROM WILLIAM BIRNEY, “DEPORTING MOHAMMEDANS” (1897)

Long before current debates over limiting Muslim immigration to the United States, federal officials excluded a group of Muslims from entering the country. William Birney, an ardent abolitionist and a Union general in the Civil War, protested the action in a letter to the Washington Post.

Five men and a lad of fifteen, immigrants from Turkey, passengers on the Caledonia, have been held in custody at New York since last Monday and are to be deported, by order of the United States Supervisors of Immigration. The cause of this imprisonment and banishment is that the newcomers, on being questioned by a subordinate official, admitted they were Mohammedans. . . .

Where is this sort of thing to end? . . . If the principle should be approved, it may be applied to any persons whose opinions the officials of the time may think dangerous, to Jews, Catholics, Mormons, Cubans, Spaniards, and even to bankers and bosses. It would be risky for [political bosses] Croker or Platt or Hanna or [J. P.] Morgan to leave the country; he might not get back again.

This deportation by order of a board, because of religion, is too absurd to be tolerated by the authorities. It follows close on the president’s Thanksgiving proclamation in which he recommended all persons (including, of course, Jews, Mormons, Spiritualists, Mohammedans, and Christian Scientists) to meet “in their respective places of worship” and offer thanks. Congress has no right to legislate for or against any religious sect or to banish any. It is the glory of our country that a man may believe anything but if he injures other people, the law takes hold of him. . . .

There are Mohammedans in the United States. Some of them are missionaries sent to New York to convert the people. If we deport Mohammedans, the Sultan may retort by deporting American missionaries—whom he regards as a demoralizing and dangerous class. If he should, what can we say against it?

If we let Mohammedan immigrants alone, showing ourselves civilized and kind-hearted, they will soon become Americans in feeling and habits.

QUESTIONS

1. Why does Birney think that the action of the immigration officials sets a dangerous precedent? 2. Why does he think that toleration is likely to promote immigrant assimilation?

During the 1890s, union membership rebounded from its decline in the late 1880s. But at the same time, the labor movement became less and less inclusive. Abandoning the Knights’ ideal of labor solidarity, the AFL restricted membership to skilled workers—a small minority of the labor force— effectively excluding the vast majority of unskilled workers and, therefore, nearly all blacks, women, and new European immigrants. AFL membership centered on sectors of the economy like printing and building construction that were dominated by small competitive businesses. AFL unions had little presence in basic industries like steel and rubber, or in the large-scale factories that now dominated the economy.

The Women’s Era Changes in the women’s movement reflected the same combination of expanding activities and narrowing boundaries. The 1890s launched what would later be called the “women’s era”—three decades during which women, although still denied the vote, enjoyed larger opportunities than in the past for economic independence and played a greater and greater role in public life. By now, nearly every state had adopted laws giving married women control over their own wages and property and the right to sign separate contracts and make separate wills. Nearly 5 million women worked for wages in 1900. Although most were young, unmarried, and concentrated in traditional jobs such as domestic service and the garment industry, a generation of college-educated women was beginning to take its place in better-paying clerical and professional positions.

Through a network of women’s clubs, temperance associations, and social reform organizations, women exerted a growing influence on public affairs. Founded in 1874, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) grew to become the era’s largest female organization, with a membership by 1890 of 150,000. Under the banner of Home Protection, it moved from demanding the prohibition of alcoholic beverages (blamed for leading men to squander their wages on drink and treat their wives abusively) to a comprehensive program of economic and political reform, including the right to vote. Women, insisted Frances Willard, the group’s president, must abandon the idea that “weakness” and dependence were their nature and join assertively in movements to change society. “A wider freedom is coming to the women of America,” she declared in an 1895 speech to male and female strikers in a Massachusetts shoe factory. “Too long has it been held that woman has no right to enter these movements. So much for the movements. Politics is the place for woman.”

At the same time, the center of gravity of feminism shifted toward an outlook more in keeping with prevailing racial and ethnic norms. The earlier “feminism of equal rights,” which claimed the ballot as part of a larger transformation of women’s status, was never fully repudiated. The movement continued to argue for women’s equality in employment, education, and politics. But with increasing frequency, the native-born, middle-class women who dominated the suffrage movement claimed the vote as educated members of a “superior race.”

A new generation of suffrage leaders suggested that educational and other voting qualifications did not conflict with the movement’s aims, so long as they applied equally to men and women. Immigrants and former slaves had been enfranchised with “ill-advised haste,” declared Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (created in 1890 to reunite the rival suffrage organizations formed after the Civil War). Indeed, Catt suggested, extending the vote to native-born white women would help to counteract the growing power of the “ignorant foreign vote” in the North and the dangerous potential for a second Reconstruction in the South. Elitism within the movement was reinforced when many advocates of suffrage blamed the “slum vote” for the defeat of a women’s suffrage referendum in California. In 1895, the same year that Booker T. Washington delivered his Atlanta address, the National American Woman Suffrage Association held its annual convention in that segregated city. Eight years later, the association met in New Orleans, where the delegates sang “Dixie” and listened to speeches by former Confederate officers that denounced blacks as barbarians. Like other American institutions, the organized movement for women’s suffrage had made its peace with nativism and racism.

Glossary new immigrants Wave of newcomers from southern and eastern Europe, including many Jews, who became a majority among immigrants to America after 1890. Immigration Restriction League A political organization founded in 1894 that called for reducing immigration to the United States by requiring a literacy test for immigrants. Chinese Exclusion Act 1882 law that halted Chinese immigration to the United States. American Federation of Labor A federation of trade unions founded in 1881, composed mostly of skilled, white, native-born workers; its long-term president was Samuel Gompers.

BECOMING A WORLD POWER

The New Imperialism In the last years of the 1890s, the narrowed definition of nationhood was projected abroad, as the United States took its place as an imperial power on the international stage. In world history, the last quarter of the nineteenth century is known as the age of imperialism, when rival European empires carved up large parts of the world among themselves. For most of this period, the United States remained a second-rate power. In 1880, the head of the Ottoman empire decided to close three foreign embassies to reduce expenses. He chose those in Sweden, Belgium, and the United States. In that year, the American navy was smaller than Denmark’s or Chile’s. When European powers met at the Berlin Congress of 1884–1885 to divide most of Africa among themselves, the United States attended because of its relationship with Liberia but did not sign the final agreement.

Throughout the nineteenth century, large empires dominated much of the globe. After 1870, a “new imperialism” arose, dominated by European powers and Japan. Belgium, Great Britain, and France consolidated their hold on colonies in Africa, and newly unified Germany acquired colonies there as well. The British and Russians sought to increase their influence in Central Asia, and all the European powers struggled to dominate parts of China. By the early twentieth century, most of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Pacific had been divided among these empires. The justification for this expansion of imperial power was that it would bring modern “civilization” to the supposedly backward peoples of the non-European world. The natives, according to their colonial occupiers, would be instructed in Western values, labor practices, and the Christian religion. Eventually, they would be accorded the right of self-government, although no one could be sure how long this would take. In the meantime, “empire” was another word for “exploitation.”

American Expansionism Territorial expansion, of course, had been a feature of American life from well before independence. But the 1890s marked a major turning point in America’s relationship with the rest of the world. Americans were increasingly aware of themselves as an emerging world power. “We are a great imperial Republic destined to exercise a controlling influence upon the actions of mankind and to affect the future of the world,” proclaimed Henry Watterson, an influential newspaper editor.

Until the 1890s, American expansion had taken place on the North American continent. Ever since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, to be sure, many Americans had considered the Western Hemisphere an American sphere of influence. There was persistent talk of acquiring Cuba, and President Grant had sought to annex the Dominican Republic, only to see the Senate reject the idea. The last territorial acquisition before the 1890s had been Alaska, purchased from Russia by Secretary of State William H. Seward in 1867, to much derision from those who could not see the purpose of American ownership of “Seward’s icebox.” Seward, however, was mostly interested in the Aleutian Islands, a part of Alaska that stretched much of the way to Asia (see the map on p. 682) and that, he believed, could be the site of coaling stations for merchant ships plying the Pacific.

Most Americans who looked overseas were interested in expanded trade, not territorial possessions. The country’s agricultural and industrial production could no longer be entirely absorbed at home. By 1890, companies like Singer Sewing Machines and John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company aggressively marketed their products abroad. Especially during economic downturns, business leaders insisted on the necessity of greater access to foreign customers. Middle-class American women, moreover, were becoming more and more desirous of clothing and food from abroad, and their demand for consumer goods such as “Oriental” fashions and exotic spices for cooking spurred the economic penetration of the Far East.

The Lure of Empire One group of Americans who spread the nation’s influence overseas were religious missionaries, thousands of whom ventured abroad in the late nineteenth century to spread Christianity, prepare the world for the second coming of Christ, and uplift the poor. Inspired by Dwight Moody, a Methodist evangelist, the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions sent more than 8,000 missionaries to “bring light to heathen worlds” across the globe. Missionary work offered employment to those with few opportunities at home, including blacks and women, who made up a majority of the total.

A small group of late-nineteenth-century thinkers actively promoted American expansionism, warning that the country must not allow itself to be shut out of the scramble for empire. In Our Country (1885), Josiah Strong, a prominent Congregationalist clergyman, sought to update the idea of manifest destiny. Having demonstrated their special aptitude for liberty and self-government on the North American continent, Strong announced, Anglo-Saxons should now spread their institutions and values to “inferior races” throughout the world. The economy would benefit, he insisted, since one means of civilizing “savages” was to turn them into consumers of American goods.

Naval officer Alfred T. Mahan, in The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), argued that no nation could prosper without a large fleet of ships engaged in international trade, protected by a powerful navy operating from overseas bases. Mahan published his book in the same year that the census bureau announced that there was no longer a clear line separating settled from unsettled land. Thus, the frontier no longer existed. “Americans,” wrote Mahan, “must now begin to look outward.” His arguments influenced the outlook of James G. Blaine, who served as secretary of state during Benjamin Harrison’s presidency (1889–1893). Blaine urged the president to try to acquire Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Cuba as strategic naval bases.

Queen Liliuokalani, the last ruler of Hawaii before it was annexed by the United States.

Although independent, Hawaii was already closely tied to the United States through treaties that exempted imports of its sugar from tariff duties and provided for the establishment of an American naval base at Pearl Harbor. Hawaii’s economy was dominated by American-owned sugar plantations that employed a workforce of native islanders and Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino laborers under long-term contracts. Early in 1893, a group of American planters organized a rebellion that overthrew the Hawaii government of Queen Liliuokalani. On the eve of leaving office, Harrison submitted a treaty of annexation to the Senate. After determining that a majority of Hawaiians did not favor the treaty, Harrison’s successor, Grover Cleveland, withdrew it. In July 1898, in the midst of the Spanish-American War, the United States finally annexed the Hawaiian Islands. In 1993, the U.S. Congress passed, and President Bill Clinton signed, a resolution expressing regret to native Hawaiians for “the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii . . . with the participation of agents and citizens of the United States.”

The depression that began in 1893 heightened the belief that a more aggressive foreign policy was necessary to stimulate American exports. In the face of social conflict and the new immigration, government and private organizations promoted a unifying patriotism. These were the years when rituals like the Pledge of Allegiance and the practice of standing for the playing of “The Star- Spangled Banner” came into existence. Americans had long honored the Stars and Stripes, but the “cult of the flag,” including an official Flag Day, dates to the 1890s. New, mass-circulation newspapers also promoted nationalistic sentiments. By the late 1890s, papers like William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World—dubbed the “yellow press” by their critics after the color in which Hearst printed a popular comic strip—were selling a million copies each day by mixing sensational accounts of crime and political corruption with aggressive appeals to patriotic sentiments.

The “Splendid Little War” All these factors contributed to America’s emergence as a world power in the Spanish-American War of 1898. But the immediate origins of the war lay not at home but in the long Cuban struggle for independence from Spain. Ten years of guerrilla war had followed a Cuban revolt in 1868. The movement for independence resumed in 1895. As reports circulated of widespread suffering caused by the Spanish policy of rounding up civilians and moving them into detention camps, the Cuban struggle won growing support in the United States.

In both the Pacific and the Caribbean, the United States achieved swift victories over Spain in the Spanish-American War.

Demands for intervention escalated after February 15, 1898, when an explosion—probably accidental, a later investigation concluded—destroyed the American battleship U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor, with the loss of nearly 270 lives. The yellow press blamed Spain and insisted on retribution. After Spain rejected an American demand for a cease-fire on the island and eventual Cuban independence, President McKinley in April asked Congress for a declaration of war. The purpose, declared Senator Henry Teller of Colorado, was to aid Cuban patriots in their struggle for “liberty and freedom.” To underscore the government’s humanitarian intentions, Congress adopted the Teller Amendment, stating that the United States had no intention of annexing or dominating the island.

Secretary of State John Hay called the Spanish-American conflict a “splendid little war.” It lasted only four months and resulted in fewer than 400 American combat deaths. Having shown little interest in imperial expansion before 1898, McKinley now embraced the idea. The war’s most decisive engagement, in fact, took place not in Cuba but at Manila Bay, a strategic harbor in the Philippine Islands in the distant Pacific Ocean. Here, on May 1, the American navy under Admiral George Dewey defeated a Spanish fleet. Soon afterward, soldiers went ashore, becoming the first American army units to engage in combat outside the Western Hemisphere. July witnessed another naval victory off Santiago, Cuba, and the landing of American troops on Cuba and Puerto Rico.

Roosevelt at San Juan Hill

In this illustration from Puck, April 6, 1901, a woman representing the United States tries on a hat shaped like a battleship and labeled “World Power.” She seems to feel that it fits her well.

The most highly publicized land battle of the war took place in Cuba. This was the charge up San Juan Hill, outside Santiago, by Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. An ardent expansionist, Roosevelt had long believed that a war would reinvigorate the nation’s unity and sense of manhood, which had suffered, he felt, during the 1890s. A few months shy of his fortieth birthday when war broke out, Roosevelt resigned his post as assistant secretary of the navy to raise a volunteer cavalry unit, which rushed to Cuba to participate in the fighting. Roosevelt envisioned his unit as a cross section of American society and enrolled athletes from Ivy League colleges, western cowboys, representatives of various immigrant groups, and even some American Indians. But with the army still segregated, he excluded blacks from his regiment. Ironically, when the Rough Riders reached the top of San Juan Hill, they found that black units had preceded them—a fact Roosevelt omitted in his reports of the battle, which were widely reproduced in the popular press. His exploits made Roosevelt a national hero. He was elected governor of New York that fall and in 1900 became McKinley’s vice president.

An American Empire With the backing of the yellow press, the war quickly escalated from a crusade to aid the suffering Cubans to an imperial venture that ended with the United States in possession of a small overseas empire. McKinley became convinced that the United States could neither return the Philippines to Spain nor grant them independence, for which he believed the inhabitants unprepared. In an interview with a group of Methodist ministers, the president spoke of receiving a divine revelation that Americans had a duty to “uplift and civilize” the Filipino people and to train them for self- government. In the treaty with Spain that ended the war, the United States acquired the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the Pacific island of Guam. As for Cuba, before recognizing its independence, McKinley forced the island’s new government to approve the Platt Amendment to the new Cuban constitution (drafted by Senator Orville H. Platt of Connecticut), which authorized the United States to intervene militarily whenever it saw fit. The United States also acquired a permanent lease on naval stations in Cuba, including what is now the facility at Guantánamo Bay.

AMERICAN EMPIRE, 1898

As a result of the Spanish-American War, the United States became the ruler of a far-flung overseas empire.

The Platt Amendment passed the Cuban Congress by a single vote. Cuban patriots were terribly

disappointed. José Martí had fomented revolution in Cuba from exile in the United States and then traveled to the island to take part in the uprising, only to be killed in a battle with Spanish soldiers in 1895. “To change masters is not to be free,” Martí had written. And the memory of the betrayal of 1898 would help to inspire another Cuban revolution half a century later.

American interest in its new possessions had more to do with trade than gaining wealth from natural resources or large-scale American settlement. Puerto Rico and Cuba were gateways to Latin America, strategic outposts from which American naval and commercial power could be projected throughout the hemisphere. The Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii lay astride shipping routes to the markets of Japan and China. In 1899, soon after the end of the Spanish-American War, Secretary of State John Hay announced the Open Door Policy, demanding that European powers that had recently divided China into commercial spheres of influence grant equal access to American exports. The Open Door referred to the free movement of goods and money, not people. Even as the United States banned the immigration of Chinese into this country, it insisted on access to the markets and investment opportunities of Asia.

The Philippine War Many Cubans, Filipinos, and Puerto Ricans had welcomed American intervention as a way of breaking Spain’s long hold on these colonies. Large planters looked forward to greater access to American markets, and local elites hoped that the American presence would fend off radical changes proposed by rebellious nationalist movements. Nationalists and labor leaders admired America’s democratic ideals and believed that American participation in the destruction of Spanish rule would lead to social reform and political self-government.

But the American determination to exercise continued control, direct or indirect, led to a rapid change in local opinion, nowhere more so than in the Philippines. Filipinos had been fighting a war against Spain since 1896. After Dewey’s victory at Manila Bay, their leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, established a provisional government with a constitution modeled on that of the United States. But once McKinley decided to retain possession of the islands, the Filipino movement turned against the United States. The result was a second war, far longer (it lasted from 1899 to 1903) and bloodier (it cost the lives of more than 100,000 Filipinos and 4,200 Americans) than the Spanish-American conflict. Today, the Philippine War is perhaps the least remembered of all American wars. At the time, however, it was closely followed and widely debated in the United States. Both sides committed atrocities. Insurgents killed Filipinos who cooperated with the Americans. The U.S. Army burned villages and moved the inhabitants into camps where thousands perished of disease, and launched a widespread campaign of torture, including the infamous “water cure” or simulated drowning, later revived in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars of the 21st century and known as waterboarding. Press reports of these practices tarnished the nation’s self-image as liberators. “We do not intend to free the people of the Philippines,” complained Mark Twain. “We have gone there to conquer.”

The McKinley administration justified its policies on the grounds that its aim was to “uplift and civilize and Christianize” the Filipinos (although most residents of the islands were already Roman Catholics). William Howard Taft, who became governor-general of the Philippines in 1901, believed it might take a century to raise Filipinos to the condition where they could appreciate “what Anglo- Saxon liberty is.”

Once in control of the Philippines, the colonial administration took seriously the idea of modernizing the islands. It expanded railroads and harbors, brought in American schoolteachers and public health officials, and sought to modernize agriculture (although efforts to persuade local farmers to substitute corn for rice ran afoul of the Filipino climate and cultural traditions). The United States, said President McKinley, had an obligation to its “little brown brothers.” Yet in all the new possessions, American policies tended to serve the interests of land-based local elites—native-born landowners in the Philippines, American sugar planters in Hawaii and Puerto Rico—and such policies bequeathed enduring poverty to the majority of the rural population. Under American rule, Puerto Rico, previously an island of diversified small farmers, became a low-wage plantation economy controlled by absentee corporations. By the 1920s, its residents were among the poorest in the entire Caribbean.

Citizens or Subjects? American rule also brought with it American racial attitudes. In an 1899 poem, the British writer Rudyard Kipling urged the United States to take up the “white man’s burden” of imperialism. American proponents of empire agreed that the domination of non-white peoples by whites formed part of the progress of civilization. Among the soldiers sent to the Philippines to fight Aguinaldo were a number of black regiments. Their letters from the front suggested that American atrocities arose from white troops applying to the Filipino population the same “treatment for colored peoples” practiced at home.

America’s triumphant entry into the ranks of imperial powers sparked an intense debate over the relationship among political democracy, race, and American citizenship. The American system of government had no provision for permanent colonies. The right of every people to self-government was one of the main principles of the Declaration of Independence. The idea of an “empire of liberty” assumed that new territories would eventually be admitted as equal states and their residents would be American citizens. In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, however, nationalism, democracy, and American freedom emerged more closely identified than ever with notions of Anglo- Saxon superiority.

Leaders of both parties, while determined to retain the new overseas possessions, feared that people of what one congressman called “an alien race and foreign tongue” could not be incorporated into the Union. The Foraker Act of 1900 declared Puerto Rico an “insular territory,” different from previous territories in the West. Its 1 million inhabitants were defined as citizens of Puerto Rico, not the United States, and denied a future path to statehood. Filipinos occupied a similar status. In a series of cases decided between 1901 and 1904 and known collectively as the Insular Cases, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution did not fully apply to the territories recently acquired by the United States—a significant limitation of the scope of American freedom. Congress, the Court declared, must recognize the “fundamental” personal rights of residents of the Philippines and Puerto Rico. But otherwise it could govern them as it saw fit for an indefinite period of time. Thus, two principles central to American freedom since the War of Independence—no taxation without representation, and government based on the consent of the governed—were abandoned when it came to the nation’s new possessions.

In the twentieth century, the territories acquired in 1898 would follow different paths. Hawaii, which had a sizable population of American missionaries and planters, became a traditional territory. Its population, except for Asian immigrant laborers, became American citizens, and it was admitted as a state in 1959. After nearly a half-century of American rule, the Philippines achieved independence in 1946. Until 1950, the U.S. Navy administered Guam, which remains today an “unincorporated” territory. As for Puerto Rico, it is sometimes called “the world’s oldest colony,” because ever since the Spanish conquered the island in 1493 it has lacked full self-government. Congress extended American citizenship to Puerto Ricans in 1917. Puerto Rico today remains in a kind of political limbo, poised on the brink of statehood or independence. The island has the status of a commonwealth. It elects its own government but lacks a voice in Congress (and in the election of the U.S. president), and key issues such as defense and environmental policy are controlled by the United States.

Whatever the end result, the Spanish-American War established a precedent for American intervention in the affairs of other countries, especially those in the Western Hemisphere. In the

twentieth century, the United States would intervene in Latin America to change local governments, either by direct military action or via support for military coups, no fewer than forty times.

Drawing the Global Color Line Just as American ideas about liberty and self-government had circulated around the world in the Age of Revolution, American racial attitudes had a global impact in the age of empire. The turn of the twentieth century was a time of worldwide concern about immgration, race relations, and the “white man’s burden,” all of which inspired a global sense of fraternity among “Anglo-Saxon” nations. Chinese exclusion in the United States strongly influenced anti-Chinese laws adopted in Canada.

One “lesson” these countries learned from the United States was that the “failure” of Reconstruction demonstrated the impossibility of multiracial democracy. The extremely hostile account of Reconstruction by the British writer James Bryce in his widely read book The American Commonwealth (published in London in 1888) circulated around the world. Bryce called African- Americans “children of nature” and insisted that giving them the right to vote had been a terrible mistake, which had produced all kinds of corruption and misgovernment. His book was frequently cited by the founders of the Australian Commonwealth (1901) to justify their “white Australia” policy, which barred the further immigration of Asians. The Union of South Africa, inaugurated in 1911, saw its own policy of racial separation—later known as apartheid—as following in the footsteps of segregation in the United States. Even American proposals that did not become law, such as the literacy test for immigrants vetoed by President Cleveland, influenced measures adopted overseas. The United States, too, learned from other countries. The Gentleman’s Agreement that limited Japanese immigration early in the twentieth century (see Chapter 19) followed a similar arrangement between Japan and Canada.

“Republic or Empire?” The emergence of the United States as an imperial power sparked intense debate. Opponents formed the Anti-Imperialist League. It united writers and social reformers who believed American energies should be directed at home, businessmen fearful of the cost of maintaining overseas outposts, and racists who did not wish to bring non-white populations into the United States. Among its prominent members were E. L. Godkin, the editor of The Nation, the novelist William Dean Howells, and the labor leader George E. McNeill. The league held meetings throughout the country and published pamphlets called Liberty Tracts, warning that empire was incompatible with democracy. America’s historic mission, the league declared, was to “help the world by an example of successful self- government,” not to conquer other peoples. A “republic of free men,” anti-imperialists proclaimed, should assist the people of Puerto Rico and the Philippines in their own “struggles for liberty,” rather than subjecting them to colonial rule.

In 1900, Democrats again nominated William Jennings Bryan to run against McKinley. The Democratic platform opposed the Philippine War for placing the United States in the “un-American” position of “crushing with military force” another people’s desire for “liberty and self-government.” George S. Boutwell, president of the Anti-Imperialist League, declared that the most pressing question in the election was the nation’s future character—“republic or empire?”

But without any sense of contradiction, proponents of an imperial foreign policy also adopted the language of freedom. Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana claimed that America ventured abroad not for material gain or national power, but to bring “a new day of freedom” to the peoples of the world. Beveridge did not, however, neglect more practical considerations. American trade, he insisted, “henceforth must be with Asia. The Pacific is our ocean. . . . Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? Geography answers the question. China is our natural customer.” Riding the wave of patriotic sentiment inspired by the war, and with the economy having recovered from the depression of 1893–1897, McKinley in 1900 repeated his 1896 triumph.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States seemed poised to take its place among the world’s great powers. Writers at home and overseas confidently predicted that American influence would soon span the globe. In his 1902 book The New Empire, Brooks Adams, a grandson of John Quincy Adams, predicted that because of its economic power, the United States would soon “outweigh any single empire, if not all empires combined.” Years would pass before this prediction was fulfilled. But in 1900, many features that would mark American life for much of the twentieth century were already apparent. The United States led the world in industrial production. The merger movement of 1897–1904 (discussed in the previous chapter) left broad sections of the economy under the control of giant corporations. The political system had stabilized. The white North and South had achieved reconciliation, while rigid lines of racial exclusion—the segregation of blacks, Chinese exclusion, Indian reservations—limited the boundaries of freedom and citizenship.

Yet the questions central to nineteenth-century debates over freedom—the relationship between political and economic liberty, the role of government in creating the conditions of freedom, and the definition of those entitled to enjoy the rights of citizens—had not been permanently answered. Nor had the dilemma of how to reconcile America’s role as an empire with traditional ideas of freedom been resolved. These were the challenges bequeathed by the nineteenth century to the first generation of the twentieth.

Glossary yellow press Sensationalism in newspaper publishing that reached a peak in the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal in the 1890s; the papers’ accounts of events in Havana Harbor in 1898 led directly to the Spanish- American War. Platt Amendment 1901 amendment to the Cuban constitution that reserved the United States’ right to intervene in Cuban affairs and forced newly independent Cuba to host American naval bases on the island. Open Door Policy Demand in 1899 by Secretary of State John Hay, in hopes of protecting the Chinese market for U.S. exports, that Chinese trade be open to all nations. Philippine War American military campaign that suppressed the movement for Philippine independence after the Spanish-American War; America’s death toll was over 4,000 and the Philippines’ was far higher. Insular Cases Series of cases between 1901 and 1904 in which the Supreme Court ruled that constitutional protection of individual rights did not fully apply to residents of “insular” territories acquired by the United States in the Spanish-American War, such as Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Anti-Imperialist League Coalition of anti-imperialist groups united in 1899 to protest American territorial expansion, especially in the Philippine Islands; its membership included prominent politicians, industrialists, labor leaders, and social reformers. U.S.S. Maine Battleship that exploded in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, resulting in 266 deaths; the American public, assuming that the Spanish had mined the ship, clamored for war, and the Spanish-American War was declared two months later.

CHAPTER REVIEW

REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. What economic and political issues gave rise to the Populist Party, and what changes did the

party advocate? 2. Compare and contrast the goals, strategies, and membership of the American Federation of

Labor and the Knights of Labor (you may want to refer back to Chapter 16). 3. Who were the Redeemers, and how did they change society and politics in the New South? 4. Explain how changes in politics, economics, social factors, and violence interacted to effect

the situation of African-Americans in the New South. 5. How did religion and the idea of the Lost Cause give support to a new understanding of the

Civil War? 6. What rights did Chinese immigrants and Chinese-Americans gain in these years, and what

limitations did they experience? How did their experiences set the stage for other restrictions on immigration?

7. How did employers use state and federal forces to protect their own economic interests, and what were the results?

8. What ideas and interests motivated the United States to create an empire in the late nineteenth century?

9. Compare the arguments for and against U.S. imperialism. Be sure to consider the views of Josiah Strong and Emilio Aguinaldo.

10. What was the Immigration Restriction League and what changes to political participation did it advocate?

KEY TERMS Populists (p. 651)

Coxey’s Army (p. 655)

New South (p. 658)

Kansas Exodus (p. 660)

Atlanta Compromise (p. 661)

grandfather clause (p. 662)

disenfranchisement (p. 662)

Plessy v. Ferguson (p. 663)

“separate but equal” (p. 664)

lynching (p. 665)

Lost Cause (p. 669)

new immigrants (p. 670)

Immigration Restriction League (p. 670)

Chinese Exclusion Act (p. 671)

American Federation of Labor (p. 673)

yellow press (p. 679)

U.S.S. Maine (p. 680)

Platt Amendment (p. 682)

Open Door Policy (p. 683)

Philippine War (p. 683)

Insular Cases (p. 685)

Anti-Imperialist League (p. 686)

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Glossary Populists Founded in 1892, a group that advocated a variety of reform issues, including free coinage of silver, income tax, postal savings, regulation of railroads, and direct election of U.S. senators. Coxey’s Army A march on Washington organized by Jacob Coxey, an Ohio member of the People’s Party. Coxey believed in abandoning the gold standard and printing enough legal tender to reinvigorate the economy. The marchers demanded that Congress create jobs and pay workers in paper currency not backed by gold. Kansas Exodus A migration in 1879 and 1880 by some 40,000–60,000 blacks to Kansas to escape the oppressive environment of the New South. Atlanta Compromise Speech to the Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895 by educator Booker T. Washington, the leading black spokesman of the day; black scholar W. E. B. Du Bois gave the speech its derisive name and criticized Washington for encouraging blacks to accommodate segregation and disenfranchisement. grandfather clause Loophole created by southern disenfranchising legislatures of the 1890s for illiterate white males whose grandfathers had been eligible to vote before the Civil War. disenfranchisement Depriving a person or persons of the right to vote; in the United States, exclusionary policies were used to deny groups, especially African-Americans and women, their voting rights. Plessy v. Ferguson U.S. Supreme Court decision supporting the legality of Jim Crow laws that permitted or required “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites. “separate but equal” Principle underlying legal racial segregation, upheld in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and struck down in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). lynching Practice, particularly widespread in the South between 1890 and 1940, in which persons (usually black) accused of a crime were murdered by mobs before standing trial. Lynchings often took place before large crowds, with law enforcement authorities not intervening. Lost Cause A romanticized view of slavery, the Old South, and the Confederacy that arose in the decades following the Civil War. new immigrants Wave of newcomers from southern and eastern Europe, including many Jews, who became a majority among immigrants to America after 1890. Immigration Restriction League A political organization founded in 1894 that called for reducing immigration to the United States by requiring a literacy test for immigrants. Chinese Exclusion Act 1882 law that halted Chinese immigration to the United States. American Federation of Labor A federation of trade unions founded in 1881, composed mostly of skilled, white, native-born

workers; its long-term president was Samuel Gompers. yellow press Sensationalism in newspaper publishing that reached a peak in the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal in the 1890s; the papers’ accounts of events in Havana Harbor in 1898 led directly to the Spanish- American War. Platt Amendment 1901 amendment to the Cuban constitution that reserved the United States’ right to intervene in Cuban affairs and forced newly independent Cuba to host American naval bases on the island. Open Door Policy Demand in 1899 by Secretary of State John Hay, in hopes of protecting the Chinese market for U.S. exports, that Chinese trade be open to all nations. Philippine War American military campaign that suppressed the movement for Philippine independence after the Spanish-American War; America’s death toll was over 4,000 and the Philippines’ was far higher. Insular Cases Series of cases between 1901 and 1904 in which the Supreme Court ruled that constitutional protection of individual rights did not fully apply to residents of “insular” territories acquired by the United States in the Spanish-American War, such as Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Anti-Imperialist League Coalition of anti-imperialist groups united in 1899 to protest American territorial expansion, especially in the Philippine Islands; its membership included prominent politicians, industrialists, labor leaders, and social reformers. New South Atlanta Constitution editor Henry W. Grady’s 1886 term for the prosperous post–Civil War South he envisioned: democratic, industrial, urban, and free of nostalgia for the defeated plantation South. U.S.S. Maine Battleship that exploded in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, resulting in 266 deaths; the American public, assuming that the Spanish had mined the ship, clamored for war, and the Spanish-American War was declared two months later.

CHAPTER 18

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

1900–1916

FOCUS QUESTIONS Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America? How did the labor and women’s movements challenge the nineteenth-century meanings of American freedom? In what ways did Progressivism include both democratic and anti-democratic impulses? How did the Progressive presidents foster the rise of the nation-state?

It was late afternoon on March 25, 1911, when fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. The factory occupied the top three floors of a ten-story building in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Here some 500 workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, toiled at sewing machines producing ladies’ blouses, some earning as little as three dollars per week. Those who tried to escape the blaze discovered that the doors to the stairwell had been locked—the owners’ way, it was later charged, of discouraging theft and unauthorized bathroom breaks. The fire department rushed to the scene with high-pressure hoses. But their ladders reached only to the sixth floor. As the fire raged, onlookers watched in horror as girls leapt from the upper stories. By the time the blaze had been put out, 46 bodies lay on the street and 100 more were found inside the building.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Company was typical of manufacturing in the nation’s largest city, a beehive of industrial production in small, crowded factories. New York was home to 30,000 manufacturing establishments with more than 600,000 employees—more industrial workers than in the entire state of Massachusetts. Triangle had already played a key role in the era’s labor history. When 200 of its workers tried to join the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), the owners responded by firing them. This incident helped to spark a general walkout of female garment workers in 1909—the Uprising of the 20,000. Among the strikers’ demands was better safety in clothing factories. The impoverished immigrants forged an alliance with middle- and upper-class female supporters, including members of the Women’s Trade Union League, which had been founded in 1903 to help bring women workers into unions. Alva Belmont, the ex-wife of railroad magnate William Vanderbilt, contributed several of her cars to a parade in support of the striking workers. By the time the walkout ended early in 1911, the ILGWU had won union contracts with more than 300 firms. But the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was not among them.

The Triangle fire was not the worst fire disaster in American history (seven years earlier, over 1,000 people had died in a blaze on the General Slocum excursion boat in New York harbor). But it had an unrivaled impact on public consciousness. More than twenty years later, Franklin D. Roosevelt would refer to it in a press conference as an example of why the government needed to regulate industry. In its wake, efforts to organize the city’s workers accelerated, and the state legislature passed new factory inspection laws and fire safety codes.

Triangle focused attention on the social divisions that plagued American society during the first two decades of the twentieth century, a period known as the Progressive era. These were years when economic expansion produced millions of new jobs and brought an unprecedented array of goods within reach of American consumers. Cities expanded rapidly—by 1920, for the first time, more Americans lived in towns and cities than in rural areas. Yet severe inequality remained the most visible feature of the urban landscape, and persistent labor strife raised anew the question of government’s role in combating it. The fire and its aftermath also highlighted how traditional gender roles were changing as women took on new responsibilities in the workplace and in the making of

public policy.

The word “Progressive” came into common use around 1910 as a way of describing a broad, loosely defined political movement of individuals and groups who hoped to bring about significant change in American social and political life. Progressives included forward-looking businessmen who realized that workers must be accorded a voice in economic decision making, and labor activists bent on empowering industrial workers. Other major contributors to Progressivism were members of female reform organizations who hoped to protect women and children from exploitation, social scientists who believed that academic research would help to solve social problems, and members of an anxious middle class who feared that their status was threatened by the rise of big business.

Everywhere in early-twentieth-century America the signs of economic and political consolidation were apparent—in the power of a small directorate of Wall Street bankers and corporate executives, the manipulation of democracy by corrupt political machines, and the rise of new systems of managerial control in workplaces. In these circumstances, wrote Benjamin P. DeWitt, in his 1915 book The Progressive Movement, “the individual could not hope to compete. . . . Slowly, Americans realized that they were not free.”

As this and the following chapter will discuss, Progressive reformers responded to the perception of declining freedom in varied, contradictory ways. The era saw the expansion of political and economic freedom through the reinvigoration of the movement for woman suffrage, the use of political power to expand workers’ rights, and efforts to improve democratic government by weakening the power of city bosses and giving ordinary citizens more influence on legislation. It witnessed the flowering of understandings of freedom based on individual fulfillment and personal self-determination—the ability to participate fully in the ever-expanding consumer marketplace and, especially for women, to enjoy economic and sexual freedoms long considered the province of men. At the same time, many Progressives supported efforts to limit the full enjoyment of freedom to those deemed fit to exercise it properly. The new system of white supremacy born in the 1890s became fully consolidated in the South. Growing numbers of native-born Americans demanded that immigrants abandon their traditional cultures and become fully “Americanized.” And efforts were made at the local and national levels to place political decision making in the hands of experts who did not have to answer to the electorate. The idea of freedom remained as contested as ever in Progressive America.

• CHRONOLOGY • 1889 Hull House founded

1898 Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics

1901 Socialist Party founded in United States

President McKinley assassinated

1902 President Theodore Roosevelt assists in coal strike

1903 Women’s Trade Union League founded

1904 Northern Securities dissolved

1905 Industrial Workers of the World established

Ford Motor Company established

1906 Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle

Meat Inspection Act

Pure Food and Drug Act

Hepburn Act

1908 Muller v. Oregon

1909 Uprising of the 20,000

1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire

Society of American Indians founded

1912 Children’s Bureau established

Theodore Roosevelt organizes the Progressive Party

1913 Sixteenth Amendment

Seventeenth Amendment

Federal Reserve established

1914 Ludlow Massacre

Federal Trade Commission established

Clayton Act

Glossary Progressivism Broad-based reform movement, 1900–1917, that sought governmental action in solving problems in many areas of American life, including education, public health, the economy, the environment, labor, transportation, and politics.

AN URBAN AGE AND A CONSUMER SOCIETY

Farms and Cities The Progressive era was a period of explosive economic growth, fueled by increasing industrial production, a rapid rise in population, and the continued expansion of the consumer marketplace. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the economy’s total output rose by about 85 percent. For the last time in American history, farms and cities grew together. As farm prices recovered from their low point during the depression of the 1890s, American agriculture entered what would later be remembered as its “golden age.” The expansion of urban areas stimulated demand for farm goods. Farm families poured into the western Great Plains. More than 1 million claims for free government land were filed under the Homestead Act of 1862—more than in the previous forty years. Between 1900 and 1910, the combined population of Texas and Oklahoma rose by nearly 2 million, and Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas added 800,000. Irrigation transformed the Imperial Valley of California and parts of Arizona into major areas of commercial farming.

But it was the city that became the focus of Progressive politics and of a new mass-consumer society. The United States counted twenty-one cities whose population exceeded 100,000 in 1910, the largest of them New York, with 4.7 million residents. The twenty-three square miles of Manhattan Island were home to over 2 million people, more than lived in thirty-three of the states. Fully a quarter of them inhabited the Lower East Side, an immigrant neighborhood more densely populated than Bombay or Calcutta in India.

The stark urban inequalities of the 1890s continued into the Progressive era. Immigrant families in New York’s downtown tenements often had no electricity or indoor toilets. Three miles to the north stood the mansions of Fifth Avenue’s Millionaire’s Row. According to one estimate, J. P. Morgan’s financial firm directly or indirectly controlled 40 percent of all financial and industrial capital in the United States. Alongside such wealth, reported the Commission on Industrial Relations, established by Congress in 1912, more than one-third of the country’s mining and manufacturing workers lived in “actual poverty.”

William L. Sonntag was another early-twentieth-century painter fascinated by scenes of urban life. In Bowery at Night, he depicts a boisterous New York street scene complete with streetcars, private carriages, and crowds of people making their way beneath an elevated railroad.

The city captured the imagination of artists, writers, and reformers. The glories of the American landscape had been the focal point of nineteenth-century painters (exemplified by the Hudson River school, which produced canvases celebrating the wonders of nature). Now painters like George W. Bellows and John Sloan and photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen captured the electric lights, crowded bars and theaters, and soaring skyscrapers of the urban landscape. With its youthful, exuberant energies, the city seemed an expression of modernity itself.

The Muckrakers Others saw the city as a place where corporate greed undermined traditional American values. At a time when more than 2 million children under the age of fifteen worked for wages, Lewis Hine photographed child laborers to draw attention to persistent social inequality. A new generation of journalists writing for mass-circulation national magazines exposed the ills of industrial and urban life. The Shame of the Cities by Lincoln Steffens (published as a series in McClure’s Magazine in 1901–1902 and in book form in 1904) showed how party bosses and business leaders profited from political corruption. McClure’s also hired Ida Tarbell to expose the arrogance and economic machinations of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. Published in two volumes in 1904, her History of the Standard Oil Company was the most substantial product of what Theodore Roosevelt disparaged as muckraking—the use of journalistic skills to expose the underside of American life.

Major novelists of the era took a similar unsparing approach to social ills. Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) traced a young woman’s moral corruption in Chicago’s harsh urban environment. Perhaps the era’s most influential novel was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), whose description of unsanitary slaughterhouses and the sale of rotten meat stirred public outrage and led directly to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906.

Immigration as a Global Process

A photograph by Lewis Hine, who used his camera to chronicle the plight of child laborers. Shown here: a young spinner in a Vermont cotton factory.

If one thing characterized early-twentieth-century cities, it was their immigrant character. The “new immigration” from southern and eastern Europe had begun around 1890 but reached its peak during the Progressive era. Between 1901 and the outbreak of World War Ⅰ in Europe in 1914, some 13 million immigrants came to the United States, the majority from Italy, Russia, and the Austro- Hungarian empire. Progressive-era immigration formed part of a larger process of worldwide migration set in motion by industrial expansion and the decline of traditional agriculture. Poles emigrated not only to Pittsburgh and Chicago but to work in German factories and Scottish mines. Italians sought jobs in Belgium, France, and Argentina as well as the United States. As many as 750,000 Chinese migrated to other countries each year.

Between 1840 and 1914 (when immigration to the United States would be virtually cut off, first by the outbreak of World War Ⅰ and then by legislation), perhaps 40 million persons emigrated to the United States and another 20 million to other parts of the Western Hemisphere, including Canada, Argentina, and the Caribbean. This population flow formed one part of a massive shifting of peoples throughout the world.

Numerous causes inspired this uprooting of population. Rural southern and eastern Europe and large parts of Asia were regions marked by widespread poverty and illiteracy, burdensome taxation, and declining economies. Political turmoil at home, like the revolution that engulfed Mexico after 1911, also inspired emigration. Not all of these immigrants could be classified as “free laborers,” however. Large numbers of Chinese, Mexican, and Italian migrants, including many who came to the United States, were bound to long-term contracts with labor agents, who then provided the workers to American employers. But all the areas attracting immigrants were frontiers—agricultural, mining, or industrial—with expanding job opportunities.

Most European immigrants to the United States entered through Ellis Island. Located in New York Harbor, this became in 1892 the nation’s main facility for processing immigrants. Millions of Americans today trace their ancestry to an immigrant who passed through Ellis Island. The less fortunate, only about 2 percent of total arrivals, who failed a medical examination or were judged to be anarchists, prostitutes, or in other ways undesirable, were sent home.

At the same time, an influx of Asian and Mexican newcomers was taking place in the West. After the exclusion of immigrants from China in the late nineteenth century, a small number of Japanese arrived, primarily to work as agricultural laborers in California’s fruit and vegetable fields and on Hawaii’s sugar plantations. By 1910, the population of Japanese origin had grown to 72,000. Between 1910 and 1940, Angel Island in San Francisco Bay—the “Ellis Island of the West”—served as the main entry point for immigrants from Asia.

Far larger was Mexican immigration. Between 1900 and 1930, some 1 million Mexicans (more than 10 percent of that country’s population) entered the United States—a number exceeded by only a few European countries. Mexicans generally entered through El Paso, Texas, the main southern gateway into the United States. Many ended up in the San Gabriel Valley of California, where citrus growers searching for cheap labor had earlier experimented with Native American, South Asian, Chinese, and Filipino migrant workers.

An illustration in the 1912 publication The New Immigration depicts the various “types” entering the United States.

By 1910, one-seventh of the American population was foreign-born, the highest percentage in the country’s history. More than 40 percent of New York City’s population had been born abroad. In Chicago and smaller industrial cities like Providence, Milwaukee, and San Francisco, the figure exceeded 30 percent. Although many newcomers moved west to take part in the expansion of farming, most clustered in industrial centers. By 1910, nearly three-fifths of the workers in the

twenty leading manufacturing and mining industries were foreign-born.

The Immigrant Quest for Freedom Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, the new immigrants arrived imagining the United States as a land of freedom, where all persons enjoyed equality before the law, could worship as they pleased, enjoyed economic opportunity, and had been emancipated from the oppressive social hierarchies of their homelands. “America is a free country,” one Polish immigrant wrote home. “You don’t have to be a serf to anyone.” Agents sent abroad by the American government to investigate the reasons for large-scale immigration reported that the main impetus was a desire to share in the “freedom and prosperity enjoyed by the people of the United States.” Freedom, they added, was largely an economic ambition—a desire to escape from “hopeless poverty” and achieve a standard of living impossible at home. While some of the new immigrants, especially Jews fleeing religious persecution in the Russian empire, thought of themselves as permanent emigrants, the majority initially planned to earn enough money to return home and purchase land. Groups like Mexicans and Italians included many “birds of passage,” who remained only temporarily in the United States. In 1908, a year of economic downturn in the United States, more Italians left the country than entered.

TABLE 18.1 Immigrants and Their Children as Percentage of Population, Ten Major Cities, 1920

City Percentage

New York City 76%

Cleveland 72

Boston 72

Chicago 71

Detroit 65

San Francisco 64

Minneapolis 63

Pittsburgh 59

Seattle 55

Los Angeles 45

The new immigrants clustered in close-knit “ethnic” neighborhoods with their own shops, theaters, and community organizations, and often continued to speak their native tongues. As early as 1900, more than 1,000 foreign-language newspapers were published in the United States. Churches were pillars of these immigrant communities. In New York’s East Harlem, even anti-clerical Italian immigrants, who resented the close alliance in Italy between the Catholic Church and the oppressive state, participated eagerly in the annual festival of the Madonna of Mt. Carmel.

Although most immigrants earned more than was possible in the impoverished regions from which they came, they endured low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions. In the mines and factories of Pennsylvania and the Midwest, eastern European immigrants performed low-wage unskilled labor, while native-born workers dominated skilled and supervisory jobs. The vast majority of Mexican immigrants became poorly paid agricultural, mine, and railroad laborers, with little prospect of upward economic mobility. “My people are not in America,” remarked one Slavic priest, “they are under it.”

Consumer Freedom Cities, however, were also the birthplace of a mass-consumption society that added new meaning to American freedom. There was, of course, nothing unusual in the idea that the promise of American life lay, in part, in the enjoyment by the masses of citizens of goods available in other countries only to the well-to-do. Not until the Progressive era, however, did the advent of large downtown department stores, chain stores in urban neighborhoods, and retail mail-order houses for farmers and small-town residents make available to consumers throughout the country the vast array of goods now pouring from the nation’s factories. By 1910, Americans could purchase, among many other items, electric sewing machines, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and record players. Low wages, the unequal distribution of income, and the South’s persistent poverty limited the consumer economy, which would not fully come into its own until after World War Ⅱ. But it was in Progressive America that the promise of mass consumption became the foundation for a new understanding of freedom as access to the cornucopia of goods made available by modern capitalism.

Leisure activities also took on the characteristics of mass consumption. Amusement parks, dance halls, and theaters attracted large crowds of city dwellers. The most popular form of mass entertainment at the turn of the century was vaudeville, a live theatrical entertainment consisting of numerous short acts typically including song and dance, comedy, acrobats, magicians, and trained animals. In the 1890s, brief motion pictures were already being introduced into vaudeville shows. As the movies became longer and involved more sophisticated plot narratives, separate theaters developed. By 1910, 25 million Americans per week, mostly working-class urban residents, were attending “nickelodeons”—motion-picture theaters whose five-cent admission charge was far lower than at vaudeville shows.

The Working Woman The new visibility of women in urban public places—at work, as shoppers, and in places of entertainment like cinemas and dance halls—indicated that traditional gender roles were changing dramatically in Progressive America. As the Triangle fire revealed, more and more women were working for wages. Black women still worked primarily as domestics or in southern cotton fields. Immigrant women were largely confined to low-paying factory employment. But for native-born white women, the kinds of jobs available expanded enormously. By 1920, around 25 percent of employed women were office workers or telephone operators, and only 15 percent worked in domestic service, the largest female job category of the nineteenth century. Female work was no longer confined to young, unmarried white women and adult black women. In 1920, of 8 million women working for wages, one-quarter were married and living with their husbands.

The working woman—immigrant and native, working-class and professional—became a symbol of female emancipation. Women faced special limitations on their economic freedom, including wage discrimination and exclusion from many jobs. Yet almost in spite of themselves, union leader Abraham Bisno remarked, young immigrant working women developed a sense of independence: “They acquired the right to a personality,” something alien to the highly patriarchal family structures of the old country. “We enjoy our independence and freedom” was the assertive statement of the Bachelor Girls Social Club, a group of female mail-order clerks in New York.

The growing number of younger women who desired a lifelong career, wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her influential book Women and Economics (1898), offered evidence of a “spirit of personal independence” that pointed to a coming transformation of both economic and family life. Gilman’s writings reinforced the claim that the road to woman’s freedom lay through the workplace. In the home, she argued, women experienced not fulfillment but oppression, and the housewife was an unproductive parasite, little more than a servant to her husband and children. By condemning women to a life of domestic drudgery, prevailing gender norms made them incapable of contributing to society or enjoying freedom in any meaningful sense of the word.

TABLE 18.2 Percentage of Women 14 Years and Older in the Labor Force, 1900–1930

Year All Women Married Women Women as % of Labor Force

1900 20.4% 5.6% 18%

1910 25.2 10.7 24

1920 23.3 9.0 24

1930 24.3 11.7 25

The desire to participate in the consumer society produced remarkably similar battles within immigrant families of all nationalities between parents and their self-consciously “free” children, especially daughters. Contemporaries, native and immigrant, noted how “the novelties and frivolities of fashion” appealed to young working women, who spent part of their meager wages on clothing and makeup and at places of entertainment. Daughters considered parents who tried to impose curfews or to prevent them from going out alone to dances or movies as old-fashioned and not sufficiently “American.” Immigrant parents found it very difficult to adapt to what one Mexican mother called “this terrible freedom in this United States.” “The Mexican girls,” she told a sociologist studying immigrant life in Los Angeles, “seeing American girls with freedom, they want it too.”

The Rise of Fordism If any individual exemplified the new consumer society, it was Henry Ford. The son of an immigrant Irish farmer, Ford had worked as an apprentice in Michigan machine shops and later as an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company. Ford did not invent the automobile, but he developed the techniques of production and marketing that brought it within the reach of ordinary Americans. In 1905, he established the Ford Motor Company, one of dozens of small automobile manufacturing firms that emerged in these years. Three years later, he introduced the Model T, a simple, light vehicle sturdy enough to navigate the country’s poorly maintained roads. While early European models like the Mercedes aimed at an elite market and were superior in craftsmanship, Ford concentrated on standardizing output and lowering prices.

The assembly line at the Ford Motor Company factory in Highland Park, Michigan, around 1914.

In 1913, Ford’s factory in Highland Park, Michigan, adopted the method of production known as the moving assembly line, in which car frames were brought to workers on a continuously moving conveyor belt. The process enabled Ford to expand output by greatly reducing the time it took to produce each car. In 1914, he raised wages at his factory to the unheard-of level of five dollars per day (more than double the pay of most industrial workers), enabling him to attract a steady stream of skilled laborers. Labor conditions in the Ford plant were not as appealing as the wages, however: assembly-line work was monotonous (the worker repeated the same basic motions for the entire day), and Ford used spies and armed detectives to prevent unionization. When other businessmen criticized him for endangering profits by paying high wages, Ford replied that workers must be able to afford the goods being turned out by American factories. Ford’s output rose from 34,000 cars, priced at $700 each, in 1910, to 730,000 Model T’s that sold at a price of $316 (well within the reach of many workers) in 1916. The economic system based on mass production and mass consumption came to be called Fordism.

The Promise of Abundance As economic production shifted from capital goods (steel, railroad equipment, etc.) to consumer products, the new advertising industry perfected ways of increasing sales, often by linking goods with the idea of freedom. Numerous products took “liberty” as a brand name or used an image of the Statue of Liberty as a sales device. The department-store magnate Edward Filene called consumerism a “school of freedom,” since shoppers made individual choices on basic questions of living. Economic abundance would eventually come to define the “American way of life,” in which personal fulfillment was to be found through acquiring material goods.

The promise of abundance shifted the quest for freedom to the realm of private life, but it also inspired political activism. Exclusion from the world of mass consumption would come to seem almost as great a denial of the rights of citizenship as being barred from voting once had been. The desire for consumer goods led many workers to join unions and fight for higher wages. “Consumers’ consciousness,” wrote Walter Lippmann, who emerged in these years as one of the nation’s most influential social commentators, was growing rapidly, with the “high cost of living” as its rallying cry.

An American Standard of Living The maturation of the consumer economy gave rise to concepts—a “living wage” and an “American standard of living”—that offered a new language for criticizing the inequalities of wealth and power in Progressive America. Father John A. Ryan’s influential book A Living Wage (1906) described a decent standard of living (one that enabled a person to participate in the consumer economy) as a “natural and absolute” right of citizenship. Ryan had grown up in Minnesota in a family sympathetic to Henry George, the Knights of Labor, and the Populists. His book sought to translate into American terms Pope Leo XIII’s powerful statement of 1891, Rerum Novarum, which criticized the divorce of economic life from ethical considerations, endorsed the right of workers to organize unions, and repudiated competitive individualism in favor of a more cooperative vision of the good society. Ryan’s insistence that economic relationships should be governed by moral standards had a powerful influence on social thought among American Catholics.

The popularity of the idea of an American standard of living reflected, in part, the emergence of a mass-consumption society during the Progressive era. For the first time in the nation’s history, mass consumption came to occupy a central place in descriptions of American society and its future. The optimistic writings of Simon W. Patten, a prophet of prosperity, announced the end of the “reign of want” and the advent of a society of abundance and leisure. In the dawning “new civilization,” he proclaimed, Americans would enjoy economic equality in a world in which “every one is independent and free.”

Glossary muckraking Writing that exposed corruption and abuses in politics, business, meatpacking, child labor, and more, primarily in the first decade of the twentieth century; included popular books and magazine articles that spurred public interest in reform. Ellis Island Reception center in New York Harbor through which most European immigrants to America were processed from 1892 to 1954. Fordism Early twentieth-century term describing the economic system pioneered by Ford Motor Company based on high wages and mass consumption. “American standard of living” The Progressive-era idea that American workers were entitled to a wage high enough to allow them full participation in the nation’s mass consumption economy.

VARIETIES OF PROGRESSIVISM For most Americans, however, Patten’s “new civilization” lay far in the future. The more immediate task, in the Progressives’ view, was to humanize industrial capitalism and find common ground in a society still racked by labor conflict and experiencing massive immigration from abroad. Some Progressives proposed to return to a competitive marketplace populated by small producers. Others accepted the permanence of the large corporation and looked to the government to reverse the growing concentration of wealth and to ensure social justice. Still others would relocate freedom from the economic and political worlds to a private realm of personal fulfillment and unimpeded self-expression. But nearly all Progressives agreed that freedom must be infused with new meaning to deal with the economic and social conditions of the early twentieth century. The “old democracy,” wrote Walter Weyl, associate editor of The New Republic, a weekly magazine that became the “bible” of Progressive intellectuals, provided no answer to the problems of a world in which the “chief restrictions upon liberty” were economic, not political.

Industrial Freedom In Progressive America, complaints of a loss of freedom came not only from the most poorly paid factory workers but from better-off employees as well. Large firms in the automobile, electrical, steel, and other industries sought to implement greater control over the work process. Efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor pioneered what he called scientific management—a program that sought to streamline production and boost profits by systematically controlling costs and work practices. Through scientific study, the “one best way” of producing goods could be determined and implemented. The role of workers was to obey the detailed instructions of supervisors. Not surprisingly, many skilled workers saw the erosion of their traditional influence over the work process as a loss of freedom. “Men and women,” complained Samuel Gompers, whose American Federation of Labor (AFL) represented such skilled workers, “cannot live during working hours under autocratic conditions, and instantly become sons and daughters of freedom as they step outside the shop gates.”

The great increase in the number of white-collar workers—the army of salespeople, bookkeepers, salaried professionals, and corporate managers that sprang up with the new system of management— also undermined the experience of personal autonomy. For although they enjoyed far higher social status and incomes than manual workers, many, wrote one commentator, were the kind of individuals who “under former conditions, would have been . . . managing their own businesses,” not working for someone else.

These developments helped to place the ideas of “industrial freedom” and “industrial democracy,” which had entered the political vocabulary in the Gilded Age, at the center of political discussion during the Progressive era. Lack of “industrial freedom” was widely believed to lie at the root of the much-discussed “labor problem.” Since in an industrial age the prospect of managing one’s own business seemed increasingly remote, many Progressives believed that the key to increasing industrial freedom lay in empowering workers to participate in economic decision making via strong unions. Louis D. Brandeis, an active ally of the labor movement whom President Woodrow Wilson appointed to the Supreme Court in 1916, maintained that unions embodied an essential principle of freedom—the right of people to govern themselves. The contradiction between “political liberty” and “industrial slavery,” Brandeis insisted, was America’s foremost social problem.

The Socialist Presence Economic freedom was also a rallying cry of American socialism, which reached its greatest influence during the Progressive era. Founded in 1901, the Socialist Party brought together surviving late-nineteenth-century radicals, such as Populists and followers of Edward Bellamy, with a portion of the labor movement. The party called for immediate reforms such as free college education, legislation to improve the condition of laborers, and, as an ultimate goal, democratic control over the economy through public ownership of railroads and factories. It was the task of socialism, said western labor leader John O’Neill, to “gather together the shards of liberty”—the fragments of the American heritage of freedom—scattered by a government controlled by capitalist millionaires.

SOCIALIST TOWNS AND CITIES, 1900–1920

Although the Socialist Party never won more than 6 percent of the vote nationally, it gained control of numerous small and medium-sized cities between 1900 and 1920.

By 1912, the Socialist Party claimed 150,000 dues-paying members, published hundreds of newspapers, enjoyed substantial support in the American Federation of Labor, and had elected scores of local officials. Socialism flourished in diverse communities throughout the country. On the Lower East Side of New York City, it arose from the economic exploitation of immigrant workers and Judaism’s tradition of social reform. Here, a vibrant socialist culture developed, complete with Yiddish-language newspapers and theaters, as well as large public meetings and street demonstrations. In 1914, the district elected socialist Meyer London to Congress. Another center of

socialist strength was Milwaukee, where Victor Berger, a German-born teacher and newspaper editor, mobilized local AFL unions into a potent political force that elected Emil Seidel mayor in 1910. Seidel’s administration provided aid to the unemployed, forced the police to recognize the rights of strikers, and won the respect of middle-class residents for its honesty and freedom from machine domination. Socialism also made inroads among tenant farmers in old Populist areas like Oklahoma, and in the mining regions of Idaho and Montana.

The Gospel of Debs No one was more important in spreading the socialist gospel or linking it to ideals of equality, self- government, and freedom than Eugene V. Debs, the railroad union leader who, as noted in the previous chapter, had been jailed during the Pullman Strike of 1894. For two decades, Debs crisscrossed the country preaching that control of the economy by a democratic government held out the hope of uniting “political equality and economic freedom.” As a champion of the downtrodden, Debs managed to bridge the cultural divide between New York’s Jewish immigrants, prairie socialists of the West, and native-born intellectuals attracted to the socialist ideal. “While there is a lower class,” proclaimed Debs, “I am in it. . . . While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Throughout the Atlantic world of the early twentieth century, socialism was a rising presence. Debs would receive more than 900,000 votes for president (6 percent of the total) in 1912. In that year, the socialist Appeal to Reason, published in Girard, Kansas, with a circulation of 700,000, was the largest weekly newspaper in the country, and socialist Max Hayes polled one-third of the vote when he challenged Samuel Gompers for the presidency of the AFL. In western Europe, socialism experienced even more pronounced growth. In the last elections before the outbreak of World War Ⅰ in 1914, socialists in France, Germany, and Scandinavia won between one-sixth and one-third of the vote. “Socialism is coming,” declared the Appeal to Reason. “It is coming like a prairie fire and nothing can stop it.”

AFL and IWW Socialism was only one example of widespread discontent in Progressive America. The labor strife of the Gilded Age continued into the early twentieth century. Having survived the depression of the 1890s, the American Federation of Labor saw its membership triple to 1.6 million between 1900 and 1904. At the same time, it sought to forge closer ties with forward-looking corporate leaders willing to deal with unions as a way to stabilize employee relations. AFL president Gompers joined with George Perkins of the J. P. Morgan financial empire and Mark Hanna, who had engineered McKinley’s election in 1896, in the National Civic Federation, which accepted the right of collective bargaining for “responsible” unions. It helped to settle hundreds of industrial disputes and encouraged improvements in factory safety and the establishment of pension plans for long-term workers. Most employers nonetheless continued to view unions as an intolerable interference with their authority, and resisted them stubbornly.

The AFL mainly represented the most privileged American workers—skilled industrial and craft laborers, nearly all of them white, male, and native-born. In 1905, a group of unionists who rejected the AFL’s exclusionary policies formed the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Part trade union, part advocate of a workers’ revolution that would seize the means of production and abolish the state, the IWW made solidarity its guiding principle, extending “a fraternal hand to every wage- worker, no matter what his religion, fatherland, or trade.” The organization sought to mobilize those excluded from the AFL—the immigrant factory labor force, migrant timber and agricultural workers, women, blacks, and even the despised Chinese on the West Coast. The IWW’s most prominent leader was William “Big Bill” Haywood, who had worked in western mines as a youth. Dubbed by critics “the most dangerous man in America,” Haywood became a national figure in 1906 when he was kidnapped and spirited off to Idaho, accused of instigating the murder of a former anti-union governor. Defended by labor lawyer Clarence Darrow, Haywood was found not guilty.

The New Immigrants on Strike

Children of Lawrence, Massachusetts, strikers marching in New York City during the epic labor confrontation of 1911.

The Uprising of the 20,000 in New York’s garment industry, mentioned earlier, was one of a series of mass strikes among immigrant workers that placed labor’s demand for the right to bargain collectively at the forefront of the reform agenda. These strikes demonstrated that while ethnic divisions among workers impeded labor solidarity, ethnic cohesiveness could also be a basis of unity, so long as strikes were organized on a democratic basis. IWW organizers printed leaflets, posters, and banners in multiple languages and insisted that each nationality enjoy representation on the committee coordinating a walkout. It drew on the sense of solidarity within immigrant communities to persuade local religious leaders, shopkeepers, and officeholders to support the strikes.

The labor conflict that had the greatest impact on public consciousness took place in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The city’s huge woolen mills employed 32,000 men, women, and children representing twenty-five nationalities. They worked six days per week and earned an average of sixteen cents per hour. When the state legislature in January 1912 enacted a fifty-four-hour limit to the workweek, employers reduced the weekly take-home pay of those who had been laboring longer hours. Workers spontaneously went on strike, and called on the IWW for assistance.

In February, Haywood and a group of women strikers devised the idea of sending strikers’ children out of the city for the duration of the walkout. Socialist families in New York City agreed to take them in. The sight of the children, many of whom appeared pale and half-starved, marching up Fifth Avenue from the train station led to a wave of sympathy for the strikers. “I have worked in the slums of New York,” wrote one observer, “but I have never found children who were so uniformly ill-

nourished, ill-fed, and ill-clothed.” A few days later, city officials ordered that no more youngsters could leave Lawrence. When a group of mothers and children gathered at the railroad station in defiance of the order, club-wielding police drove them away, producing outraged headlines around the world. The governor of Massachusetts soon intervened, and the strike was settled on the workers’ terms. A banner carried by the Lawrence strikers gave a new slogan to the labor movement: “We want bread and roses, too”—a declaration that workers sought not only higher wages but the opportunity to enjoy the finer things of life.

Another highly publicized labor uprising took place in New Orleans, where a 1907 strike of 10,000 black and white dockworkers prevented employers’ efforts to eliminate their unions and reduce their wages. This was a remarkable expression of interracial solidarity at a time when segregation had become the norm throughout the South. Other strikes proved less successful. A six-month walkout of 25,000 silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913 failed despite publicity generated by the Paterson Pageant, in which the strikers reenacted highlights of their struggle before a sympathetic audience at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

A strike against the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company was also unsuccessful. Mostly recent immigrants from Europe and Mexico, the strikers demanded recognition of the United Mine Workers of America, wage increases, an eight-hour workday, and the right to shop and live in places not owned by the company. When the walkout began, in September 1913, the mine owners evicted 11,000 strikers and their families from company housing. They moved into tent colonies, which armed militia units soon surrounded. On April 20, 1914, the militia attacked the largest tent city, at Ludlow, and burned it to the ground, killing an estimated twenty to thirty men, women, and children. Seven months after the Ludlow Massacre, the strike was called off.

Labor and Civil Liberties The fiery organizer Mary “Mother” Jones, who at the age of eighty-three had been jailed after addressing the Colorado strikers, later told a New York audience that the union “had only the Constitution; the other side had the bayonets.” Yet the struggle of workers for the right to strike and of labor radicals against restraints on open-air speaking made free speech a significant public issue in the early twentieth century. By and large, the courts rejected their claims. But these battles laid the foundation for the rise of civil liberties as a central component of freedom in twentieth-century America.

State courts in the Progressive era regularly issued injunctions prohibiting strikers from speaking, picketing, or distributing literature during labor disputes. Like the abolitionists before them, the labor movement, in the name of freedom, demanded the right to assemble, organize, and spread their views. The investigations of the Commission on Industrial Relations revealed the absence of free speech in many factory communities, with labor organizers prohibited from speaking freely under threat of either violence from private police or suppression by local authorities. “I don’t think we live in a free country or enjoy civil liberties,” Clarence Darrow told the commission.

The IWW’s battle for civil liberties breathed new meaning into the idea of freedom of expression. Lacking union halls, its organizers relied on songs, street theater, impromptu organizing meetings, and street corner gatherings to spread their message and attract support. In response to IWW activities, officials in Los Angeles, Spokane, Denver, and more than a dozen other cities limited or prohibited outdoor meetings. To arouse popular support, the IWW filled the jails with members who defied local law by speaking in public. Sometimes, prisoners were brutally treated, as in Spokane, where three died and hundreds were hospitalized after being jailed for violating a local law requiring prior approval of the content of public speeches. In nearly all the free-speech fights, however, the IWW eventually forced local officials to give way. “Whether they agree or disagree with its methods or aims,” wrote one journalist, “all lovers of liberty everywhere owe a debt to this organization for . . . [keeping] alight the fires of freedom.”

The New Feminism During the Progressive era, the word “feminism” first entered the political vocabulary. Inspired by the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Feminist Alliance, a small organization of New York professional women, developed plans to build apartment houses with communal kitchens, cafeterias, and daycare centers, to free women from the constraints of the home. However, because they were unable to obtain a mortgage, the buildings were never constructed. In 1914, a mass meeting at New York’s Cooper Union debated the question “What is Feminism?” The meeting was sponsored by Heterodoxy, a women’s club located in Greenwich Village that brought together female professionals, academics, and reformers. Feminism, said one speaker, meant woman’s emancipation “both as a human being and a sex-being.” Feminism’s forthright attack on traditional rules of sexual behavior added a new dimension to the idea of personal freedom.

VOICES OF FREEDOM

From CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, WOMEN AND ECONOMICS (1898)

Women and Economics, by the prolific feminist social critic and novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, influenced the new generation of women aspiring to greater independence. It insisted that how people earned a living shaped their entire lives and that therefore women must free themselves from the home to achieve genuine freedom.

It is not motherhood that keeps the housewife on her feet from dawn till dark; it is house service, not child service. Women work longer and harder than most men. . . . A truer spirit is the increasing desire of young girls to be independent, to have a career of their own, at least for a while, and the growing objection of countless wives to the pitiful asking for money, to the beggary of their position. More and more do fathers give their daughters, and husbands their wives, a definite allowance,—a separate bank account,—something . . . all their own.

The spirit of personal independence in the women of today is sure proof that a change has come. . . . The radical change in the economic position of women is advancing upon us. . . . The growing individualization of democratic life brings inevitable change to our daughters as well as to our sons. . . . One of its most noticeable features is the demand in women not only for their own money, but for their own work for the sake of personal expression. Few girls today fail to manifest some signs of this desire for individual expression. . . .

Economic independence for women necessarily involves a change in the home and family relation. But, if that change is for the advantage of individual and race, we need not fear it. It does not involve a change in the marriage relation except in withdrawing the element of economic dependence, nor in the relation of mother to child save to improve it. But it does involve the exercise of human faculty in women, in social service and exchange rather than in domestic service solely. . . . [Today], when our still developing social needs call for an ever-increasing . . . freedom, the woman in marrying becomes the house-servant, or at least the housekeeper, of the man. . . . When women stand free as economic agents, they will [achieve a] much better fulfilment of their duties as wives and mothers and [contribute] to the vast improvement in health and happiness of the human race.

From JOHN MITCHELL, “THE WORKINGMAN’S CONCEPTION OF INDUSTRIAL LIBERTY” (1910)

During the Progressive era, the idea of “industrial liberty” moved to the center of political discussion. Progressive reformers and labor leaders like John Mitchell, head of the United Mine Workers, condemned the prevailing idea of liberty of contract in favor of a broader definition of economic freedom.

While the Declaration of Independence established civil and political liberty, it did not, as you all know, establish industrial liberty. . . . Liberty means more than the right to choose the field of one’s employment. He is not a free man whose family must buy food today with the money that is earned tomorrow. He is not really free who is forced to work unduly long hours and for wages so low that he

can not provide the necessities of life for himself and his family; who must live in a crowded tenement and see his children go to work in the mills, the mines, and the factories before their bodies are developed and their minds trained. To have freedom a man must be free from the harrowing fear of hunger and want; he must be in such a position that by the exercise of reasonable frugality he can provide his family with all of the necessities and the reasonable comforts of life. He must be able to educate his children and to provide against sickness, accident, and old age. . . .

A number of years ago the legislatures of several coal producing States enacted laws requiring employers to pay the wages of their workmen in lawful money of the United States and to cease the practice of paying wages in merchandise. From time immemorial it had been the custom of coal companies to conduct general supply stores, and the workingmen were required, as a condition of employment, to accept products in lieu of money in return for services rendered. This system was a great hardship to the workmen. . . . The question of the constitutionality of this legislation was carried into the courts and by the highest tribunal it was declared to be an invasion of the workman’s liberty to deny him the right to accept merchandise in lieu of money as payment of his wages. . . . [This is] typical of hundreds of instances in which laws that have been enacted for the protection of the workingmen have been declared by the courts to be unconstitutional, on the grounds that they invaded the liberty of the working people. . . . Is it not natural that the workingmen should feel that they are being guaranteed the liberties they do not want and denied the liberty that is of real value to them? May they not exclaim, with Madame Roland [of the French Revolution], “O Liberty! Liberty! How many crimes are committed in thy name!”

QUESTIONS

1. What does Gilman see as the main obstacles to freedom for women? 2. What does Mitchell believe will be necessary to establish “industrial liberty”? 3. How do the authors differ in their view of the relationship of the family to individual freedom?

Heterodoxy was part of a new radical “bohemia” (a social circle of artists, writers, and others who reject conventional rules and practices). Its definition of feminism merged issues like the vote and greater economic opportunities with open discussion of sexuality. Its members formed discussion clubs, attended experimental theaters, and published magazines. They confidently expected to preside over the emancipation of the human spirit from the prejudices of the nineteenth century.

One symbol of the new era was Isadora Duncan, who brought from California a new, expressive dance based on the free movement of a body liberated from the constraints of traditional technique and costume. “I beheld the dance I had always dreamed of,” wrote the novelist Edith Wharton on seeing a Duncan performance, “satisfying every sense as a flower does, or a phrase of Mozart’s.” Another sign of artistic revolution was the Armory Show of 1913, an exhibition that exposed New Yorkers to new cubist paintings from Europe by artists previously unknown in the United States, like Pablo Picasso.

The Rise of Personal Freedom During the Progressive era, as journalist William M. Reedy jested, it struck “sex o’clock” in America. The founder of psychiatry, Sigmund Freud, lectured at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1909, and discovered that his writings on infantile sexuality, repression, and the irrational sources of human behavior were widely known “even in prudish America.” Issues of intimate personal relations previously confined to private discussion blazed forth in popular magazines and public debates.

For the generation of women who adopted the word “feminism” to express their demand for greater liberty, free sexual expression and reproductive choice emerged as critical definitions of women’s emancipation. Greenwich Village in New York City became a center of sexual experimentation. The aura of tolerance attracted many gay men and lesbians to the area, and although organized demands for gay rights lay far in the future, the gay community became an important element of the Village’s lifestyle. But new sexual attitudes spread far beyond bohemia; they flourished among the young, unmarried, self-supporting women who made sexual freedom a hallmark of their oft-proclaimed personal independence.

The Birth-Control Movement The growing presence of women in the labor market reinforced demands for access to birth control, an issue that gave political expression to changing sexual behavior. In the nineteenth century, the right to “control one’s body” generally meant the ability to refuse sexual advances, including those of a woman’s husband. Now, it suggested the ability to enjoy an active sexual life without necessarily bearing children. Emma Goldman, who had emigrated to the United States from Lithuania at the age of sixteen, toured the country lecturing on subjects from anarchism to the need for more enlightened attitudes toward homosexuality. She regularly included the right to birth control in her speeches and distributed pamphlets with detailed information about various contraceptive devices. “I demand freedom for both sexes,” she proclaimed, “freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.” Goldman constantly ran afoul of the law. By one count, she was arrested more than forty times for dangerous or “obscene” statements or simply to keep her from speaking.

By forthrightly challenging the laws banning contraceptive information and devices, Margaret Sanger, one of eleven children of an Irish-American working-class family, placed the birth-control movement at the heart of the new feminism. In 1911, she began a column on sex education, “What Every Girl Should Know,” for The Call, a New York socialist newspaper. Postal officials barred one issue, containing a column on venereal disease, from the mails. The next issue of The Call included a blank page with the headline: “What Every Girl Should Know—Nothing; by order of the U. S. Post Office.”

Mothers with baby carriages wait outside Margaret Sanger’s birth-control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn, 1916.

By 1914, the intrepid Sanger was openly advertising birth-control devices in her own journal, The Woman Rebel. “No woman can call herself free,” she proclaimed, “who does not own and control her own body [and] can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.” In 1916, Sanger opened a clinic in a working-class neighborhood of Brooklyn and began distributing contraceptive devices to poor Jewish and Italian women, an action for which she was sentenced to a month in prison. Few Progressives rallied to her defense.

Among the remarkable women involved in the birth-control movement—and radicalism more generally—was Helen Keller. Born in Alabama, she lost her sight and hearing because of a disease at the age of nineteen months. But she learned to read and write in braille and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1904. Keller became known throughout the world as the author of numerous articles and books, especially an autobiography that has been translated into over fifty languages. Later, her story became the subject of a popular play and film, The Miracle Worker. Keller became a leading advocate for persons with disabilities. Less well known is that in addition to campaigning for the availability of birth control, Keller was also an outspoken supporter of socialism, woman suffrage, the rights of laborers, and world peace and a longtime member of the Industrial Workers of the World.

The careers of Sanger and Keller exemplified how, for a time, the birth-control issue became a crossroads where the paths of labor radicals, cultural modernists, and feminists intersected. The IWW and Socialist Party distributed Sanger’s writings. Like the IWW free-speech fights and Goldman’s persistent battle for the right to lecture, Sanger’s travail was part of a rich history of dissent in the Progressive era that helped to focus enlightened opinion on the ways local authorities and national obscenity legislation set rigid limits to Americans’ freedom of expression. Slowly, laws banning birth control began to change. But since access was determined by individual states, even when some liberalized their laws, birth control remained unavailable in many others.

Native American Progressivism Many groups participated in the Progressive impulse. Founded in 1911, the Society of American Indians was a reform organization typical of the era. It brought together Indian intellectuals to promote discussion of the plight of Native Americans in the hope that public exposure would be the first step toward remedying injustice. Because many of the society’s leaders had been educated at government-sponsored boarding schools, the society united Indians of many tribal backgrounds. It created a pan-Indian public space independent of white control.

Many of these Indian intellectuals were not unsympathetic to the basic goals of federal Indian policy, including the transformation of communal landholdings on reservations into family farms. But Carlos Montezuma, a founder of the Society of American Indians, became an outspoken critic. Born in Arizona, he had been captured as a child by members of a neighboring tribe and sold to a traveling photographer, who brought him to Chicago. There Montezuma attended school and eventually obtained a medical degree.

In 1916, Montezuma established a newsletter, Wassaja (meaning “signaling”), that condemned federal paternalism toward the Indians and called for the abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Convinced that outsiders exerted too much power over life on the reservations, he insisted that self- determination was the only way for Indians to escape poverty and marginalization: “We must free ourselves. . . . We must be independent.” But he also demanded that Indians be granted full citizenship and all the constitutional rights of other Americans. Montezuma’s writings had little influence at the time on government policy, but activists would later rediscover him as a forerunner of Indian radicalism.

Glossary scientific management Management campaign to improve worker efficiency using measurements like “time and motion” studies to achieve greater productivity; introduced by Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1911. Socialist Party Political party demanding public ownership of major economic enterprises in the United States as well as reforms like recognition of labor unions and woman suffrage; reached peak of influence in 1912 when presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs received over 900,000 votes. collective bargaining The process of negotiations between an employer and a group of employees to regulate working conditions. Industrial Workers of the World Radical union organized in Chicago in 1905 and nicknamed the Wobblies; its opposition to World War Ⅰ led to its destruction by the federal government under the Espionage Act. birth-control movement An offshoot of the early twentieth-century feminist movement that saw access to birth control and “voluntary motherhood” as essential to women’s freedom. The birth-control movement was led by Margaret Sanger. Society of American Indians Organization founded in 1911 that brought together Native American intellectuals of many tribal backgrounds to promote discussion of the plight of Indian peoples.

THE POLITICS OF PROGRESSIVISM

Effective Freedom Progressivism was an international movement. In the early twentieth century, cities throughout the world experienced similar social strains arising from rapid industrialization and urban growth. In 1850, London and Paris were the only cities whose population exceeded 1 million. By 1900, there were twelve—New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia in the United States, and others in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Facing similar social problems, reformers across the globe exchanged ideas and envisioned new social policies. Sun Yat-Sen, the Chinese leader, was influenced by the writings of Henry George and Edward Bellamy.

As governments in Britain, France, and Germany instituted old age pensions, minimum wage laws, unemployment insurance, and the regulation of workplace safety, American reformers came to believe they had much to learn from the Old World. The term “social legislation,” meaning governmental action to address urban problems and the insecurities of working-class life, originated in Germany but soon entered the political vocabulary of the United States.

Progressives believed that the modern era required a fundamental rethinking of the functions of political authority, whether the aim was to combat the power of the giant corporations, protect consumers, civilize the marketplace, or guarantee industrial freedom at the workplace. Progressives sought to reinvigorate the idea of an activist, socially conscious government. Even in South Carolina, with its strong tradition of belief in local autonomy, Governor Richard I. Manning urged his constituents to modify their view of government as “a threat to individual liberty,” to see it instead as “a means for solving the ills of the body politic.”

Progressives could reject the traditional assumption that powerful government posed a threat to freedom, because their understanding of freedom was itself in flux. “Effective freedom,” wrote the philosopher John Dewey, was a positive, not a negative, concept—the “power to do specific things.” As such, it depended on “the distribution of powers that exists at a given time.” Thus, freedom inevitably became a political question.

Pragmatism

A photograph from 1910 depicts needy constituents of New York political boss Timothy “Big Tim” Sullivan receiving free pairs of shoes. Each year, Sullivan distributed 2,000 pairs on his mother’s birthday. Such largesse endeared political bosses to many voters, to the annoyance of municipal reformers.

Dewey was one of the foremost proponents of a school of philosophy called pragmatism that emerged in the late nineteenth century and strongly influenced Progressive thinkers. One of the most important philosophical movements ever to emerge in the United States, pragmatism, as explained in a 1907 book of that title by the philosopher William James (brother of the famous novelist Henry James), insisted that institutions and social policies must be judged by their concrete effects, not their longevity or how well they comport with religious doctrine or traditional political beliefs. Experience, pragmatists insisted, was more important than doctrine.

James saw pragmatism as a way of using evidence to moderate conflicts between religion and science. For others, including Dewey, the outlook encouraged an experimental approach to social problems characteristic of Progressivism. Given the deep divisions and widespread poverty in American society, ideologies such as Social Darwinism and liberty of contract, judged by the standard of pragmatism, had manifestly failed, and new approaches to social problems were needed. Dewey was a founder of the New School for Social Research in New York City, which stressed the importance of scientifically evaluating public policy. The idea that with proper information, social improvement could be achieved, was widely shared among American Progressives, as well as their counterparts in other countries.

State and Local Reforms Throughout the Western world, social legislation proliferated in the early twentieth century. In the United States, with a political structure more decentralized than in European countries, state and local governments enacted most of the era’s reform measures. In cities, Progressives worked to reform the structure of government to reduce the power of political bosses, establish public control of “natural monopolies” like gas- and waterworks, and improve public transportation. They raised property taxes in order to spend more money on schools, parks, and other public facilities.

Gilded Age mayors Hazen Pingree and Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones pioneered urban Progressivism. A former factory worker who became a successful shoe manufacturer, Pingree served as mayor of Detroit from 1889 to 1897. He battled the business interests that had dominated city government, forced gas and telephone companies to lower their rates, and established a municipal power plant. Jones had instituted an eight-hour day and paid vacations at his factory that produced oil drilling equipment. As mayor of Toledo, Ohio, from 1897 to 1905, he founded night schools and free kindergartens, built new parks, and supported the right of workers to unionize. Since state legislatures defined the powers of city government, urban Progressives often carried their campaigns to the state level. Pingree became governor of Michigan in 1896, in which post he continued his battle against railroads and other corporate interests.

Progressivism in the West Although often associated with eastern cities, Progressivism was also a major presence in the West. Former Populists and those who believed in the moral power of the frontier gravitated to Progressive programs to regulate the railroads and other large corporations, and to the idea that direct democracy could revitalize corrupt politics. Important Progressive leaders worked for reform in western states and municipalities, including Hiram Johnson of California and Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin.

Oregon stood at the forefront of Progressive reform. The leading figure in that state was William U’Ren, a lawyer who had entered politics as a supporter of Henry George’s single-tax program. U’Ren concluded that without changes to the political system, entrenched interests would always be able to block reforms such as George’s. He was the founder of the Oregon System, which included such measures as the initiative, referendum, and recall. Initiative, also known as direct legislation, enabled citizens to propose and vote directly on laws, bypassing state legislatures. Referendum similarly provided for popular votes on public policies. Recall allowed for the removal of public officials by popular vote. Together with direct primaries, in which voters, rather than party officials, chose candidates for office, all these reforms sought to weaken the power of political bosses and transfer it to ordinary citizens. Using the initiative, Progressives won the vote for women in the state.

The Oregon system, studied and emulated in many other states, came into being via an alliance of the urban middle class with reform-minded farmers and workers. But fault lines appeared when labor- oriented Progressives tried to use the initiative and referendum to increase taxes on the well-to-do and require the state to provide jobs for the unemployed. Both measures failed. Moreover, the initiative system quickly became out of control. In the 1912 election, voters in Portland were asked to evaluate forty measures seeking to become law. Nonetheless, between 1910 and 1912, Oregon’s West Coast neighbors, Washington and California, also adopted the initiative and referendum and approved woman suffrage.

In California, where a Republican machine closely tied to the Southern Pacific Railroad had dominated politics for decades, Progressives took power under Governor Hiram Johnson, who held office from 1911 to 1917. As public prosecutor, Johnson had secured the conviction for bribery of San Francisco political boss Abraham Ruef. Having promised to “kick the Southern Pacific [Railroad] out of politics,” he secured passage of the Public Utilities Act, one of the country’s strongest railroad-regulation measures, as well as laws banning child labor and limiting the working hours of women.

The most influential Progressive administration at the state level was that of Robert M. La Follette, who made Wisconsin a “laboratory for democracy.” After serving as a Republican member of Congress, La Follette became convinced that an alliance of railroad and lumber companies controlled state politics. Elected governor in 1900, he instituted a series of measures known as the Wisconsin Idea, including nominations of candidates for office through primary elections, the taxation of corporate wealth, and state regulation of railroads and public utilities. Other measures created a statewide system of insurance against illness, death, and accident, barred the sale to private companies of land, mineral rights, and other natural resources owned by the state, required safety devices on various forms of machinery, and prohibited child labor. To staff his administration, he drew on nonpartisan faculty members from the University of Wisconsin. Wisconsin offered the most striking merger of the social and political impulses that went under the name of Progressivism.

Progressive Democracy “We are far from free,” wrote Randolph Bourne in 1913, “but the new spirit of democracy is the angel that will free us.” Progressives hoped to reinvigorate democracy by restoring political power to the citizenry and civic harmony to a divided society. Alarmed by the upsurge in violent class conflict and the unrestricted power of corporations, they believed that political reforms could help to create a unified “people” devoted to greater democracy and social reconciliation. Yet increasing the responsibilities of government made it all the more important to identify who was entitled to political participation and who was not.

The Progressive era saw a host of changes implemented in the political process, many seemingly contradictory in purpose. The electorate was simutaneously expanded and contracted, empowered and removed from direct influence on many functions of government. Democracy was enhanced by the Seventeenth Amendment—which provided that U.S. senators be chosen by popular vote rather than by state legislatures—by widespread adoption of the popular election of judges, and by the use of primary elections among party members to select candidates for office. The era culminated with a constitutional amendment enfranchising women—the largest expansion of democracy in American history.

But the Progressive era also witnessed numerous restrictions on democratic participation, most strikingly the disenfranchisement of blacks in the South, a process, as noted in Chapter 17, supported by many white southern Progressives as a way of ending election fraud. To make city government more honest and efficient, many localities replaced elected mayors with appointed nonpartisan commissions or city managers—a change that insulated officials from machine domination but also from popular control. New literacy tests and residency and registration requirements, common in northern as well as southern states, limited the right to vote among the poor. Taken as a whole, the electoral changes of the Progressive era represented a significant reversal of the idea that voting was an inherent right of American citizenship. In the eyes of many Progressives, the “fitness” of voters, not their absolute numbers, defined a functioning democracy.

Government by Expert “He didn’t believe in democracy; he believed simply in government.” The writer H. L. Mencken’s quip about Theodore Roosevelt came uncomfortably close to the mark for many Progressive advocates of an empowered state. Most Progressive thinkers were highly uncomfortable with the real world of politics, which seemed to revolve around the pursuit of narrow class, ethnic, and regional interests. Robert M. La Follette’s reliance on college professors to staff important posts in his administration reflected a larger Progressive faith in expertise. The government could best exercise intelligent control over society through a democracy run by impartial experts who were in many respects unaccountable to the citizenry.

This impulse toward order, efficiency, and centralized management—all in the name of social justice —was an important theme of Progressive reform. The title of Walter Lippmann’s influential 1914 work of social commentary, Drift and Mastery, posed the stark alternatives facing the nation. “Drift” meant continuing to operate according to the outmoded belief in individual autonomy. “Mastery” required applying scientific inquiry to modern social problems. The new generation of educated professionals, Lippmann believed, could be trusted more fully than ordinary citizens to solve America’s deep social problems. Political freedom was less a matter of direct participation in government than of qualified persons devising the best public policies.

Jane Addams and Hull House But alongside this elitist politics, Progressivism also included a more democratic vision of the activist state. As much as any other group, organized women reformers spoke for the democratic side of Progressivism. Still barred from voting and holding office in most states, women nonetheless became central to the political history of the Progressive era. Women challenged the barriers that excluded them from formal political participation and developed a democratic, grassroots vision of Progressive government. They placed on the political agenda new understandings of female freedom. The immediate catalyst was a growing awareness among women reformers of the plight of poor immigrant communities and the emergence of the condition of women and child laborers as a major focus of public concern.

The era’s most prominent female reformer was Jane Addams, who had been born in 1860, the daughter of an Illinois businessman. After graduating from college, Addams, who never married, resented the prevailing expectation that a woman’s life should be governed by what she called the “family claim”—the obligation to devote herself to parents, husband, and children. In 1889, she founded Hull House in Chicago, a settlement house devoted to improving the lives of the immigrant poor. Hull House was modeled on Toynbee Hall, which Addams had visited after its establishment in a working-class neighborhood of London in 1884. Unlike previous reformers, who had aided the poor from afar, settlement-house workers moved into poor neighborhoods. They built kindergartens and playgrounds for children, established employment bureaus and health clinics, and showed female victims of domestic abuse how to gain legal protection. By 1910, more than 400 settlement houses had been established in cities throughout the country.

“Spearheads for Reform” Addams was typical of the Progressive era’s “new woman.” By 1900, there were more than 80,000 college-educated women in the United States. Many found a calling in providing social services, nursing, and education to poor families in the growing cities. The efforts of middle-class women to uplift the poor, and of laboring women to uplift themselves, helped to shift the center of gravity of politics toward activist government. Women like Addams discovered that even well-organized social work was not enough to alleviate the problems of inadequate housing, income, and health. Government action was essential. Hull House inspired an array of reforms in Chicago, soon adopted elsewhere, including stronger building and sanitation codes, shorter working hours and safer labor conditions, and the right of labor to organize.

Female activism spread throughout the country. Ironically, the exclusion of blacks from jobs in southern textile mills strengthened the region’s movement against child labor. Reformers portrayed child labor as a menace to white supremacy, depriving white children of educations they would need as adult members of the dominant race. These reformers devoted little attention to the condition of black children. Women’s groups in Alabama were instrumental in the passage of a 1903 state law restricting child labor. By 1915, every southern state had followed suit. But with textile mill owners determined to employ children and many poor families dependent on their earnings, these laws were enforced only sporadically.

Mayor Mary W. Howard (center) and the town council of Kanab, Utah. They served from 1912 to 1914, the first all-female municipal government in American history.

The settlement houses have been called “spearheads for reform.” They produced prominent Progressive figures like Julia Lathrop, the first woman to head a federal agency (the Children’s Bureau, established in 1912 to investigate the conditions of mothers and children and advocate their interests). Florence Kelley, the daughter of Civil War–era Radical Republican congressman William D. Kelley and a veteran of Hull House, went on to mobilize women’s power as consumers as a force for social change. In the Gilded Age, the writer Helen Campbell had brilliantly exposed the contradiction of a market economy in which fashionable women wore clothing produced by poor women in wretched sweatshops. “Emancipation on the one side,” she pointedly observed, “has meant no corresponding emancipation for the other.” A generation later, under Kelley’s leadership, the National Consumers’ League became the nation’s leading advocate of laws governing the working conditions of women and children. Freedom of choice in the marketplace, Kelley insisted, enabled socially conscious consumers to “unite with wage earners” by refusing to purchase goods produced under exploitative conditions.

The Campaign for Woman Suffrage

Mary Pickford, one of the era’s most celebrated movie stars, publicized her support for woman suffrage in this photograph from around 1910.

After 1900, the campaign for woman suffrage moved beyond the mostly elite membership of the 1890s to engage a broad coalition ranging from middle-class members of women’s clubs to unionists, socialists, and settlement-house workers. For the first time, it became a mass movement. Membership in the National American Woman Suffrage Association grew from 13,000 in 1893 to more than 2 million by 1917. The group campaigned throughout the country for the right to vote and began to enjoy some success. By 1900, more than half the states allowed women to vote in local elections dealing with school issues, and Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah had adopted full woman suffrage. The West also led the way in women holding public office. The first women to become mayors of major cities, governors, and members of Congress hailed from the West—Mayor Bertha Landes in Seattle (1926–1928), Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin of Montana (elected 1916 and 1940), and, in the 1920s, governors Miriam “Ma” Ferguson of Texas and Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming.

Cynics charged that Wyoming legislators used suffrage to attract more female migrants to their predominantly male state, while Utah hoped to enhance the political power of husbands in polygamous marriages banned by law but still practiced by some Mormons. In Colorado and Idaho, however, the success of referendums in the 1890s reflected the power of the Populist Party, a strong supporter of votes for women. Between 1910 and 1914, seven more western states enfranchised women. In 1913, Illinois became the first state east of the Mississippi River to allow women to vote in presidential elections.

These campaigns, which brought women aggressively into the public sphere, were conducted with a new spirit of militancy. They also made effective use of the techniques of advertising, publicity, and mass entertainment characteristic of modern consumer society. California’s successful 1911 campaign utilized automobile parades, numerous billboards and electric signs, and countless suffrage buttons and badges. Nonetheless, state campaigns were difficult, expensive, and usually unsuccessful. The movement increasingly focused its attention on securing a national constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote.

Maternalist Reform Ironically, the desire to exalt women’s role within the home did much to inspire the reinvigoration of the suffrage movement. Many of the era’s experiments in public policy arose from the conviction that the state had an obligation to protect women and children. Female reformers helped to launch a mass movement for direct government action to improve the living standards of poor mothers and children. Laws providing for mothers’ pensions (state aid to mothers of young children who lacked male support) spread rapidly after 1910. The pensions tended to be less than generous, and local eligibility requirements opened the door to unequal treatment (white widows benefited the most, single mothers were widely discriminated against, and black women were almost entirely excluded). Maternalist reforms like mothers’ pensions rested on the assumption that the government should encourage women’s capacity for bearing and raising children and enable them to be economically independent at the same time. Both feminists and believers in conventional domestic roles supported such measures. The former hoped that these laws would subvert women’s dependence on men, the latter that they would strengthen traditional families and the mother-child bond.

Other Progressive legislation recognized that large numbers of women did in fact work outside the home, but defined them as a dependent group (like children) in need of state protection in ways male workers were not. In 1908, in the landmark case of Muller v. Oregon, Louis D. Brandeis filed a brief citing scientific and sociological studies to demonstrate that because women had less strength and endurance than men, long hours of labor were dangerous for women, while their unique ability to bear children gave the government a legitimate interest in their working conditions. Persuaded by Brandeis’s argument, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of an Oregon law setting maximum working hours for women.

Thus, three years after the notorious Lochner decision invalidating a New York law limiting the working hours of male bakers (discussed in Chapter 16), the Court created the first large breach in “liberty of contract” doctrine. But the cost was high: at the very time that women in unprecedented numbers were entering the labor market and earning college degrees, Brandeis’s brief and the Court’s opinion solidified the view of women workers as weak, dependent, and incapable of enjoying the same economic rights as men. By 1917, thirty states had enacted laws limiting the hours of labor of female workers. Many women derived great benefit from these laws; others saw them as an infringement on their freedom.

While the maternalist agenda built gender inequality into the early foundations of the welfare state, the very use of government to regulate working conditions called into question basic assumptions concerning liberty of contract. Although not all reformers were willing to take the step, it was easy to extend the idea of protecting women and children to demand that government better the living and working conditions of men as well, by insuring them against the impact of unemployment, old age, ill health, and disability. Brandeis himself insisted that government should concern itself with the health, income, and future prospects of all its citizens.

The Idea of Economic Citizenship Brandeis envisioned a different welfare state from that of the maternalist reformers, one rooted less in the idea of healthy motherhood than in universal economic entitlements, including the right to a decent income and protection against unemployment and work-related accidents. For him, the right to assistance derived from citizenship itself, not some special service to the nation (as in the case of mothers).

This vision, too, enjoyed considerable support in the Progressive era. By 1913, twenty-two states had enacted workmen’s compensation laws to benefit workers, male or female, injured on the job. This legislation was the first wedge that opened the way for broader programs of social insurance. To avoid the stigma of depending on governmental assistance, contributions from workers’ own wages funded these programs in part, thus distinguishing them from charity dispensed by local authorities to the poor. But state minimum wage laws and most laws regulating working hours applied only to women. Women and children may have needed protection, but interference with the freedom of contract of adult male workers was still widely seen as degrading. The establishment of a standard of living and working conditions beneath which no American, male or female, should be allowed to fall would await the coming of the New Deal.

Glossary pragmatism A philosophical movement that emerged in the late nineteenth century, which insisted that institutions and social policies should be judged by their practical effects, not their longevity or whether they reflected traditional religious or political beliefs. initiative A Progressive-era reform that allowed citizens to propose and vote on laws, bypassing state legislatures. referendum A Progressive-era reform that allowed public policies to be submitted to popular vote. recall A Progressive-era reform that allowed the removal of public officials by popular vote. Seventeenth Amendment Progressive reform passed in 1913 that required U.S. senators to be elected directly by voters; previously, senators were chosen by state legislatures. settlement house Late-nineteenth-century movement to offer a broad array of social services in urban immigrant neighborhoods; Chicago’s Hull House was one of hundreds of settlement houses that operated by the early twentieth century. maternalist reforms Progressive-era reforms that sought to encourage women’s child-bearing and -rearing abilities and to promote their economic independence. Muller v. Oregon 1908 Supreme Court decision that held that state interest in protecting women could override liberty of contract. Louis D. Brandeis, with help from his sister-in-law Josephine Goldmark of the National Consumers League, filed a brief in Muller that used statistics about women’s health to argue for their protection.

THE PROGRESSIVE PRESIDENTS Despite the ferment of Progressivism on the city and state levels, the most striking political development of the early twentieth century was the rise of the national state. The process of nationalization was occurring throughout American life. National corporations dominated the economy; national organizations like the American Medical Association came into being to raise the incomes and respect of professions. The process was even reflected in the consolidation of local baseball teams into the American and National Leagues and the advent in 1903 of the World Series. Only energetic national government, Progressives believed, could create the social conditions of freedom.

Despite creative experiments in social policy at the city and state levels, the tradition of localism seemed to most Progressives an impediment to a renewed sense of national purpose. Poverty, economic insecurity, and lack of industrial democracy were national problems that demanded national solutions. The democratic national state, wrote New Republic editor Herbert Croly, offered an alternative to control of Americans’ lives by narrow interests that manipulated politics or by the all-powerful corporations. Croly proposed a new synthesis of American political traditions. To achieve the “Jeffersonian ends” of democratic self-determination and individual freedom, he insisted, the country needed to employ the “Hamiltonian means” of government intervention in the economy. Each in his own way, the Progressive presidents—Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson—tried to address this challenge.

Theodore Roosevelt In September 1901, the anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated William McKinley while the president visited the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. At the age of forty-two, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt became the youngest man ever to hold the office of president. Roosevelt was an impetuous, energetic individual with a penchant for what he called the “strenuous life” of manly adventure. In many ways, he became the model for the twentieth-century president, an official actively and continuously engaged in domestic and foreign affairs. (The foreign policies of the Progressive presidents will be discussed in the next chapter.) Roosevelt regarded the president as “the steward of the public welfare.” He moved aggressively to set the political agenda.

Roosevelt’s program, which he called the Square Deal, attempted to confront the problems caused by economic consolidation by distinguishing between “good” and “bad” corporations. The former, among which he included U.S. Steel, served the public interest. The latter were run by greedy financiers interested only in profit and had no right to exist.

President Theodore Roosevelt addressing a crowd in 1902.

Soon after assuming office, Roosevelt shocked the corporate world by announcing his intention to prosecute under the Sherman Antitrust Act the Northern Securities Company. Created by financier J. P. Morgan, this “holding company” owned the stock and directed the affairs of three major western railroads. It monopolized transportation between the Great Lakes and the Pacific. Morgan was outraged. “Wall Street is paralyzed,” quipped one newspaper, “at the thought that a President of the United States should sink to enforce the law.” In 1904, the Supreme Court ordered Northern Securities dissolved, a major victory for the antitrust movement.

Roosevelt and Economic Regulation Roosevelt also believed that the president should be an honest broker in labor disputes, rather than automatically siding with employers as his predecessors had usually done. When a strike paralyzed the West Virginia and Pennsylvania coalfields in 1902, he summoned union and management leaders to the White House. By threatening a federal takeover of the mines, he persuaded the owners to allow the dispute to be settled by a commission he himself would appoint.

Reelected in 1904, Roosevelt pushed for more direct federal regulation of the economy. Appealing to the public for support, he condemned the misuse of the “vast power conferred by vast wealth.” He proposed to strengthen the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), which the Supreme Court had essentially limited to collecting economic statistics. By this time, journalistic exposés, labor unrest, and the agitation of Progressive reformers had created significant public support for Roosevelt’s regulatory program. In 1906, Congress passed the Hepburn Act, giving the ICC the power to examine railroads’ business records and to set reasonable rates, a significant step in the development of federal intervention in the corporate economy. That year, as has been noted, also saw the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, which established a federal agency to police the quality and labeling of food and drugs, and the Meat Inspection Act. Many businessmen supported these measures, recognizing that they would benefit from greater public confidence in the quality and safety of their products. But even they were alarmed by Roosevelt’s calls for federal inheritance and income taxes and the regulation of all interstate businesses.

John Muir and the Spirituality of Nature If the United States lagged behind Europe in many areas of social policy, it led the way in the conservation of natural resources. The first national park, Yellowstone in Wyoming, was created by Congress in 1872, partly to preserve an area of remarkable natural beauty and partly at the urging of the Northern Pacific Railroad, which was anxious to promote western tourism. In the 1890s, the Scottish-born naturalist John Muir organized the Sierra Club to help preserve forests from uncontrolled logging by timber companies.

Muir’s love of nature stemmed from deep religious feelings. Nearly blinded in an accident in an Indianapolis machine shop where he worked in his twenties, he found in the restoration of his sight an inspiration to appreciate God’s creation. In nature, he believed, men could experience directly the presence of God. Muir’s outlook blended evangelical Protestantism with a romantic view of nature inspired by the Transcendentalists of the pre–Civil War era—like Henry David Thoreau, he lamented the intrusions of civilization on the natural environment. But unlike the Transcendentalists, Muir developed a broad following. As more and more Americans lived in cities, they came to see nature less as something to conquer and more as a place for recreation and personal growth.

The Conservation Movement In the 1890s, Congress authorized the president to withdraw “forest reserves” from economic development, a restriction on economic freedom in the name of a greater social good. But it was under Theodore Roosevelt that the conservation movement became a concerted federal policy. A dedicated outdoorsman who built a ranch in North Dakota in the 1880s, Roosevelt moved to preserve parts of the natural environment from economic exploitation.

Relying for advice on Gifford Pinchot, the head of the U.S. Forest Service, he ordered that millions of acres be set aside as wildlife preserves and encouraged Congress to create new national parks. The creation of parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier required the removal of Indians who hunted and fished there as well as the reintroduction of animals that had previously disappeared. City dwellers who visited the national parks did not realize that these were to a considerable extent artificially created and managed environments, not primordial nature.

In some ways, conservation was a typical Progressive reform. Manned by experts, the government could stand above political and economic battles, serving the public good while preventing “special interests” from causing irreparable damage to the environment. The aim was less to end the economic utilization of natural resources than to develop responsible, scientific plans for their use. Pinchot halted timber companies’ reckless assault on the nation’s forests. But unlike Muir, he believed that development and conservation could go hand in hand and that logging, mining, and grazing on public lands should be controlled, not eliminated. Conservation also reflected the Progressive thrust toward efficiency and control—in this case, control of nature itself.

In the view of Progressive conservationists, the West’s scarcest resource—water—cried out for regulation. Governments at all levels moved to control the power of western rivers, building dams and irrigation projects to regularize their flow, prevent waste, and provide water for large-scale agriculture and urban development. With such projects came political conflict, as cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco battled with rural areas for access to water. After secretly buying up large tracts of land in the Owens Valley east of the city, for example, the city of Los Angeles constructed a major aqueduct between 1908 and 1913, over the vigorous objections of the valley’s residents. By the 1920s, so much water had been diverted to the city that the once thriving farming and ranching businesses of Owens Valley could no longer operate.

Taft in Office Having served nearly eight years as president, Roosevelt did not run again in 1908. His chosen successor was William Howard Taft, a federal judge from Ohio who had served as governor of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. Taft defeated William Jennings Bryan, making his third unsuccessful race for the White House. Taft’s inaugural address expressed the Progressive view of the state: “The scope of a modern government . . . has been widened far beyond the principles laid down by the old ‘laissez-faire’ school of political writers.”

Although temperamentally more conservative than Roosevelt, Taft pursued antitrust policy even more aggressively. He persuaded the Supreme Court in 1911 to declare John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company (one of Roosevelt’s “good” trusts) in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and to order its breakup into separate marketing, producing, and refining companies. The government also won a case against American Tobacco, which the Court ordered to end pricing policies that were driving smaller firms out of business. In these decisions, the justices announced a new standard for judging large corporations—the “rule of reason”—which in effect implemented Roosevelt’s old distinction between good and bad trusts. Big businesses were not, in and of themselves, antitrust violators, unless they engaged in policies that stifled competition.

Taft supported the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which authorized Congress to enact a graduated income tax (one whose rate of taxation is higher for wealthier citizens). It was ratified shortly before he left office. A 2 percent tax on incomes over $4,000 had been included in a tariff enacted in 1894 but had been quickly declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court as a “communistic threat to property.” The movement to resurrect the income tax united southern and western farmers who wished to reduce government dependence on revenue from the tariff, which they believed discriminated against nonindustrial states, and Progressives who believed that taxation should be based on the ability to pay. A key step in the modernization of the federal government, the income tax provided a reliable and flexible source of revenue for a national state whose powers, responsibilities, and expenditures were growing rapidly.

Despite these accomplishments, Taft seemed to gravitate toward the more conservative wing of the Republican Party. Only a few months after taking office, he signed the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, which reduced rates on imported goods but not nearly as much as reformers wished. Taft’s rift with Progressives grew deeper when Richard A. Ballinger, the secretary of the interior, concluded that Roosevelt had exceeded his authority in placing land in forest reserves. Ballinger decided to return some of this land to the public domain, where mining and lumber companies would have access to it. Gifford Pinchot accused Ballinger of colluding with business interests and repudiating the environmental goals of the Roosevelt administration. When Taft fired Pinchot in 1910, the breach with party Progressives became irreparable. In 1912, Roosevelt challenged Taft for the Republican nomination. Defeated, Roosevelt launched an independent campaign as the head of the new Progressive Party.

The Election of 1912 All the crosscurrents of Progressive-era thinking about what McClure’s Magazine called “the problem of the relation of the State and the corporation” came together in the presidential campaign of 1912. The four-way contest between Taft, Roosevelt, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and Socialist Eugene V. Debs became a national debate on the relationship between political and economic freedom in the age of big business. At one end of the political spectrum stood Taft, who stressed that economic individualism could remain the foundation of the social order so long as government and private entrepreneurs cooperated in addressing social ills. At the other end was Debs. Relatively few Americans supported the Socialist Party’s goal of abolishing the “capitalistic system” altogether, but its immediate demands—including public ownership of the railroads and banking system, government aid to the unemployed, and laws establishing shorter working hours and a minimum wage—summarized forward-looking Progressive thought.

Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party candidate, speaking in Chicago during the 1912 presidential campaign.

But it was the battle between Wilson and Roosevelt over the role of the federal government in securing economic freedom that galvanized public attention in 1912. The two represented competing

strands of Progressivism. Both believed government action necessary to preserve individual freedom, but they differed over the dangers of increasing the government’s power and the inevitability of economic concentration. Though representing a party thoroughly steeped in states’ rights and laissez- faire ideology, Wilson was deeply imbued with Progressive ideas. As governor of New Jersey, Wilson had presided over the implementation of a system of workmen’s compensation and state regulation of utilities and railroads.

New Freedom and New Nationalism Strongly influenced by Louis D. Brandeis, with whom he consulted frequently during the campaign, Wilson insisted that democracy must be reinvigorated by restoring market competition and freeing government from domination by big business. Wilson feared big government as much as he feared the power of the corporations. The New Freedom, as he called his program, envisioned the federal government strengthening antitrust laws, protecting the right of workers to unionize, and actively encouraging small businesses—creating, in other words, the conditions for the renewal of economic competition without increasing government regulation of the economy. Wilson warned that corporations were as likely to corrupt government as to be managed by it, a forecast that proved remarkably accurate.

To Roosevelt’s supporters, Wilson seemed a relic of a bygone era; his program, they argued, served the needs of small businessmen but ignored the inevitability of economic concentration and the interests of professionals, consumers, and labor. Wilson and Brandeis spoke of the “curse of bigness.” What the nation actually needed, Walter Lippmann countered, was frank acceptance of the benefits of bigness, coupled with the intervention of government to counteract its abuses. Lippmann was expressing the core of the New Nationalism, Roosevelt’s program of 1912. Only the “controlling and directing power of the government,” Roosevelt insisted, could restore “the liberty of the oppressed.” He called for heavy taxes on personal and corporate fortunes and federal regulation of industries, including railroads, mining, and oil.

The Progressive Party platform offered numerous proposals to promote social justice. Drafted by a group of settlement-house activists, labor reformers, and social scientists, the platform laid out a blueprint for a modern, democratic welfare state, complete with woman suffrage, federal supervision of corporate enterprise, national labor and health legislation for women and children, an eight-hour day and “living wage” for all workers, and a national system of social insurance covering unemployment, medical care, and old age. Described by Roosevelt as the “most important document” since the end of the Civil War, the platform brought together many of the streams of thought and political experiences that flowed into Progressivism. Roosevelt’s campaign helped to give freedom a modern social and economic content and established an agenda that would define political liberalism for much of the twentieth century.

Roosevelt’s Americanism A redefinition of what it meant to be an American united many strands of Progressive-era thought. Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism was one example. Roosevelt wanted immigrants to “Americanize” rather than retain cultures and customs from their countries of origin. He also believed that fitness for citizenship—or lack thereof—was both inborn and related to past historical experience. Slaves brought from Africa and their descendants, he believed, could not assimilate properly into American culture. Only persons with the capacity for “self-control”—mainly white people—were capable of participating in democracy.

In a 1910 speech in Kansas outlining his New Nationalism, Roosevelt announced that the “prime problem of our nation is to get the right type of good citizenship.” He argued that the government should provide for the well-being of its people to make them better citizens, while retaining the view that only persons with “the right kind of character” were really qualified for citizenship. Being a proper American required a certain level of material comfort. “No man can be a good citizen,” he declared, “unless he has a wage more than sufficient to cover the bare cost of living. . . . We keep countless men from being good citizens by the conditions of life with which we surround them.” Yet the person who lacked the qualities necessary to be “a good man in the home, a good father, a good husband,” could also never be a good citizen. Clearly, Roosevelt’s idea of citizenship had a strong gender bias. Yet in 1912 he would embrace woman suffrage. And Roosevelt’s concept of Americanism, although closed to blacks and Asian-Americans, was open to more people than the outlook of his contemporaries who also excluded the “new immigrants” from Europe. But its coercive potential would become starkly evident a few years later, when the United States entered World War Ⅰ and the government demanded absolute loyalty of all Americans and the immediate assimilation of immigrants.

Wilson’s First Term The Republican split in 1912 ensured a sweeping victory for Wilson, who won about 42 percent of the popular vote, although Roosevelt humiliated Taft by winning about 27 percent to the president’s 23 percent. In office, Wilson proved himself a strong executive leader. He established an office at the Capitol so that he could confer regularly with members of Congress about pending legislation, and he was the first president to hold regular press conferences in order to influence public opinion directly and continuously. He delivered messages personally to Congress rather than sending them in written form, as had all his predecessors since John Adams.

With Democrats in control of Congress, Wilson moved aggressively to implement his version of Progressivism. The first significant measure of his presidency was the Underwood Tariff, which substantially reduced duties on imports and, to make up for lost revenue, imposed a graduated income tax on the richest 5 percent of Americans. There followed the Clayton Act of 1914, which exempted labor unions from antitrust laws and barred courts from issuing injunctions curtailing the right to strike. In 1916 came the Keating-Owen Act outlawing child labor in the manufacture of goods sold in interstate commerce (the Supreme Court would later declare it unconstitutional), the Adamson Act establishing an eight-hour workday on the nation’s railroads, and the Warehouse Act, reminiscent of the Populist subtreasury plan, which extended credit to farmers when they stored their crops in federally licensed warehouses.

The Expanding Role of Government Some of Wilson’s policies seemed more in tune with Roosevelt’s New Nationalism than the New Freedom of 1912. He abandoned the idea of aggressive trust-busting in favor of greater government supervision of the economy. Wilson presided over the creation of two powerful new public agencies. In 1913, Congress created the Federal Reserve System, consisting of twelve regional banks. They were overseen by a central board appointed by the president and empowered to handle the issuance of currency, aid banks in danger of failing, and influence interest rates so as to promote economic growth. The law was a delayed response to the Panic of 1907, when the failure of several financial companies threatened a general collapse of the banking system. With the federal government lacking a modern central bank, it had been left to J. P. Morgan to assemble the funds to prop up threatened financial institutions. Morgan’s actions highlighted the fact that in the absence of federal regulation of banking, power over finance rested entirely in private hands.

WHO IS AN AMERICAN?

From MARY CHURCH TERRELL, “WHAT IT MEANS TO BE COLORED IN THE CAPITAL OF THE UNITED STATES” (1906)

The daughter of slaves, Mary Church Terrell became one of the nation’s most prominent black women. A high school teacher in Washington, D.C., she went on to serve on the city’s Board of Education and became a founder of the NAACP. In 1906, Terrell delivered a speech to a women’s club in Washington in which she outlined some of the forms of humiliation faced daily by African- Americans in the nation’s capital. They were treated, she pointed out, like aliens in their native land.

As a colored woman I might enter Washington any night, a stranger in a strange land, and walk miles without finding a place to lay my head. Unless I happened to know colored people who live here . . . I should be obliged to spend the entire night wandering about. Indians, Chinamen, Filipinos, Japanese and representatives of any other dark race can find hotel accommodations, if they can pay for them. The colored man alone is thrust out of the hotels of the national capital like a leper.

Unless I am willing to engage in a few menial occupations, in which the pay for my services would be very poor, there is no way for me to earn an honest living, if I am not a trained nurse or a dressmaker or can secure a position as teacher in the public schools. . . . If I try to enter many of the numerous vocations in which my white sisters are allowed to engage, the door is shut in my face. . . .

It is impossible for any white person in the United States, no matter how sympathetic and broad, to realize what life would mean to him if his incentive to effort were suddenly snatched away. . . . Surely nowhere in the world do oppression and persecution based solely on the color of the skin appear more hateful and hideous than in the capital of the United States, because the chasm between the principles upon which this Government was founded, in which it still professes to believe, and those which are daily practiced under the protection of the flag, yawn so wide and deep.

QUESTIONS

1. Why does Terrell compare her situation with that of people from China, Japan, and other countries in Asia?

2. Why does she consider prejudice more “hateful” in the United States than in other countries?

A second expansion of national power occurred in 1914, when Congress established the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate and prohibit “unfair” business activities such as price-fixing and monopolistic practices. Both the Federal Reserve and FTC were welcomed by many business leaders as a means of restoring order to the economic marketplace and warding off more radical measures for curbing corporate power. But they reflected the remarkable expansion of the federal role in the economy during the Progressive era.

By 1916, the social ferment and political mobilizations of the Progressive era had given birth to a new American state. With new laws, administrative agencies, and independent commissions, government at the local, state, and national levels had assumed the authority to protect and advance

“industrial freedom.” Government had established rules for labor relations, business behavior, and financial policy, protected citizens from market abuses, and acted as a broker among the groups whose conflicts threatened to destroy social harmony. But a storm was already engulfing Europe that would test the Progressive faith in empowered government as the protector of American freedom.

Glossary Pure Food and Drug Act Passed in 1906, the first law to regulate manufacturing of food and medicines; prohibited dangerous additives and inaccurate labeling. conservation movement A progressive reform movement focused on the preservation and sustainable management of the nation’s natural resources. Sixteenth Amendment Constitutional amendment passed in 1913 that legalized the federal income tax. Progressive Party Political party created when former president Theodore Roosevelt broke away from the Republican Party to run for president again in 1912; the party supported progressive reforms similar to those of the Democrats but stopped short of seeking to eliminate trusts. Also the name of the party backing Robert La Follette for president in 1924. New Freedom Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s political slogan in the presidential campaign of 1912; Wilson wanted to improve the banking system, lower tariffs, and, by breaking up monopolies, give small businesses freedom to compete. New Nationalism Platform of the Progressive Party and slogan of former president Theodore Roosevelt in the presidential campaign of 1912; stressed government activism, including regulation of trusts, conservation, and recall of state court decisions that had nullified progressive programs. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Independent agency created by the Wilson administration that replaced the Bureau of Corporations as an even more powerful tool to combat unfair trade practices and monopolies.

CHAPTER REVIEW

REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. Identify the main groups and ideas that drove the Progressive movement. 2. Explain how immigration to the United States in this period was part of a global movement of

peoples. 3. Describe how Fordism transformed American industrial and consumer society. 4. Socialism was a rising force across the globe in the early twentieth century. How successful

was the movement in the United States? 5. Explain why the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) grew so rapidly and aroused so much

opposition. 6. How did pragmatism influence Progressive thinkers like John Dewey? 7. How did immigrants adjust to life in America? What institutions or activities became

important to their adjustment, and why? 8. What did Progressive-era feminists want to change in society, and how did their actions help

to spearhead broader reforms? 9. How did ideas of women’s roles, shared by maternalist reformers, lead to an expansion of

activism by and rights for women? 10. How did each Progressive-era president view the role of the federal government? 11. According to Theodore Roosevelt, what were the qualities that made for “the right type of

good citizenship”? 12. Pick a Progressive-era reform (a movement, specific legislation, and organization) and

describe how it shows how Progressives could work for both the expansion of democracy and restrictions on it.

KEY TERMS Progressivism (p. 690)

muckraking (p. 693)

Ellis Island (p. 695)

Fordism (p. 700)

“American standard of living” (p. 700)

scientific management (p. 702)

Socialist Party (p. 702)

collective bargaining (p. 704)

Industrial Workers of the World (p. 705)

birth-control movement (p. 711)

Society of American Indians (p. 712)

pragmatism (p. 714)

initiative (p. 715)

referendum (p. 715)

recall (p. 715)

Seventeenth Amendment (p. 717)

settlement house (p. 718)

maternalist reforms (p. 721)

Muller v. Oregon (p. 721)

Pure Food and Drug Act (p. 724)

conservation movement (p. 725)

Sixteenth Amendment (p. 727)

Progressive Party (p. 727)

New Freedom (p. 728)

New Nationalism (p. 728)

Federal Trade Commission (p. 732)

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Glossary Progressivism Broad-based reform movement, 1900–1917, that sought governmental action in solving problems in many areas of American life, including education, public health, the economy, the environment, labor, transportation, and politics. muckraking Writing that exposed corruption and abuses in politics, business, meatpacking, child labor, and more, primarily in the first decade of the twentieth century; included popular books and magazine articles that spurred public interest in reform. Ellis Island Reception center in New York Harbor through which most European immigrants to America were processed from 1892 to 1954. Fordism Early twentieth-century term describing the economic system pioneered by Ford Motor Company based on high wages and mass consumption. “American standard of living” The Progressive-era idea that American workers were entitled to a wage high enough to allow them full participation in the nation’s mass consumption economy. scientific management Management campaign to improve worker efficiency using measurements like “time and motion” studies to achieve greater productivity; introduced by Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1911. Socialist Party Political party demanding public ownership of major economic enterprises in the United States as well as reforms like recognition of labor unions and woman suffrage; reached peak of influence in 1912 when presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs received over 900,000 votes. collective bargaining The process of negotiations between an employer and a group of employees to regulate working conditions. Industrial Workers of the World Radical union organized in Chicago in 1905 and nicknamed the Wobblies; its opposition to World War Ⅰ led to its destruction by the federal government under the Espionage Act. birth-control movement An offshoot of the early twentieth-century feminist movement that saw access to birth control and “voluntary motherhood” as essential to women’s freedom. The birth-control movement was led by Margaret Sanger. Society of American Indians Organization founded in 1911 that brought together Native American intellectuals of many tribal backgrounds to promote discussion of the plight of Indian peoples. pragmatism A philosophical movement that emerged in the late nineteenth century, which insisted that institutions and social policies should be judged by their practical effects, not their longevity or whether they reflected traditional religious or political beliefs. initiative A Progressive-era reform that allowed citizens to propose and vote on laws, bypassing state legislatures.

referendum A Progressive-era reform that allowed public policies to be submitted to popular vote. recall A Progressive-era reform that allowed the removal of public officials by popular vote. Seventeenth Amendment Progressive reform passed in 1913 that required U.S. senators to be elected directly by voters; previously, senators were chosen by state legislatures. settlement house Late-nineteenth-century movement to offer a broad array of social services in urban immigrant neighborhoods; Chicago’s Hull House was one of hundreds of settlement houses that operated by the early twentieth century. maternalist reforms Progressive-era reforms that sought to encourage women’s child-bearing and -rearing abilities and to promote their economic independence. Muller v. Oregon 1908 Supreme Court decision that held that state interest in protecting women could override liberty of contract. Louis D. Brandeis, with help from his sister-in-law Josephine Goldmark of the National Consumers League, filed a brief in Muller that used statistics about women’s health to argue for their protection. Pure Food and Drug Act Passed in 1906, the first law to regulate manufacturing of food and medicines; prohibited dangerous additives and inaccurate labeling. conservation movement A progressive reform movement focused on the preservation and sustainable management of the nation’s natural resources. Sixteenth Amendment Constitutional amendment passed in 1913 that legalized the federal income tax. Progressive Party Political party created when former president Theodore Roosevelt broke away from the Republican Party to run for president again in 1912; the party supported progressive reforms similar to those of the Democrats but stopped short of seeking to eliminate trusts. Also the name of the party backing Robert La Follette for president in 1924. New Freedom Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s political slogan in the presidential campaign of 1912; Wilson wanted to improve the banking system, lower tariffs, and, by breaking up monopolies, give small businesses freedom to compete. New Nationalism Platform of the Progressive Party and slogan of former president Theodore Roosevelt in the presidential campaign of 1912; stressed government activism, including regulation of trusts, conservation, and recall of state court decisions that had nullified progressive programs. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Independent agency created by the Wilson administration that replaced the Bureau of Corporations as an even more powerful tool to combat unfair trade practices and monopolies.

CHAPTER 19

SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY: THE UNITED STATES AND WORLD WAR I

1916–1920

FOCUS QUESTIONS In what ways did the Progressive presidents promote the expansion of American power overseas? How did the United States get involved in World War Ⅰ? How did the United States mobilize resources and public opinion for the war effort? How did the war affect race relations in the United States? Why was 1919 such a watershed year for the United States and the world?

In 1902, W. T. Stead published a short volume with the arresting title The Americanization of the World; or, the Trend of the Twentieth Century. Stead was an English editor whose sensational writings included an exposé of London prostitution, Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. He would meet his death in 1912 as a passenger on the Titanic, the ocean liner that foundered after striking an iceberg in the North Atlantic. Impressed by Americans’ “exuberant energies,” Stead predicted that the United States would soon emerge as “the greatest of world-powers.” But what was most striking about his work was that Stead located the source of American power less in the realm of military might or territorial acquisition than in the country’s single-minded commitment to the “pursuit of wealth” and the relentless international spread of American culture—art, music, journalism, even ideas about religion and gender relations. He foresaw a future in which the United States promoted its interests and values through an unending involvement in the affairs of other nations. Stead proved to be an accurate prophet.

The Spanish-American War had established the United States as an international empire. Despite the conquest of the Philippines and Puerto Rico, however, the country’s overseas holdings remained tiny compared to those of Britain, France, and Germany. And no more were added, except for a strip of land surrounding the Panama Canal, acquired in 1903, and the Virgin Islands, purchased from Denmark in 1917. In 1900, Great Britain ruled over more than 300 million people in possessions scattered across the globe, and France had nearly 50 million subjects in Asia and Africa. Compared with these, the American presence in the world seemed very small. As Stead suggested, America’s empire differed significantly from those of European countries—it was economic, cultural, and intellectual, rather than territorial.

The world economy at the dawn of the twentieth century was already highly globalized. An ever- increasing stream of goods, investments, and people flowed from country to country. Although Britain still dominated world banking and the British pound remained the major currency of international trade, the United States had become the leading industrial power. By 1914, it produced more than one-third of the world’s manufactured goods. Already, Europeans complained of an “American invasion” of steel, oil, agricultural equipment, and consumer goods. Spearheads of American culture like movies and popular music were not far behind.

Europeans were fascinated by American ingenuity and mass production techniques. Many feared American products and culture would overwhelm their own. “What are the chief new features of London life?” one British writer asked in 1901. “They are the telephone, the portable camera, the phonograph, the electric street car, the automobile, the typewriter. . . . In every one of these the American maker is supreme.” Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Americans traveled abroad each year in the early twentieth century. And American racial and ethnic groups became heavily engaged in overseas politics. Through fraternal, religious, and political organizations based in their ethnic and racial communities, Irish-Americans supported Irish independence, American Jews protested the

treatment of their co-religionists in Russia, and black Americans hoped to uplift Africa. American influence was growing throughout the world.

America’s burgeoning connections with the outside world led to increasing military and political involvement. In the two decades after 1900, many of the basic principles that would guide American foreign policy for the rest of the century were formulated. The “open door”—the free flow of trade, investment, information, and culture—emerged as a key principle of American foreign relations. “Since the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market,” wrote Woodrow Wilson, “the flag of his nation must follow him and the doors of nations which are closed against him must be battered down.”

Americans in the twentieth century often discussed foreign policy in the language of freedom. At least in rhetoric, the United States ventured abroad—including intervening militarily in the affairs of other nations—not to pursue strategic goals or to enhance American economic interests, but to promote liberty and democracy. A supreme faith in America’s historic destiny and in the righteousness of its ideals enabled the country’s leaders to think of the United States simultaneously as an emerging great power and as the worldwide embodiment of freedom.

More than any other individual, Woodrow Wilson articulated this vision of America’s relationship to the rest of the world. His foreign policy, called by historians liberal internationalism, rested on the conviction that economic and political progress went hand in hand. Thus, greater worldwide freedom would follow inevitably from increased American investment and trade abroad. Frequently during the twentieth century, this conviction would serve as a mask for American power and self-interest. It would also inspire sincere efforts to bring freedom to other peoples. In either case, liberal internationalism represented a shift from the nineteenth-century tradition of promoting freedom primarily by example, to active intervention to remake the world in the American image.

American involvement in World War Ⅰ provided the first great test of Wilson’s belief that American power could “make the world safe for democracy.” Most Progressives embraced the country’s participation in the war, believing that the United States could help to spread Progressive values throughout the world. The government quickly came to view critics of American involvement not simply as citizens with a different set of opinions, but as enemies of the very ideas of democracy and freedom. As a result, the war produced one of the most sweeping repressions of the right to dissent in all of American history. Rather than bringing Progressivism to other peoples, the war destroyed it at home.

• CHRONOLOGY • 1903 United States secures the Panama Canal Zone

1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine

1905 The Niagara movement established

1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan

1909 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People organized

1910 Mexican Revolution begins

1914–1919 World War Ⅰ

1915 Lusitania sinks

1916 Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race

Randolph Bourne’s “Trans-National America”

1917 Zimmermann Telegram intercepted

United States enters the war

Espionage Act passed

Russian Revolution

1918 Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” speech

Eugene V. Debs convicted under the Espionage Act

1918–1920 Worldwide flu epidemic

1919 Eighteenth Amendment

Versailles Treaty signed

1919–1920 Red Scare

1920 Senate rejects the Versailles Treaty

Nineteenth Amendment

1921 Tulsa riot

Glossary liberal internationalism Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy theory, which rested on the idea that economic and political freedom went hand in hand, and encouraged American intervention abroad in order to secure these freedoms globally.

AN ERA OF INTERVENTION Just as they expanded the powers of the federal government in domestic affairs, the Progressive presidents were not reluctant to project American power outside the country’s borders. At first, they confined their interventions to the Western Hemisphere, whose affairs the United States had claimed a special right to oversee ever since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. Between 1901 and 1920, U.S. marines landed in Caribbean countries more than twenty times. Usually, they were dispatched to create a welcoming economic environment for American companies that wanted stable access to raw materials like bananas and sugar, and for bankers nervous that their loans to local governments might not be repaid.

THE PANAMA CANAL ZONE

Constructed in the first years of the twentieth century, after Theodore Roosevelt helped engineer Panama’s independence from Colombia, the Panama Canal drastically reduced the time it took for commercial and naval vessels to sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

“I Took the Canal Zone” Just as he distinguished between good and bad trusts, Theodore Roosevelt divided the world into “civilized” and “uncivilized” nations. The former, he believed, had an obligation to establish order in an unruly world. Roosevelt became far more active in international diplomacy than most of his predecessors, helping, for example, to negotiate a settlement of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, a feat for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Closer to home, his policies were more aggressive. “I have always been fond of the West African proverb,” he wrote, “‘Speak softly and carry a big stick.’” And although he declared that the United States “has not the slightest desire for territorial aggrandizement at the expense of its southern neighbors,” Roosevelt pursued a policy of intervention in Central America.

THE UNITED STATES IN THE CARIBBEAN, 1898–1941

Between 1898 and 1941, the United States intervened militarily numerous times in Caribbean countries, generally to protect the economic interests of American banks and investors.

In his first major action in the region, Roosevelt engineered the separation of Panama from Colombia in order to facilitate the construction of a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The idea of a canal across the fifty-one-mile-wide Isthmus of Panama had a long history. In 1879–1881, the French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps attempted to construct such a waterway but failed because of inadequate funding and the toll exacted on his workers by yellow fever and malaria. Roosevelt had long been a proponent of American naval development. He was convinced that a canal would

facilitate the movement of naval and commercial vessels between the two oceans. In 1903, when Colombia, of which Panama was a part, refused to cede land for the project, Roosevelt helped to set in motion an uprising by conspirators led by Philippe Bunau-Varilla, a representative of the Panama Canal Company. An American gunboat prevented the Colombian army from suppressing the rebellion.

Upon establishing Panama’s independence, Bunau-Varilla signed a treaty giving the United States both the right to construct and operate a canal and sovereignty over the Panama Canal Zone, a ten- mile-wide strip of land through which the route would run. A remarkable feat of engineering, the canal was the largest construction project in American history to that date. Like the building of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s and much construction work today, it involved the widespread use of immigrant labor. Most of the 60,000 workers came from the Caribbean islands of Barbados and Jamaica, but others hailed from Europe, Asia, and the United States. In keeping with American segregation policies, the best jobs were reserved for white Americans, who lived in their own communities complete with schools, churches, and libraries. The project also required a massive effort to eradicate the mosquitoes that carried the tropical diseases responsible, in part, for the failure of earlier efforts. When completed in 1914, the canal reduced the sea voyage between the East and West coasts of the United States by 8,000 miles. “I took the Canal Zone,” Roosevelt exulted. But the manner in which the canal had been initiated, and the continued American rule over the Canal Zone, would long remain a source of tension. In 1977, as a symbol of a new, noninterventionist U.S. attitude toward Latin America, President Jimmy Carter negotiated treaties that led to turning over the canal’s operation and control of the Canal Zone to Panama in the year 2000 (see Chapter 26).

The Roosevelt Corollary Roosevelt’s actions in Panama anticipated the full-fledged implementation of a principle that came to be called the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. This held that the United States had the right to exercise “an international police power” in the Western Hemisphere—a significant expansion of Monroe’s pledge to defend the hemisphere against European intervention. Early in Roosevelt’s administration, British, Italian, and German naval forces blockaded Venezuela to ensure the payment of debts to European bankers. Roosevelt persuaded them to withdraw, but the incident convinced him that financial instability in the New World would invite intervention from the Old. In 1904, Roosevelt ordered American forces to seize the customs houses of the Dominican Republic to ensure payment of that country’s debts to European and American investors. He soon arranged an “executive agreement” giving a group of American banks control over Dominican finances. In 1906, he dispatched troops to Cuba to oversee a disputed election; they remained in the country until 1909. Roosevelt also encouraged investment by American corporations like the United Fruit Company, whose huge banana plantations soon dominated the economies of Honduras and Costa Rica.

COLONIAL POSSESSIONS, 1900

Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, landed marines in Nicaragua to protect a government friendly to American economic interests. In general, however, Taft emphasized economic investment and loans from American banks, rather than direct military intervention, as the best way to spread American influence. As a result, his foreign policy became known as Dollar Diplomacy. In Honduras, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and even Liberia—the West African nation established in 1816 as a home for freed American slaves—Taft pressed for more efficient revenue

collection, stable government, and access to land and labor by American companies.

Moral Imperialism The son of a Presbyterian minister, Woodrow Wilson brought to the presidency a missionary zeal and a sense of his own and the nation’s moral righteousness. He appointed as secretary of state William Jennings Bryan, a strong anti-imperialist. Wilson repudiated Dollar Diplomacy and promised a new foreign policy that would respect Latin America’s independence and free it from foreign economic domination. But Wilson could not abandon the conviction that the United States had a responsibility to teach other peoples the lessons of democracy. Moreover, he believed, the export of American manufactured goods and investments went hand in hand with the spread of democratic ideals. To Wilson, expanding American economic influence served a higher purpose than mere profit. Americans, he told a group of businessmen in 1916, were “meant to carry liberty and justice” throughout the world. “Go out and sell goods,” he urged them, “that will make the world more comfortable and happy, and convert them to the principles of America.”

Wilson’s moral imperialism produced more military interventions in Latin America than the foreign policy of any president before or since. In 1915, he sent marines to occupy Haiti after the government refused to allow American banks to oversee its financial dealings. In 1916, he established a military government in the Dominican Republic, with the United States controlling the country’s customs collections and paying its debts. American soldiers remained in the Dominican Republic until 1924 and in Haiti until 1934. They built roads and schools but did little or nothing to promote democracy. Wilson’s foreign policy underscored a paradox of modern American history: the presidents who spoke the most about freedom were likely to intervene most frequently in the affairs of other countries.

Wilson and Mexico Wilson’s major preoccupation in Latin America was Mexico, where in 1911 a revolution led by Francisco Madero overthrew the government of dictator Porfirio Díaz. Two years later, without Wilson’s knowledge but with the backing of the U.S. ambassador and of American companies that controlled Mexico’s oil and mining industries, military commander Victoriano Huerta assassinated Madero and seized power.

Wilson was appalled. The United States, he announced, would not extend recognition to a “government of butchers.” He would “teach” Latin Americans, he added, “to elect good men.” When civil war broke out in Mexico, Wilson ordered American troops to land at Vera Cruz to prevent the arrival of weapons meant for Huerta’s forces. But to Wilson’s surprise, Mexicans greeted the marines as invaders rather than liberators. Vera Cruz, after all, was where the forces of the conquistador Hernán Cortés had landed in the sixteenth century and those of Winfield Scott during the Mexican-American War. More than 100 Mexicans and 19 Americans died in the fighting that followed.

Huerta resigned in 1914 and fled the country. Meanwhile, various Mexican factions turned on one another. A peasant uprising in the southern part of the country, led by Emiliano Zapata, demanded land reform. The Wilson administration offered support to Venustiano Carranza, a leader devoted to economic modernization. In 1916, the war spilled over into the United States when several hundred men loyal to Francisco “Pancho” Villa, the leader of another peasant force, raided Columbus, New Mexico, a few miles north of the border, leading to the death of seventeen Americans. With Carranza’s approval, Wilson ordered 10,000 troops under the command of General John J. Pershing on an expedition into Mexico that unsuccessfully sought to arrest Villa. Chaos in Mexico continued —within the next few years, Zapata, Carranza, and Villa all fell victim to assassination. Mexico was a warning that it might be more difficult than Wilson assumed to use American might to reorder the internal affairs of other nations, or to apply moral certainty to foreign policy.

Glossary Panama Canal Zone The small strip of land on either side of the Panama Canal. The Canal Zone was under U.S. control from 1903 to 1979 as a result of Theodore Roosevelt’s assistance in engineering a coup in Colombia that established Panama’s independence. Roosevelt Corollary 1904 announcement by President Theodore Roosevelt, essentially a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, that the United States could intervene militarily to prevent interference from European powers in the Western Hemisphere. Dollar Diplomacy A foreign policy initiative under President William Howard Taft that promoted the spread of American influence through loans and economic investments from American banks. moral imperialism The Wilsonian belief that U.S. foreign policy should be guided by morality and should teach other peoples about democracy. Wilson used this belief to both repudiate Dollar Diplomacy and justify frequent military interventions in Latin America.

AMERICA AND THE GREAT WAR In June 1914, a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, in Sarajevo. (Today, Sarajevo is the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina.) This deed set in motion a chain of events that plunged Europe into the most devastating war the world had ever seen. In the years before 1914, European nations had engaged in a scramble to obtain colonial possessions overseas and had constructed a shifting series of alliances seeking military domination within Europe. In the aftermath of the assassination, Austria-Hungary, the major power in eastern Europe, declared war on Serbia. Within a little more than a month, because of the European powers’ interlocking military alliances, Britain, France, Russia, and Japan (the Allies) found themselves at war with the Central Powers—Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman empire, whose holdings included modern-day Turkey and much of the Middle East.

German forces quickly overran Belgium and part of northern France. The war then settled into a prolonged stalemate, with bloody, indecisive battles succeeding one another. New military technologies—submarines, airplanes, machine guns, tanks, and poison gas—produced unprecedented slaughter. In one five-month battle at Verdun, in 1916, 600,000 French and German soldiers died— nearly as many deaths as in the entire American Civil War. By the time the war ended, an estimated 10 million soldiers, and uncounted millions of civilians, had perished.

The Great War, or World War Ⅰ as it came to be called, dealt a severe blow to the optimism and self- confidence of Western civilization. For decades, philosophers, reformers, and politicians had hailed the triumph of reason and human progress. Despite increasingly bitter rivalries between European powers, especially Germany and Britain, as they competed for political and military dominance at home and carved up Asia and Africa into rival empires, mankind seemed to have moved beyond the time when disputes were settled by war. The conflict was also a shock to European socialist and labor movements. Of the two great ideologies that had arisen in the nineteenth century, nationalism and socialism, the former proved more powerful. Karl Marx had called on the “workers of the world” to unite against their oppressors. Instead, they marched off to kill each other.

Neutrality and Preparedness As war engulfed Europe, Americans found themselves sharply divided. British-Americans sided with their nation of origin, as did many other Americans who associated Great Britain with liberty and democracy and Germany with repressive government. On the other hand, German-Americans identified with Germany. Irish-Americans bitterly opposed any aid to the British, a sentiment reinforced in 1916 when authorities in London suppressed the Easter Rebellion, an uprising demanding Irish independence, and executed several of its leaders. Immigrants from the Russian empire, especially Jews, had no desire to see the United States aid the czar’s regime. Indeed, the presence of Russia, the world’s largest despotic state, as an ally of Britain and France made it difficult to see the war as a clear-cut battle between democracy and autocracy. Many feminists, pacifists, and social reformers, moreover, had become convinced that peace was essential to further efforts to enhance social justice at home. They lobbied vigorously against American involvement. So did large numbers of religious leaders, who viewed war as a barbaric throwback to a less Christian era.

When war broke out in 1914, President Wilson proclaimed American neutrality. But as in the years preceding the War of 1812, naval warfare in Europe reverberated in the United States. Britain declared a naval blockade of Germany and began to stop American merchant vessels. Germany launched submarine warfare against ships entering and leaving British ports. In May 1915, a German submarine sank the British liner Lusitania (which was carrying a large cache of arms) off the coast of Ireland, causing the death of 1,198 passengers, including 124 Americans. Wilson composed a note of protest so strong that Bryan resigned as secretary of state, fearing that the president was laying the foundation for military intervention. Bryan had advocated warning Americans not to travel on the ships of belligerents, but Wilson felt this would represent a retreat from the principle of freedom of the seas.

The sinking of the Lusitania outraged American public opinion and strengthened the hand of those who believed that the United States must prepare for possible entry into the war. These included longtime advocates of a stronger military establishment, like Theodore Roosevelt, and businessmen with close economic ties to Britain, the country’s leading trading partner and the recipient of more than $2 billion in wartime loans from American banks. Wilson himself had strong pro-British sympathies and viewed Germany as “the natural foe of liberty.” By the end of 1915, he had embarked on a policy of “preparedness”—a crash program to expand the American army and navy.

The Road to War In May 1916, Germany announced the suspension of submarine warfare against noncombatants. Wilson’s preparedness program seemed to have succeeded in securing the right of Americans to travel freely on the high seas without committing American forces to the conflict. “He kept us out of war” became the slogan of his campaign for reelection. With the Republican Party reunited after its split in 1912, the election proved to be one of the closest in American history. Wilson defeated Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes by only twenty-three electoral votes and about 600,000 popular votes out of more than 18 million cast. Partly because he seemed to promise not to send American soldiers to Europe, Wilson carried ten of the twelve states that had adopted woman suffrage. Without the votes of women, Wilson would not have been reelected.

On January 22, 1917, Wilson called for a “peace without victory” in Europe and outlined his vision for a world order including freedom of the seas, restrictions on armaments, and self-determination for nations great and small. Almost immediately, however, Germany announced its intention to resume submarine warfare against ships sailing to or from the British Isles, and several American merchant vessels were sunk. The German government realized that its actions would probably lead Wilson to intervene, but German strategists gambled that the blockade would strangle Britain economically before the arrival of American troops.

In March 1917, British spies intercepted and made public the Zimmermann Telegram, a message by German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann calling on Mexico to join in a coming war against the United States and promising to help it recover territory lost in the Mexican-American War of 1846– 1848. A revolution in Russia that same month overthrew the czar and established a constitutional government, making it more plausible to believe that the United States would be fighting on the side of democracy. On April 2, Wilson went before Congress to ask for a declaration of war against Germany. “The world,” he proclaimed, “must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundation of political liberty.” The war resolution passed the Senate 82–6 and the House 373–50.

The Fourteen Points Not until the spring of 1918 did American forces arrive in Europe in large numbers. By then, the world situation had taken a dramatic turn. In November 1917, a communist revolution headed by Vladimir Lenin overthrew the Russian government that had come to power the previous spring. Shortly thereafter, Lenin withdrew Russia from the war and published the secret treaties by which the Allies had agreed to divide up conquered territory after the war—an embarrassment for Wilson, who had promised a just peace.

WORLD WAR I: THE WESTERN FRONT

After years of stalemate on the western front in World War I, the arrival of American troops in 1917 and 1918 shifted the balance of power and made possible the Allied victory.

Partly to assure the country that the war was being fought for a moral cause, Wilson in January 1918 issued the Fourteen Points, the clearest statement of American war aims and of his vision of a new international order. Among the key principles were self-determination for all peoples, freedom of the seas, free trade, open diplomacy (an end to secret treaties), the readjustment of colonial claims with colonized people given “equal weight” in deciding their futures, and the creation of a “general association of nations” to preserve the peace. Wilson envisioned this last provision, which led to the establishment after the war of the League of Nations, as a kind of global counterpart to the regulatory

commissions Progressives had created at home to maintain social harmony and prevent the powerful from exploiting the weak. Although purely an American program, not endorsed by the other Allies, the Fourteen Points established the agenda for the peace conference that followed the war.

The United States threw its economic resources and manpower into the war. When American troops finally arrived in Europe, they turned the tide of battle. In the spring of 1918, they helped to repulse a German advance near Paris and by July were participating in a major Allied counteroffensive. In September, in the Meuse-Argonne campaign, American soldiers under the command of General John J. Pershing, fresh from his campaigns in Mexico, helped to push back the German army. With 1.2 million American soldiers taking part and well over 100,000 dead and wounded, Meuse-Argonne, which lasted a month and a half, was the main American engagement of the war and one of the most significant and deadliest battles in American history. It formed part of a massive Allied offensive involving British, French, and Belgian soldiers and those from overseas European possessions. With his forces in full retreat, the German kaiser abdicated on November 9. Two days later, Germany sued for peace. More than 100,000 Americans had died, a substantial number, but they were only 1 percent of the 10 million soldiers killed in the Great War.

Glossary Lusitania British passenger liner sunk by a German U-boat, May 7, 1915, creating a diplomatic crisis and public outrage at the loss of 128 Americans (roughly 10 percent of the total aboard); Germany agreed to pay reparations, and the United States waited two more years to enter World War Ⅰ. Zimmermann Telegram Telegram from the German foreign secretary to the German minister in Mexico, February 1917, instructing the minister to offer to recover Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona for Mexico if it would fight the United States to divert attention from Germany in the event that the United States joined the war. Fourteen Points President Woodrow Wilson’s 1918 plan for peace after World War Ⅰ; at the Versailles peace conference, however, he failed to incorporate all of the points into the treaty.

THE WAR AT HOME

The Progressives’ War Looking back on American participation in the European conflict, Randolph Bourne summed up one of its lessons: “War is the health of the state.” Bourne saw the expansion of government power as a danger, but it struck most Progressives as a golden opportunity. To them, the war offered the possibility of reforming American society along scientific lines, instilling a sense of national unity and self-sacrifice, and expanding social justice. That American power could now disseminate Progressive values around the globe heightened the war’s appeal.

Almost without exception, Progressive intellectuals and reformers, joined by prominent labor leaders and native-born socialists, rallied to Wilson’s support. The roster included intellectuals like John Dewey, journalists such as Walter Lippmann and Herbert Croly, AFL head Samuel Gompers, socialist writers like Upton Sinclair, and prominent reformers including Florence Kelley and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In The New Republic, Dewey urged Progressives to recognize the “social possibilities of war.” The crisis, he wrote, offered the prospect of attacking the “immense inequality of power” within the United States, thus laying the foundation for Americans to enjoy “effective freedom.”

The Wartime State Like the Civil War, World War Ⅰ created, albeit temporarily, a national state with unprecedented powers and a sharply increased presence in Americans’ everyday lives. Under the Selective Service Act of May 1917, 24 million men were required to register with the draft, and the army soon swelled from 120,000 to 5 million men. The war seemed to bring into being the New Nationalist state Theodore Roosevelt and so many Progressives had desired. New federal agencies moved to regulate industry, transportation, labor relations, and agriculture. Headed by Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, the War Industries Board presided over all elements of war production from the distribution of raw materials to the prices of manufactured goods. To spur efficiency, it established standardized specifications for everything from automobile tires to shoe colors (three were permitted—black, brown, and white). The Railroad Administration took control of the nation’s transportation system, and the Fuel Agency rationed coal and oil. The Food Administration instructed farmers on modern methods of cultivation and promoted the more efficient preparation of meals. Its director, Herbert Hoover, mobilized the shipment of American food to the war-devastated Allies, popularizing the slogan “Food will win the war.”

These agencies generally saw themselves as partners of business as much as regulators. They guaranteed government suppliers a high rate of profit and encouraged cooperation among former business rivals by suspending antitrust laws. At the same time, however, the War Labor Board, which included representatives of government, industry, and the American Federation of Labor, pressed for the establishment of a minimum wage, eight-hour workday, and the right to form unions. During the war, wages rose substantially, working conditions in many industries improved, and union membership doubled. To finance the war, corporate and individual income taxes rose enormously. By 1918, the wealthiest Americans were paying 60 percent of their income in taxes. Tens of millions of Americans answered the call to demonstrate their patriotism by purchasing Liberty bonds. Once peace arrived, the wartime state quickly withered away. But for a time, the federal government seemed well on its way to fulfilling the Progressive vision of promoting economic rationalization, industrial justice, and a sense of common national purpose.

The Propaganda War During the Civil War, it had been left to private agencies—Union Leagues, the Loyal Publication Society, and others—to mobilize prowar public opinion. But the Wilson administration decided that patriotism was too important to leave to the private sector. Many Americans were skeptical about whether democratic America should enter a struggle between rival empires. Some vehemently opposed American participation, notably the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the bulk of the Socialist Party, which in 1917 condemned the declaration of war as “a crime against the people of the United States” and called on “the workers of all countries” to refuse to fight. As the major national organization to oppose Wilson’s policy, the Socialist Party became a rallying point for antiwar sentiment. In mayoral elections across the country in the fall of 1917, the Socialist vote averaged 20 percent, far above the party’s previous total.

All combatants issued propaganda posters. The American poster, part of a 1917 campaign to sell war bonds, depicts a militarized Statue of Liberty about to take a sword from a kneeling Boy Scout. The German one, satirically entitled We Are Barbarians, refutes the charge of barbarism hurled at Germans by the Allies. It relates that Germany outstrips England and France in Nobel Prizes, provision for the elderly, book publication, education, and literacy.

In April 1917, the Wilson administration created the Committee on Public Information (CPI) to explain to Americans and the world, as its director, George Creel, put it, “the cause that compelled America to take arms in defense of its liberties and free institutions.” Enlisting academics, journalists, artists, and advertising men, the CPI flooded the country with prowar propaganda, using

every available medium from pamphlets (of which it issued 75 million) to posters, newspaper advertisements, and motion pictures. It trained and dispatched across the country 75,000 Four- Minute Men, who delivered brief standardized talks (sometimes in Italian, Yiddish, and other immigrant languages) to audiences in movie theaters, schools, and other public venues.

Never before had an agency of the federal government attempted the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses,” in the words of young Edward Bernays, a member of Creel’s staff who would later create the modern profession of public relations. The CPI’s activities proved, one adman wrote, that it was possible to “sway the ideas of whole populations, change their habits of life, create belief, practically universal in any policy or idea.” In the 1920s, advertisers would use what they had learned to sell goods. But the CPI also set a precedent for governmental efforts to shape public opinion in later international conflicts, from World War Ⅱ to the Cold War and Iraq.

“The Great Cause of Freedom” The CPI couched its appeal in the Progressive language of social cooperation and expanded democracy. Abroad, this meant a peace based on the principle of national self-determination. At home, it meant improving “industrial democracy.” A Progressive journalist, Creel believed the war would accelerate the movement toward solving the “age-old problems of poverty, inequality, oppression, and unhappiness.” He took to heart a warning from historian Carl Becker that a simple contrast between German tyranny and American democracy would not seem plausible to the average worker: “You talk to him of our ideals of liberty and he thinks of the shameless exploitation of labor and of the ridiculous gulf between wealth and poverty.” CPI pamphlets foresaw a postwar society complete with a “universal eight-hour day” and a living wage for all.

While “democracy” served as the key term of wartime mobilization, “freedom” also took on new significance. The war, a CPI advertisement proclaimed, was being fought in “the great cause of freedom.” Thousands of persons, often draftees, were enlisted to pose in giant human tableaus representing symbols of liberty. One living representation of the Liberty Bell at Fort Dix, New Jersey, included 25,000 people. The most common visual image in wartime propaganda was the Statue of Liberty, employed especially to rally support among immigrants. “You came here seeking Freedom,” stated a caption on one Statue of Liberty poster. “You must now help preserve it.” Buying Liberty bonds became a demonstration of patriotism. Wilson’s speeches cast the United States as a land of liberty fighting alongside a “concert of free people” to secure self-determination for the oppressed peoples of the world. The idea of freedom, it seems, requires an antithesis, and the CPI found one in the German kaiser and, more generally, the German nation and people. Government propaganda whipped up hatred of the wartime foe by portraying it as a nation of barbaric Huns.

The Coming of Woman Suffrage The enlistment of “democracy” and “freedom” as ideological war weapons inevitably inspired demands for their expansion at home. In 1916, Wilson had cautiously endorsed votes for women. America’s entry into the war threatened to tear the suffrage movement apart, since many advocates had been associated with opposition to American involvement. Indeed, among those who voted against the declaration of war was the first woman member of Congress, the staunch pacifist Jeannette Rankin of Montana. “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war,” she said. Although defeated in her reelection bid in 1918, Rankin would return to Congress in 1940. She became the only member to oppose the declaration of war against Japan in 1941, which ended her political career. In 1968, at the age of eighty-five, Rankin took part in a giant march on Washington to protest the war in Vietnam.

As during the Civil War, however, most leaders of woman suffrage organizations enthusiastically enlisted in the effort. Women sold war bonds, organized patriotic rallies, and went to work in war production jobs. Some 22,000 served as clerical workers and nurses with American forces in Europe. Many believed wartime service would earn them equal rights at home.

At the same time, a new generation of college-educated activists, organized in the National Woman’s Party, pressed for the right to vote with militant tactics many older suffrage advocates found scandalous. The party’s leader, Alice Paul, had studied in England between 1907 and 1910 when the British suffrage movement adopted a strategy that included arrests, imprisonments, and vigorous denunciations of a male-dominated political system. How could the country fight for democracy abroad, Paul asked, while denying it to women at home? She compared Wilson to the kaiser, and a group of her followers chained themselves to the White House fence, resulting in a seven-month prison sentence. When they began a hunger strike, the prisoners were force-fed.

The combination of women’s patriotic service and widespread outrage over the mistreatment of Paul and her fellow prisoners pushed the administration toward full-fledged support for woman suffrage. “We have made partners of the women in this war,” Wilson proclaimed. “Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?” In 1920, the long struggle ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment barring states from using sex as a qualification for the suffrage. The United States became the twenty-seventh country to allow women to vote.

Prohibition The war gave a powerful impulse to other campaigns that had engaged the energies of many women in the Progressive era. Ironically, efforts to stamp out prostitution and protect soldiers from venereal disease led the government to distribute birth-control information and devices—the very action for which Margaret Sanger had recently been jailed, as noted in the previous chapter.

Prohibition, a movement inherited from the nineteenth century that had gained new strength and militancy in Progressive America, finally achieved national success during the war. Numerous impulses flowed into the renewed campaign to ban intoxicating liquor. Employers hoped it would create a more disciplined labor force. Urban reformers believed that it would promote a more orderly city environment and undermine urban political machines that used saloons as places to organize. Women reformers hoped Prohibition would protect wives and children from husbands who engaged in domestic violence when drunk or who squandered their wages at saloons. Many native-born Protestants saw Prohibition as a way of imposing “American” values on immigrants.

PROHIBITION, 1915: COUNTIES AND STATES THAT BANNED LIQUOR BEFORE THE EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT (RATIFIED 1919, REPEALED 1933)

In the early years of the twentieth century, many states and localities in the South and West banned the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. (“Wet” counties allowed alcoholic beverages, “dry” counties banned them.) Prohibition became national with the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919.

Like the suffrage movement, Prohibitionists first concentrated on state campaigns. By 1915, they had won victories in eighteen southern and midwestern states where the immigrant population was small

and Protestant denominations like Baptists and Methodists strongly opposed drinking. But like the suffrage movement, Prohibitionists came to see national legislation as their best strategy. The war gave them added ammunition. Many prominent breweries were owned by German-Americans, making beer seem unpatriotic. The Food Administration insisted that grain must be used to produce food, not distilled into beer and liquor. In December 1917, Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquor. It was ratified by the states in 1919 and went into effect at the beginning of 1920.

Liberty in Wartime World War Ⅰ raised questions already glimpsed during the Civil War that would trouble the nation again during the McCarthy era and in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 2001: What is the balance between security and freedom? Does the Constitution protect citizens’ rights during wartime? Should dissent be equated with lack of patriotism? The conflict demonstrated that during a war, traditional civil liberties are likely to come under severe pressure.

In 1917, Randolph Bourne ridiculed Progressives who believed they could mold the war according to their own “liberal purposes.” The conflict, he predicted, would empower not reformers but the “least democratic forces in American life.” The accuracy of Bourne’s prediction soon become apparent. Despite the administration’s idealistic language of democracy and freedom, the war inaugurated the most intense repression of civil liberties the nation has ever known. Perhaps the very nobility of wartime rhetoric contributed to the massive suppression of dissent. For in the eyes of Wilson and many of his supporters, America’s goals were so virtuous that disagreement could only reflect treason to the country’s values.

The Espionage and Sedition Acts For the first time since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the federal government enacted laws to restrict freedom of speech. The Espionage Act of 1917 prohibited not only spying and interfering with the draft but also “false statements” that might impede military success. The postmaster general barred from the mails numerous newspapers and magazines critical of the administration. The victims ranged from virtually the entire socialist press and many foreign-language publications to The Jeffersonian, a newspaper owned by ex-Populist leader Tom Watson, which criticized the draft as a violation of states’ rights. In 1918, the Sedition Act made it a crime to make spoken or printed statements that intended to cast “contempt, scorn, or disrepute” on the “form of government,” or that advocated interference with the war effort. The government charged more than 2,000 persons with violating these laws. Over half were convicted. A court sentenced Ohio farmer John White to twenty- one months in prison for saying that the murder of innocent women and children by German soldiers was no worse than what the United States had done in the Philippines in the war of 1899–1903.

The most prominent victim was Eugene V. Debs, convicted in 1918 under the Espionage Act for delivering an antiwar speech. Before his sentencing, Debs gave the court a lesson in the history of American freedom, tracing the tradition of dissent from Thomas Paine to the abolitionists and pointing out that the nation had never engaged in a war without internal opposition. Germany sent socialist leader Karl Liebknecht to prison for four years for opposing the war; in the United States, Debs’s sentence was ten years. After the war’s end, Wilson rejected the advice of his attorney general that he commute Debs’s sentence. Debs ran for president while still in prison in 1920 and received 900,000 votes. It was left to Wilson’s successor, Warren G. Harding, to release Debs from prison in 1921.

Coercive Patriotism

A common patriotic exercise involved massive numbers of soldiers forming images of the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, or President Woodrow Wilson. Here, in 1918, some 18,000 men about to depart for the war in Europe from Camp Dodge, Iowa, create what contemporaries called a “living photograph.”

Even more extreme repression took place at the hands of state governments and private groups.

Americans had long displayed the flag (and used it in advertisements for everything from tobacco products to variety shows). But during World War Ⅰ, attitudes toward the American flag became a test of patriotism. Persons suspected of disloyalty were forced to kiss the flag in public; those who made statements critical of the flag could be imprisoned. During the war, thirty-three states outlawed the possession or display of red or black flags (symbols, respectively, of communism and anarchism), and twenty-three outlawed a newly created offense, “criminal syndicalism,” the advocacy of unlawful acts to accomplish political change or “a change in industrial ownership.”

“Who is the real patriot?” Emma Goldman asked while on trial for conspiring to violate the Selective Service Act. She answered, those who “love America with open eyes,” who were not blind to “the wrongs committed in the name of patriotism.” But from the federal government to local authorities and private groups, patriotism came to be equated with support for the government, the war, and the American economic system, while antiwar sentiment, labor radicalism, and sympathy for the Russian Revolution became “un-American.” Local authorities formally investigated residents who failed to subscribe to Liberty Loans. Throughout the country, schools revised their course offerings to ensure their patriotism and required teachers to sign loyalty oaths.

VOICES OF FREEDOM

From WOODROW WILSON, WAR MESSAGE TO CONGRESS (1917)

More than any other individual in the early twentieth century, President Woodrow Wilson articulated a new vision of America’s relationship to the rest of the world. In his message to a special session of Congress on April 2, 1917, Wilson asked for a declaration of war. In his most celebrated sentence, Wilson declared, “The world must be made safe for democracy.”

Let us be very clear, and make very clear to all the world what our motives and our objects are. . . . Our object . . . is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth ensure the observance of those principles. . . . The menace to peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people.

A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. . . . Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honour steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own. . . .

We are now about to accept gage of battle with this natural foe to liberty and shall, if necessary, spend the whole force of the nation to check and nullify its pretensions and its power. We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included: for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. . . . If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression. . . .

It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, . . . for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.

From EUGENE V. DEBS, SPEECH TO THE JURY BEFORE SENTENCING UNDER THE ESPIONAGE ACT (1918)

Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was arrested for delivering an antiwar speech and convicted of violating the Espionage Act. In his speech to the jury, he defended the right of dissent in wartime.

Gentlemen, you have heard the report of my speech at Canton [Ohio] on June 16, and I submit that there is not a word in that speech to warrant the charges set out in the indictment. . . . In what I had to

say there my purpose was to have the people understand something about the social system in which we live and to prepare them to change this system by perfectly peaceable and orderly means into what I, as a Socialist, conceive to be a real democracy. . . . I have never advocated violence in any form. I have always believed in education, in intelligence, in enlightenment; and I have always made my appeal to the reason and to the conscience of the people.

In every age there have been a few heroic souls who have been in advance of their time, who have been misunderstood, maligned, persecuted, sometimes put to death. . . . Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, and their compeers were the rebels of their day. . . . But they had the moral courage to be true to their convictions. . . .

William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Elizabeth Cady Stanton . . . and other leaders of the abolition movement who were regarded as public enemies and treated accordingly, were true to their faith and stood their ground. . . . You are now teaching your children to revere their memories, while all of their detractors are in oblivion. . . .

The war of 1812 was opposed and condemned by some of the most influential citizens; the Mexican War was vehemently opposed and bitterly denounced, even after the war had been declared and was in progress, by Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner, Daniel Webster. . . . They were not indicted; they were not charged with treason. . . .

Isn’t it strange that we Socialists stand almost alone today in upholding and defending the Constitution of the United States? The revolutionary fathers . . . understood that free speech, a free press and the right of free assemblage by the people were fundamental principles in democratic government. . . . I believe in the right of free speech, in war as well as in peace.

QUESTIONS

1. What does Wilson think is the greatest threat to freedom in the world? 2. Why does Debs relate the history of wartime dissent in the United States? 3. Does anything in Wilson’s speech offer a harbinger of the extreme repression of free speech

that occurred during World War Ⅰ?

The 250,000 members of the newly formed American Protective League (APL) helped the Justice Department identify radicals and critics of the war by spying on their neighbors and carrying out “slacker raids” in which thousands of men were stopped on the streets of major cities and required to produce draft registration cards. Many private groups seized upon the atmosphere of repression as a weapon against domestic opponents. Employers cooperated with the government in crushing the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a move long demanded by business interests. In July 1917, vigilantes in Bisbee, Arizona, rounded up some 1,200 striking copper miners and their sympathizers, herded them into railroad boxcars, and transported them into the desert, where they were abandoned. Few ever returned to Bisbee. In August, a crowd in Butte, Montana, lynched IWW leader Frank Little. The following month, operating under one of the broadest warrants in American history, federal agents swooped down on IWW offices throughout the country, arresting hundreds of leaders and seizing files and publications.

The war experience, commented Walter Lippmann, demonstrated “that the traditional liberties of speech and opinion rest on no solid foundation.” Yet while some Progressives protested individual

excesses, most failed to speak out against the broad suppression of freedom of expression. Civil liberties, by and large, had never been a major concern of Progressives, who had always viewed the national state as the embodiment of democratic purpose and insisted that freedom flowed from participating in the life of society, not standing in opposition. Strong believers in the use of national power to improve social conditions, Progressives found themselves ill prepared to develop a defense of minority rights against majority or governmental tyranny. From the AFL to New Republic intellectuals, moreover, supporters of the war saw the elimination of socialists and alien radicals as a necessary prelude to the integration of labor and immigrants into an ordered society, an outcome they hoped would emerge from the war.

Glossary Selective Service Act Law passed in 1917 to quickly increase enlistment in the army for the United States’ entry into World War Ⅰ; required men to register with the draft. War Industries Board Board run by financier Bernard Baruch that planned production and allocation of war materiel, supervised purchasing, and fixed prices, 1917–1919. Eighteenth Amendment Prohibition amendment passed in 1919 that made illegal the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages; repealed in 1933. Espionage Act 1917 law that prohibited spying and interfering with the draft as well as making “false statements” that hurt the war effort. Sedition Act 1918 law that made it a crime to make spoken or printed statements that criticized the U.S. government or encouraged interference with the war effort.

WHO IS AN AMERICAN? In many respects, Progressivism was a precursor to major developments of the twentieth century— the New Deal, the Great Society, the socially active state. But in accepting the idea of “race” as a permanent, defining characteristic of individuals and social groups, Progressives bore more resemblance to nineteenth-century thinkers than to later twentieth-century liberals, with whom they are sometimes compared.

The “Race Problem” Even before American participation in World War Ⅰ, what contemporaries called the “race problem”—the tensions that arose from the country’s increasing ethnic diversity—had become a major subject of public concern. “Race” referred to far more than black-white relations. The Dictionary of Races of Peoples, published in 1911 by the U.S. Immigration Commission, listed no fewer than forty-five immigrant “races,” each supposedly with its own inborn characteristics. They ranged from Anglo-Saxons at the top down to Hebrews, Northern Italians, and, lowest of all, Southern Italians—supposedly violent, undisciplined, and incapable of assimilation. Popular best- sellers like The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916 by Madison Grant, president of the New York Zoological Society, warned that the influx of new immigrants and the low birthrate of native white women threatened the foundations of American civilization.

The “Science” of Eugenics The emergence of eugenics, which studied the alleged mental characteristics of different groups of people, gave an air of scientific expertise to anti-immigrant sentiment. Racial “purity” became an obsession of eugenicists. John Harvey Kellogg (the inventor of the breakfast cereal Corn Flakes) in 1906 founded the Race Betterment Foundation, aimed at promoting the “purity of the gene pool.” The foundation tried to discourage people with the “wrong” racial pedigree from having children and sponsored eugenics fairs throughout the country. Another such organization was the American Breeder’s Association, which warned about the menace posed by people with “inferior blood.” The Eugenic Records Office, headquartered in New York State, issued certificates to people who could demonstrate their “Nordic purity.”

Eugenics taught that since many social problems, including juvenile delinquency, prostitution, and even poverty, were caused by defective genes, they could be eliminated by controlling reproduction. One eugenics textbook widely used in the nation’s colleges declared: “It is a reproach to our intelligence that we as a people, proud in other respects of our control of nature, should have to support about half a million insane, feeble-minded, epileptic, blind and deaf, 80,000 prisoners and 100,000 paupers at a cost of over 100 million dollars per year. . . . But we have become so used to crime, disease, and degeneracy that we take them as necessary evils.” This belief that these problems could be solved by actively shaping the nation’s population encouraged efforts to restrict immigration.

The war accelerated other efforts to “improve” the quality of the American people. Indiana in 1907 passed a law authorizing doctors to sterilize insane and “feeble-minded” inmates in mental institutions so they would not pass their “defective” genes on to children. During and after World War Ⅰ, numerous other states followed suit. In Buck v. Bell (1927), the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of these laws. Carrie Buck, an eighteen-year-old inmate at a Virginia mental institution, sued to prevent her sterilization by the state on the grounds that it violated her right to the equal protection of the laws, guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s opinion rejecting her plea included the widely publicized statement, “Society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” By the time the practice ended in the 1960s, some 63,000 persons had been involuntarily sterilized. American eugenics policies for manipulating the character of the population were carefully studied in Nazi Germany.

Americanization and Pluralism Somehow, the very nationalization of politics and economic life served to heighten awareness of ethnic and racial difference and spurred demands for “Americanization”—the creation of a more homogeneous national culture. A 1908 play by the Jewish immigrant writer Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot, gave a popular name to the process by which newcomers were supposed to merge their identity into existing American nationality. Public and private groups of all kinds—including educators, employers, labor leaders, social reformers, and public officials—took up the task of Americanizing new immigrants. The Ford Motor Company’s famed sociological department entered the homes of immigrant workers to evaluate their clothing, furniture, and food preferences and enrolled them in English-language courses. Ford fired those who failed to adapt to American standards after a reasonable period of time. Americanization programs often targeted women as the bearers and transmitters of culture. In Los Angeles, teachers and religious missionaries worked to teach English to Mexican-American women so that they could then assimilate American values. Fearful that adult newcomers remained too stuck in their Old World ways, public schools paid great attention to Americanizing immigrants’ children. The challenge facing schools, wrote one educator, was “to implant in their children, so far as can be done, the Anglo-Saxon conception of righteousness, law and order, and popular government.”

With President Wilson declaring that some Americans “born under foreign flags” were guilty of “disloyalty . . . and must be absolutely crushed,” the federal and state governments demanded that immigrants demonstrate their unwavering devotion to the United States. The Committee on Public Information renamed the Fourth of July, 1918, Loyalty Day and asked ethnic groups to participate in patriotic pageants. New York City’s celebration included a procession of 75,000 persons with dozens of floats and presentations linking immigrants with the war effort and highlighting their contributions to American society. Leaders of ethnic groups that had suffered discrimination saw the war as an opportunity to gain greater rights. Prominent Jewish leaders promoted enlistment and expressions of loyalty. The Chinese-American press insisted that even those born abroad and barred from citizenship should register for the draft, to “bring honor to the people of our race.”

WHO IS AN AMERICAN?

From RANDOLPH S. BOURNE, “TRANS-NATIONAL AMERICA” (1916)

Probably the most penetrating rejection of the Americanization model issued from the pen of the social critic Randolph Bourne. In an article in The Atlantic, Bourne envisioned a democratic, cosmopolitan society in which immigrants and natives alike retained their group identities while at the same time embracing a new “trans-national” culture.

No reverberatory effect of the great war has caused American public opinion more solicitude than the failure of the “melting-pot.” The discovery of diverse nationalistic feelings among our great alien population has come to most people as an intense shock. . . . We have had to listen to publicists who . . . insist that the alien shall be forcibly assimilated to that Anglo-Saxon tradition which they unquestionably label “American.” . . . We act as if we wanted Americanization to take place only on our own terms, and not by the consent of the governed. . . .

The Anglo-Saxon was merely the first immigrant. . . . Colonials from the other nations have come and settled down beside him. They found no definite native culture . . . and consequently they looked back to their mother-country, as the earlier Anglo-Saxon immigrant was looking back to his. . . .

There is no distinctively American culture. It is apparently our lot rather to be a federation of cultures. This we have been for half a century, and the war has made it ever more evident that this is what we are destined to remain. . . . What we have achieved has been rather a cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures, from whom the sting of devastating competition has been removed. America is already the world-federation in miniature, the continent where for the first time in history has been achieved that miracle of hope, the peaceful living side by side, with character substantially preserved, of the most heterogeneous peoples under the sun. . . . America is coming to be, not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors. Any movement which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one color, or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this cosmopolitan vision.

QUESTIONS

1. Why does Bourne believe that the “melting pot” has failed? 2. What does he mean by describing America as a “trans-nationality”?

The Anti-German Crusade German-Americans bore the brunt of forced Americanization. The first wave of German immigrants had arrived before the Civil War. By 1914, German-Americans numbered nearly 9 million, including immigrants and persons of German parentage. They had created thriving ethnic institutions including clubs, sports associations, schools, and theaters. On the eve of the war, many Americans admired German traditions in literature, music, and philosophy, and one-quarter of all the high school students in the country studied the German language. But after American entry into the war, the use of German and expressions of German culture became a target of prowar organizations. In Iowa, Governor William L. Harding issued a proclamation requiring that all oral communication in schools, public places, and over the telephone be conducted in English. Freedom of speech, he declared, did not include “the right to use a language other than the language of the country.”

By 1919, the vast majority of the states had enacted laws restricting the teaching of foreign languages. Popular words of German origin were changed: “hamburger” became “liberty sandwich,” and “sauerkraut” “liberty cabbage.” Many communities banned the playing of German music. The government jailed Karl Muck, the director of the Boston Symphony and a Swiss citizen, as an enemy alien after he insisted on including the works of German composers like Beethoven in his concerts. The war dealt a crushing blow to German-American culture. By 1920, the number of German- language newspapers had been reduced to 276 (one-third the number twenty years earlier), and only 1 percent of high school pupils still studied German. The census of 1920 reported a 25 percent drop in the number of Americans admitting to having been born in Germany.

Even as Americanization programs sought to assimilate immigrants into American society, the war strengthened the conviction that certain kinds of undesirable persons ought to be excluded altogether. The new immigrants, one advocate of restriction declared, appreciated the values of democracy and freedom far less than “the Anglo-Saxon,” as evidenced by their attraction to “extreme political doctrines” like anarchism and socialism. Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman introduced the term “IQ” (intelligence quotient) in 1916, claiming that this single number could measure an individual’s mental capacity. Intelligence tests administered to recruits by the army seemed to confirm scientifically that blacks and the new immigrants stood far below native white Protestants on the IQ scale, further spurring demands for immigration restriction.

Groups Apart: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Asian-Americans No matter how coercive, Americanization programs assumed that European immigrants and especially their children could eventually adjust to the conditions of American life, embrace American ideals, and become productive citizens enjoying the full blessings of American freedom. This assumption did not apply to non-white immigrants or to blacks. Although the melting-pot idea envisioned that newcomers from Europe would leave their ethnic enclaves and join the American mainstream, non-whites confronted ever-present boundaries of exclusion.

The war led to further growth of the Southwest’s Mexican population. Wartime demand for labor from the area’s mine owners and large farmers led the government to exempt Mexicans temporarily from the literacy test enacted in 1917. Mexicans were legally classified as white, and many Progressive reformers viewed the growing Mexican population as candidates for Americanization. Teachers and religious missionaries sought to instruct them in English, convert them to Protestantism, and in other ways promote their assimilation into the mainstream culture. Yet public officials in the Southwest treated them as a group apart. Segregation, by law and custom, was common in schools, hospitals, theaters, and other institutions in states with significant Mexican populations. By 1920, nearly all Mexican children in California and the Southwest were educated in their own schools or classrooms. Phoenix, Arizona, established separate public schools for Indians, Mexicans, blacks, and whites. Although in far smaller numbers than blacks, Mexican-Americans also suffered lynchings—over 200 between 1880 and 1930. Discrimination led to the formation of La Grán Liga Mexicanista de Beneficencia y Protección, which aimed to improve the conditions of Mexicans in the United States and “to strike back at the hatred of some bad sons of Uncle Sam who believe themselves better than the Mexicans.”

Puerto Ricans also occupied an ambiguous position within American society. On the eve of American entry into World War Ⅰ, Congress terminated the status “citizen of Puerto Rico” and conferred American citizenship on residents of the island. The aim was to dampen support for Puerto Rican independence and to strengthen the American hold on a strategic outpost in the Caribbean. The change did not grant islanders the right to vote for president, or representation in Congress. Puerto Rican men, nonetheless, were subject to the draft and fought overseas. José de Diego, the Speaker of the House of the island’s legislature, wrote the president in 1917 asking that Puerto Rico be granted the democracy the United States was fighting for in Europe.

Even more restrictive were policies toward Asian-Americans. In 1906, the San Francisco school board ordered all Asian students confined to a single public school. When the Japanese government protested, president Theodore Roosevelt persuaded the city to rescind the order. He then negotiated the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 whereby Japan agreed to end migration to the United States except for the wives and children of men already in the country. In 1913, California barred all aliens incapable of becoming naturalized citizens (that is, all Asians) from owning or leasing land.

The Color Line By far the largest non-white group, African-Americans were excluded from nearly every Progressive definition of freedom described in Chapter 18. After their disenfranchisement in the South, few could participate in American democracy. Barred from joining most unions and from skilled employment, black workers had little access to “industrial freedom.” A majority of adult black women worked outside the home, but for wages that offered no hope of independence. Predominantly domestic and agricultural workers, they remained unaffected by the era’s laws regulating the hours and conditions of female labor. Nor could blacks, the majority desperately poor, participate fully in the emerging consumer economy, either as employees in the new department stores (except as janitors and cleaning women) or as purchasers of the consumer goods now flooding the marketplace.

Progressive intellectuals, social scientists, labor reformers, and suffrage advocates displayed a remarkable indifference to the black condition. Israel Zangwill did not include blacks in the melting- pot idea popularized by his Broadway play. Walter Weyl waited until the last fifteen pages of The New Democracy to introduce the “race problem.” His comment, quoted in the previous chapter, that the chief obstacles to freedom were economic, not political, revealed little appreciation of how the denial of voting rights underpinned the comprehensive system of inequality to which southern blacks were subjected.

Most settlement-house reformers accepted segregation as natural and equitable, assuming there should be white settlements for white neighborhoods and black settlements for black. White leaders of the woman suffrage movement said little about black disenfranchisement. In the South, members of upper-class white women’s clubs sometimes raised funds for black schools and community centers. But suffrage leaders insisted that the vote was a racial entitlement, a “badge and synonym of freedom,” in the words of Rebecca Felton of Georgia, that should not be denied to “free-born white women.” During Reconstruction, women had been denied constitutional recognition because it was “the Negro’s hour.” Now, World War Ⅰ’s “woman’s hour” excluded blacks. The amendment that achieved woman suffrage left the states free to limit voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Living in the South, the vast majority of the country’s black women still could not vote.

Roosevelt, Wilson, and Race

A poster advertising the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, which had its premiere at Woodrow Wilson’s White House. The movie glorified the Ku Klux Klan and depicted blacks during Reconstruction as unworthy of participation in government and a danger to white womanhood.

The Progressive presidents shared prevailing attitudes concerning blacks. Theodore Roosevelt shocked white opinion by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine with him in the White House and by appointing a number of blacks to federal offices. But in 1906, when a small group of black soldiers shot off their guns in Brownsville, Texas, killing one resident, and none of their fellows would name them, Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge of three black companies—156 men in all, including six winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Roosevelt’s ingrained belief in Anglo-Saxon racial destiny (he called Indians “savages” and blacks “wholly unfit for the suffrage”) did nothing to lessen Progressive intellectuals’ enthusiasm for his New Nationalism. Even Jane Addams, one of the few Progressives to take a strong interest in black rights and a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), went along when the Progressive Party convention of 1912 rejected a civil rights plank in its platform and barred black delegates from the South.

Woodrow Wilson, a native of Virginia, could speak without irony of the South’s “genuine representative government” and its exalted “standards of liberty.” His administration imposed racial segregation in federal departments in Washington, D.C., and dismissed numerous black federal employees. Wilson allowed D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan as the defender of white civilization during Reconstruction, to have its premiere at the White House in 1915. “Have you a ‘new freedom’ for white Americans and a new slavery for your African- American fellow citizens?” William Monroe Trotter, the militant black editor of the Boston Guardian and founder of the all-black National Equal Rights League, asked the president.

In one of hundreds of lynchings during the Progressive era, a white mob in Springfield, Missouri, in 1906 falsely accused three black men of rape, hanged them from an electric light pole, and burned their bodies in a public orgy of violence. Atop the pole stood a replica of the Statue of Liberty.

W. E. B. Du Bois and the Revival of Black Protest Black leaders struggled to find a strategy to rekindle the national commitment to equality that had flickered brightly, if briefly, during Reconstruction. No one thought more deeply, or over so long a period, about the black condition and the challenge it posed to American democracy than the scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, and educated at Fisk and Harvard universities, Du Bois lived to his ninety-fifth year. The unifying theme of his career was Du Bois’s effort to reconcile the contradiction between what he called “American freedom for whites and the continuing subjection of Negroes.” His book The Souls of Black Folk (1903) issued a clarion call for blacks dissatisfied with the accommodationist policies of Booker T. Washington to press for equal rights. Du Bois believed that educated African-Americans like himself —the “talented tenth” of the black community—must use their education and training to challenge inequality.

In some ways, Du Bois was a typical Progressive who believed that investigation, exposure, and education would lead to solutions for social problems. As a professor at Atlanta University, he projected a grandiose plan for decades of scholarly study of black life in order to make the country aware of racism and point the way toward its elimination. But he also understood the necessity of political action.

In 1905, Du Bois gathered a group of black leaders at Niagara Falls (meeting on the Canadian side since no American hotel would provide accommodations) and organized the Niagara movement, which sought to reinvigorate the abolitionist tradition. “We claim for ourselves,” Du Bois wrote in the group’s manifesto, “every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil, and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America.” The Declaration of Principles adopted at Niagara Falls called for restoring to blacks the right to vote, an end to racial segregation, and complete equality in economic and educational opportunity. These would remain the cornerstones of the black struggle for racial justice for decades to come. Four years later, Du Bois joined with a group of mostly white reformers, shocked by a lynching in Springfield, Illinois (Lincoln’s adult home), to create the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP, as it was known, launched a long struggle for the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

The men who founded the Niagara movement at a 1905 meeting on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. W. E. B. Du Bois is in the second row, second from the right, in a white hat. They pledged to renew the struggle for “every single right that belongs to a freeborn American.” By the time of the second meeting, a year later, women had become part of the movement.

The NAACP’s legal strategy won a few victories. In Bailey v. Alabama (1911), the Supreme Court overturned southern “peonage” laws that made it a crime for sharecroppers to break their labor contracts. Six years later, it ruled unconstitutional a Louisville zoning regulation excluding blacks from living in certain parts of the city (primarily because it interfered with whites’ right to sell their property as they saw fit). Overall, however, the Progressive era witnessed virtually no progress toward racial justice.

Closing Ranks Among black Americans, the wartime language of freedom inspired hopes for a radical change in the country’s racial system. With the notable exception of William Monroe Trotter, most black leaders saw American participation in the war as an opportunity to make real the promise of freedom. To Trotter, much-publicized German atrocities were no worse than American lynchings; rather than making the world safe for democracy, the government should worry about “making the South safe for the Negroes.” Yet the black press rallied to the war. Du Bois himself, in widely reprinted editorials, called on African-Americans to enlist in the army to help “make our own America a real land of the free.”

Black participation in the Civil War had helped to secure the destruction of slavery and the achievement of citizenship. But during World War Ⅰ, closing ranks did not bring significant gains. The navy barred blacks entirely, and the segregated army confined most of the 400,000 blacks who served in the war to supply units rather than combat. Wilson feared, as he noted in his diary, that the overseas experience would “go to their heads.” And the U.S. Army campaigned strenuously to persuade the French not to treat black soldiers as equals—not to eat or socialize with them, or even shake their hands. Contact with African colonial soldiers fighting alongside the British and French did widen the horizons of black American soldiers. But while colonial troops marched in the victory parade in Paris, the Wilson administration did not allow black Americans to participate.

The Great Migration and the “Promised Land” Nonetheless, the war unleashed social changes that altered the contours of American race relations. The combination of increased wartime production and a drastic falloff in immigration from Europe opened thousands of industrial jobs to black laborers for the first time, inspiring a large-scale migration from South to North. On the eve of World War Ⅰ, 90 percent of the African-American population still lived in the South. Most northern cities had tiny black populations, and domestic and service work still predominated among both black men and black women in the North. But between 1910 and 1920, half a million blacks left the South. The black population of Chicago more than doubled, New York City’s rose 66 percent, and smaller industrial cities like Akron, Buffalo, and Trenton showed similar gains.

Many motives sustained the Great Migration—higher wages in northern factories than were available in the South (even if blacks remained confined to menial and unskilled positions), opportunities for educating their children, escape from the threat of lynching, and the prospect of exercising the right to vote. Migrants spoke of a Second Emancipation, of “crossing over Jordan,” and of leaving the realm of pharaoh for the Promised Land. One group from Mississippi stopped to sing, “I am bound for the land of Canaan,” after their train crossed the Ohio River into the North.

TABLE 19.1 The Great Migration

City Black Population, 1910 Black Population, 1920 Percent Increase

New York 91,709 152,467 66.3%

Philadelphia 84,459 134,229 58.9

Chicago 44,103 109,458 148.2

St. Louis 43,960 69,854 58.9

Detroit 5,741 40,838 611.3

Pittsburgh 25,623 37,725 47.2

Cleveland 8,448 34,451 307.8

The black migrants, mostly young men and women, carried with them “a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom,” as Alain Locke explained in the preface to his influential book The New Negro (1925). Yet the migrants encountered vast disappointments—severely restricted employment opportunities, exclusion from unions, rigid housing segregation, and outbreaks of violence that made it clear that no region of the country was free from racial hostility. More white southerners than blacks moved north during the war, often with similar economic aspirations. But the new black presence, coupled with demands for change inspired by the war, created a racial tinderbox that needed only an incident to trigger an explosion.

Racial Violence, North and South Dozens of blacks were killed during a 1917 riot in East St. Louis, Illinois, where employers had recruited black workers in an attempt to weaken unions (most of which excluded blacks from membership). In 1919, more than 250 persons died in riots in the urban North. Most notable was the violence in Chicago, touched off by the drowning by white bathers of a black teenager who accidentally crossed the unofficial dividing line between black and white beaches on Lake Michigan. The riot that followed raged for five days and involved pitched battles between the races throughout the city. By the time the National Guard restored order, 38 persons had been killed and more than 500 injured.

One of a series of paintings by the black artist Jacob Lawrence called The Migration Series, inspired by the massive movement of African-Americans to the North during and after World War I. For each, Lawrence composed a brief title, in this case, “In the North the Negro had better educational facilities.”

Violence was not confined to the North. In the year after the war ended, seventy-six persons were lynched in the South, including several returning black veterans wearing their uniforms. In Phillips County, Arkansas, attacks on striking black sharecroppers by armed white vigilantes left as many as 200 persons dead and required the intervention of the army to restore order. The worst race riot in American history occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, when more than 300 blacks were killed and over 10,000 left homeless after a white mob, including police and National Guardsmen, burned an all-black section of the city to the ground. The Tulsa riot erupted after a group of black veterans tried to prevent the lynching of a youth who had accidentally tripped and fallen on a white female elevator operator, causing rumors of rape to sweep the city.

The Rise of Garveyism World War Ⅰ kindled a new spirit of militancy. The East St. Louis riot of 1917 inspired a widely publicized Silent Protest Parade on New York’s Fifth Avenue in which 10,000 blacks silently carried placards reading, “Mr. President, Why Not Make America Safe for Democracy?” In the new densely populated black ghettos of the North, widespread support emerged for the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a movement for African independence and black self-reliance launched by Marcus Garvey, a recent immigrant from Jamaica. Freedom for Garveyites meant national self- determination. Blacks, they insisted, should enjoy the same internationally recognized identity enjoyed by other peoples in the aftermath of the war. “Everywhere we hear the cry of freedom,” Garvey proclaimed in 1921. “We desire a freedom that will lift us to the common standard of all men, . . . freedom that will give us a chance and opportunity to rise to the fullest of our ambition and that we cannot get in countries where other men rule and dominate.” Du Bois and other established black leaders viewed Garvey as little more than a demagogue. They applauded when the government deported him after a conviction for mail fraud. But the massive following his movement achieved testified to the sense of betrayal that had been kindled in black communities during and after the war.

Glossary National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Founded in 1910, the civil rights organization that brought lawsuits against discriminatory practices and published The Crisis, a journal edited by African-American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois. Great Migration Large-scale migration of southern blacks during and after World War Ⅰ to the North, where jobs had become available during the labor shortage of the war years. Tulsa riot A race riot in 1921—the worst in American history—that occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after a group of black veterans tried to prevent a lynching. Over 300 African-Americans were killed, and 10,000 lost their homes in fires set by white mobs. Garvey, Marcus The leading spokesman for Negro Nationalism, which exalted blackness, black cultural expression, and black exclusiveness. He called upon African-Americans to liberate themselves from the surrounding white culture and create their own businesses, cultural centers, and newspapers. He was also the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

1919

A Worldwide Upsurge The combination of militant hopes for social change and disappointment with the war’s outcome was evident far beyond the black community. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (or Soviet Union), as Russia had been renamed after the revolution, Lenin’s government had nationalized landholdings, banks, and factories and proclaimed the socialist dream of a workers’ government. The Russian Revolution and the democratic aspirations unleashed by World War Ⅰ sent tremors of hope and fear throughout the world. Like 1848 and, in the future, 1968, 1919 was a year of worldwide social and political upheaval. Inspired by Lenin’s call for revolution, communist-led governments came to power in Bavaria (a part of Germany) and Hungary. General strikes demanding the fulfillment of wartime promises of “industrial democracy” took place in Belfast, Glasgow, and Winnipeg. In Spain, anarchist peasants began seizing land. Crowds in India challenged British rule, and nationalist movements in other colonies demanded independence. “We are living and shall live all our lives in a revolutionary world,” wrote Walter Lippmann.

The worldwide revolutionary upsurge produced a countervailing mobilization by opponents of radical change. Even as they fought the Germans, the Allies viewed the Soviet government as a dire threat and attempted to overturn it. In the summer of 1918, Allied expeditionary forces—British, French, Japanese, and Americans—landed in Russia to aid Lenin’s opponents in the civil war that had engulfed the country. The last of them did not leave until 1920.

Wilson’s policies toward the Soviet Union revealed the contradictions within the liberal internationalist vision. On the one hand, in keeping with the principles of the Fourteen Points and its goal of a worldwide economic open door, Wilson hoped to foster trade with the new government. On the other, fear of communism as a source of international instability and a threat to private property inspired military intervention in Russia. The Allies did not invite the Soviet Union to the Versailles peace conference, and Wilson refused to extend diplomatic recognition to Lenin’s government. The Soviet regime survived, but in the rest of the world the tide of change receded. By the fall, the mass strikes had been suppressed and conservative governments had been installed in central Europe. Anticommunism would remain a pillar of twentieth-century American foreign policy.

Upheaval in America In the United States, 1919 also brought unprecedented turmoil. It seemed all the more disorienting for occurring in the midst of a worldwide flu epidemic that killed over 20 million persons, including nearly 700,000 Americans. Racial violence, as noted above, was widespread. In June, bombs exploded at the homes of prominent Americans, including the attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, who escaped uninjured. Among aggrieved American workers, wartime language linking patriotism with democracy and freedom inspired hopes that an era of social justice and economic empowerment was at hand. In 1917, Wilson had told the AFL, “While we are fighting for freedom, we must see to it among other things that labor is free.” Labor took him seriously—more seriously, it seems, than Wilson intended. The government, as one machinist put it, had “proclaimed to the World that the freedom and democracy we are fighting for shall be practiced in the industries of America.”

By the war’s end, many Americans believed that the country stood on the verge of what Herbert Hoover called “a new industrial order.” Sidney Hillman, leader of the garment workers’ union, was one of those caught up in the utopian dreams inspired by the war and reinforced by the Russian Revolution. “One can hear the footsteps of the Deliverer,” he wrote. “Labor will rule and the World will be free.” In 1919, more than 4 million workers engaged in strikes—the greatest wave of labor unrest in American history. There were walkouts, among many others, by textile workers, telephone operators, and Broadway actors. Throughout the country, workers appropriated the imagery and rhetoric of the war, parading in army uniforms with Liberty buttons, denouncing their employers as “kaisers,” and demanding “freedom in the workplace.” They were met by an unprecedented mobilization of employers, government, and private patriotic organizations.

The strike wave began in January 1919 in Seattle, where a walkout of shipyard workers mushroomed into a general strike that for once united AFL unions and the IWW. For five days, a committee of labor leaders oversaw city services, until federal troops arrived to end the strike. In September, Boston policemen struck for higher wages and shorter working hours. Declaring “there is no right to strike against the public safety,” Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge called out the National Guard to patrol the city and fired the entire police force. In the nation’s coalfields, a company manager observed, wartime propaganda had raised unrealistic expectations among workers, who took the promise of “an actual emancipation” too “literally.” When the war ended, miners demanded an end to company absolutism. Their strike was ended by a court injunction obtained by Attorney General Palmer.

The Great Steel Strike

An advertisement placed by a steel company in a Pittsburgh newspaper announces, in several languages, that the steel strike of 1919 “has failed.” The use of the figure of Uncle Sam illustrates how the companies clothed their anti-union stance in the language of patriotism.

The wartime rhetoric of economic democracy and freedom helped to inspire the era’s greatest labor uprising, the 1919 steel strike. It united some 365,000 mostly immigrant workers in demands for

union recognition, higher wages, and an eight-hour workday. Before 1917, the steel mills were little autocracies where managers arbitrarily established wages and working conditions and suppressed all efforts at union organizing. During the war, workers flooded into the Amalgamated Association, the union that had been nearly destroyed by its defeat at Homestead a generation earlier. By the end of 1918, they had won an eight-hour day. Employers’ anti-union activities resumed following the armistice that ended the fighting. “For why this war?” asked one Polish immigrant steelworker at a union meeting. “For why we buy Liberty bonds? For the mills? No, for freedom and America—for everybody. No more [work like a] horse and wagon. For eight-hour day.”

In response to the strike, steel magnates launched a concerted counterattack. Employers appealed to anti-immigrant sentiment among native-born workers, many of whom returned to work, and conducted a propaganda campaign that associated the strikers with the IWW, communism, and disloyalty. “Americanism vs. Alienism” was the issue of the strike, declared the New York Tribune. With middle-class opinion having turned against the labor movement and the police assaulting workers on the streets, the strike collapsed in early 1920.

The Red Scare Many Progressives hoped to see the wartime apparatus of economic planning continue after 1918. The Wilson administration, however, quickly dismantled the agencies that had established controls over industrial production and the labor market, although during the 1930s they would serve as models for some policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Wartime repression of dissent, however, continued. It reached its peak with the Red Scare of 1919–1920, a short-lived but intense period of political intolerance inspired by the postwar strike wave and the social tensions and fears generated by the Russian Revolution.

Convinced that episodes like the steel strike were part of a worldwide communist conspiracy, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in November 1919 and January 1920 dispatched federal agents to raid the offices of radical and labor organizations throughout the country. They carried search warrants so broad that they reminded those with a sense of history of the writs of assistance against which James Otis had eloquently protested as being destructive of liberty in 1761. The Palmer Raids were overseen by the twenty-four-year-old director of the Radical Division of the Justice Department, J. Edgar Hoover. More than 5,000 persons were arrested, most of them without warrants, and held for months without charge. The government deported hundreds of immigrant radicals, including Emma Goldman. Hoover also began compiling files on thousands of Americans suspected of holding radical political ideas, a practice he would later continue as head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The abuse of civil liberties in early 1920 was so severe that Palmer came under heavy criticism from Congress and much of the press. Secretary of Labor Louis Post began releasing imprisoned immigrants, and the Red Scare collapsed. Even the explosion of a bomb outside the New York Stock Exchange in September 1920, which killed forty persons, failed to rekindle it. (The perpetrators of this terrorist explosion, the worst on American soil until the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, were never identified.) The reaction to the Palmer Raids planted the seeds for a new appreciation of the importance of civil liberties that would begin to flourish during the 1920s. But in their immediate impact, the events of 1919 and 1920 dealt a devastating setback to radical and labor organizations of all kinds and kindled an intense identification of patriotic Americanism with support for the political and economic status quo. The IWW had been effectively destroyed, and many moderate unions lay in disarray. The Socialist Party crumbled under the weight of governmental repression (the New York legislature expelled five Socialist members, and Congress denied Victor Berger the seat to which he had been elected from Wisconsin) and internal differences over the Russian Revolution.

Wilson at Versailles The beating back of demands for fundamental social change was a severe rebuke to the hopes with which so many Progressives had enlisted in the war effort. Wilson’s inability to achieve a just peace based on the Fourteen Points compounded the sense of failure. Late in 1918, the president traveled to France to attend the Versailles peace conference. Greeted by ecstatic Paris crowds, he declared that American soldiers had come to Europe “as crusaders, not merely to win a war, but to win a cause . . . to lead the world on the way of liberty.” But he proved a less adept negotiator than his British and French counterparts, David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau.

Although the Fourteen Points had called for “open covenants openly arrived at,” the negotiations were conducted in secret. The resulting Versailles Treaty did accomplish some of Wilson’s goals. It established the League of Nations, the body central to his vision of a new international order. It applied the principle of self-determination to eastern Europe and redrew the map of that region. From the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian empire and parts of Germany and czarist Russia, new European nations emerged from the war—Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Yugoslavia. Some enjoyed ethnolinguistic unity, while others comprised unstable combinations of diverse nationalities.

Despite Wilson’s pledge of a peace without territorial acquisitions or vengeance, the Versailles Treaty was a harsh document that all but guaranteed future conflict in Europe. Clemenceau won for France the right to occupy the Saar Basin and Rhineland—iron- and coal rich parts of Germany. The treaty placed strict limits on the size of Germany’s future army and navy. Lloyd George persuaded Wilson to agree to a clause declaring Germany morally responsible for the war and setting astronomical reparations payments (they were variously estimated at between $33 billion and $56 billion), which crippled the German economy.

The Wilsonian Moment To many people around the world, the Great War destroyed European claims that theirs was a higher civilization, which gave them the right to rule over more barbaric peoples. In this sense, it helped to heighten the international prestige of the United States, a latecomer to the war. Like the ideals of the American Revolution, the Wilsonian rhetoric of self-determination reverberated across the globe, especially among colonial peoples seeking independence. In fact, they took Wilson’s rhetoric more seriously than he did. Despite his belief in self-determination, he believed that colonial peoples required a long period of tutelage before they were ready for independence.

EUROPE IN 1914

World War I and the Versailles Treaty redrew the map of Europe and the Middle East. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires ceased to exist, and Germany and Russia were reduced in size. A group of new states emerged in eastern Europe, embodying the principle of self- determination, one of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points.

Nonetheless, Wilsonian ideals quickly spread around the globe—not simply the idea that government must rest on the consent of the governed but also Wilson’s stress on the “equality of nations,” large and small, and that international disputes should be settled by peaceful means rather than armed conflict. These stood in sharp contrast to the imperial ideas and practices of Europe. In eastern Europe, whose people sought to carve new, independent nations from the ruins of the Austro- Hungarian and Ottoman empires, many considered Wilson a “popular saint.” The leading Arabic

newspaper, Al-Ahram, published in Egypt, then under British rule, gave extensive coverage to Wilson’s speech asking Congress to declare war in the name of democracy, and to the Fourteen Points, and translated the Declaration of Independence into Arabic for its readers. In Beijing, students demanding that China free itself of foreign domination gathered at the American embassy shouting, “Long live Wilson.” Japan proposed to include in the charter of the new League of Nations a clause recognizing the equality of all people, regardless of race.

EUROPE IN 1919

Outside of Europe, however, the idea of “self-determination” was stillborn. When the peace conference opened, Secretary of State Robert Lansing warned that the phrase was “loaded with dynamite” and would “raise hopes which can never be realized.” Wilson’s language, he feared, had put “dangerous” ideas “into the minds of certain races” and would inspire “impossible demands, and cause trouble in many lands.” As Lansing anticipated, advocates of colonial independence descended on Paris to lobby the peace negotiators. Arabs demanded that a unified independent state be carved from the old Ottoman empire in the Middle East. Nguyen That Thanh, a young Vietnamese patriot working in Paris, appealed unsuccessfully to Wilson to help bring an end to French rule in Vietnam. W. E. B. Du Bois organized a Pan-African Congress in Paris that put forward the idea of a self- governing nation to be carved out of Germany’s African colonies. Koreans, Indians, Irish, and others also pressed claims for self-determination.

The British and French, however, had no intention of applying this principle to their own empires. They rebuffed the pleas of colonial peoples for self-rule. During the war, the British had encouraged Arab nationalism as a weapon against the Ottoman empire and had also pledged to create a homeland in Palestine for the persecuted Jews of Europe. In fact, the victors of World War Ⅰ divided Ottoman

territory into a series of new territories, including Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine, controlled by the victorious Allies under League of Nations “mandates.” South Africa, Australia, and Japan acquired former German colonies in Africa and Asia. Nor did Ireland achieve its independence at Versailles. Only at the end of 1921 did Britain finally agree to the creation of the Irish Free State, while continuing to rule the northeastern corner of the island. As for the Japanese proposal to establish the principle of racial equality, Wilson, with the support of Great Britain and Australia, engineered its defeat.

The Seeds of Wars to Come Du Bois, as noted above, hoped that black participation in the war effort would promote racial justice at home and self-government for colonies abroad. “We return,” he wrote in The Crisis in May 1919. “We return from fighting, we return fighting. Make way for Democracy!” But the war’s aftermath both in the United States and overseas left him bitterly disappointed. Du Bois concluded that Wilson had not meant to include black Americans or the colonial peoples of the world in his democratic vision. “Most men today,” he complained, “cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody’s slavery.” In 1903, in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois had made the memorable prediction that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” He now forecast a “fight for freedom” that would pit “black and brown and yellow men” throughout the world against racism and imperialism.

Disappointment at the failure to apply the Fourteen Points to the non-European world created a pervasive cynicism about Western use of the language of freedom and democracy. Wilson’s apparent willingness to accede to the demands of the imperial powers helped to spark a series of popular protest movements across the Middle East and Asia, and the rise of a new anti-Western nationalism. Some leaders, like Nguyen That Thanh, who took the name Ho Chi Minh, turned to communism, in whose name he would lead Vietnam’s long and bloody struggle for independence. With the collapse of the Wilsonian moment, Lenin’s reputation in the colonial world began to eclipse that of the American president. But whether communist or not, these movements announced the emergence of anticolonial nationalism as a major force in world affairs, which it would remain for the rest of the twentieth century.

“Your liberalness,” one Egyptian leader remarked, speaking of Britain and America, “is only for yourselves.” Yet ironically, when colonial peoples demanded to be recognized as independent members of the international community, they would invoke both the heritage of the American Revolution—the first colonial struggle that produced an independent nation—and the Wilsonian language whereby the self-governing nation-state is the most legitimate political institution, and all nations deserve equal respect.

As Du Bois recognized, World War Ⅰ sowed the seeds not of a lasting peace but of wars to come. German resentment over the peace terms would help to fuel the rise of Adolf Hitler and the coming of World War Ⅱ. In the breakup of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, violence over the status of Northern Ireland, and seemingly unending conflicts in the Middle East, the world of the late twentieth century was still haunted by the ghost of Versailles.

The Treaty Debate One final disappointment awaited Wilson on his return from Europe. He viewed the new League of Nations as the war’s finest legacy. But many Americans feared that membership in the League would commit the United States to an open-ended involvement in the affairs of other countries. Wilson asserted that the United States could not save the world without being continually involved with it. His opponents, led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, argued that the League threatened to deprive the country of its freedom of action.

A considerable majority of senators would have accepted the treaty with “reservations” ensuring that the obligation to assist League members against attack did not supersede the power of Congress to declare war. As governor of New Jersey and as president, Wilson had proved himself to be a skilled politician capable of compromising with opponents. In this case, however, convinced that the treaty reflected “the hand of God,” Wilson refused to negotiate with congressional leaders. In October 1919, in the midst of the League debate, Wilson suffered a serious stroke. Although the extent of his illness was kept secret, he remained incapacitated for the rest of his presidency. In effect, his wife, Edith, headed the government for the next seventeen months. In November 1919 and again in March 1920, the Senate rejected the Versailles Treaty.

American involvement in World War Ⅰ lasted barely nineteen months, but it cast a long shadow over the following decade—and, indeed, the rest of the century. In its immediate aftermath, the country retreated from international involvements. But in the long run, Wilson’s combination of idealism and power politics had an enduring impact. His appeals to democracy, open markets, and a special American mission to instruct the world in freedom, coupled with a willingness to intervene abroad militarily to promote American interests and values, would create the model for twentieth-century American international relations.

On its own terms, the war to make the world safe for democracy failed. Even great powers cannot always bend the world to their purposes. The war brought neither stability nor democracy to most of the world, and it undermined freedom in the United States. It also led to the eclipse of Progressivism. Republican candidate Warren G. Harding, who had no connection with the party’s Progressive wing, swept to victory in the presidential election of 1920. Harding’s campaign centered on a “return to normalcy” and a repudiation of what he called “Wilsonism.” He received 60 percent of the popular vote. Begun with idealistic goals and grand hopes for social change, American involvement in the Great War laid the foundation for one of the most conservative decades in the nation’s history.

Glossary Red Scare of 1919–1920 Fear among many Americans after World War Ⅰ of communists in particular and noncitizens in general, a reaction to the Russian Revolution, mail bombs, strikes, and riots. Versailles Treaty The treaty signed at the Versailles peace conference after World War Ⅰ, which established President Woodrow Wilson’s vision of an international regulating body, redrew parts of Europe and the Middle East, and assigned economically crippling war reparations to Germany, but failed to incorporate all of Wilson’s Fourteen Points. League of Nations Organization of nations to mediate disputes and avoid war, established after World War Ⅰ as part of the Versailles Treaty; President Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” speech to Congress in 1918 proposed the formation of the league, which the United States never joined.

CHAPTER REVIEW

REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. Explain the role of the United States in the global economy by 1920. 2. What were the assumptions underlying the Roosevelt Corollary? How did the doctrine affect

U.S. relations with European nations and those in the Western Hemisphere? 3. What did President Wilson mean by “moral imperialism,” and what measures were taken to

apply this to Latin America? 4. How did the ratification of both the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments suggest both the

restrictive and democratizing nature of Progressivism? 5. Why did Progressives see in the expansion of governmental powers in wartime an opportunity

to reform American society? 6. What were the goals and methods of the Committee on Public Information during World War Ⅰ?

7. What are governmental and private examples of coercive patriotism during the war? What were the effects of those efforts?

8. How did the “science” of eugenics fuel anti-immigrant sentiment? 9. How did World War Ⅰ and its aftermath provide African-Americans with opportunities?

10. What were the major causes—both real and imaginary—of the Red Scare? 11. Identify the goals of those pressing for global change in 1919, and of those who opposed them.

KEY TERMS liberal internationalism (p. 736)

Panama Canal Zone (p. 739)

Roosevelt Corollary (p. 739)

Dollar Diplomacy (p. 740)

moral imperialism (p. 741)

Lusitania (p. 743)

Zimmermann Telegram (p. 744)

Fourteen Points (p. 745)

Selective Service Act (p. 747)

War Industries Board (p. 747)

Eighteenth Amendment (p. 752)

Espionage Act (p. 752)

Sedition Act (p. 752)

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (p. 765)

Great Migration (p. 766)

Tulsa riot (p. 767)

Marcus Garvey (p. 768)

Red Scare of 1919–1920 (p. 771)

Versailles Treaty (p. 772)

League of Nations (p. 772)

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Glossary liberal internationalism Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy theory, which rested on the idea that economic and political freedom went hand in hand, and encouraged American intervention abroad in order to secure these freedoms globally. Panama Canal Zone The small strip of land on either side of the Panama Canal. The Canal Zone was under U.S. control from 1903 to 1979 as a result of Theodore Roosevelt’s assistance in engineering a coup in Colombia that established Panama’s independence. Roosevelt Corollary 1904 announcement by President Theodore Roosevelt, essentially a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, that the United States could intervene militarily to prevent interference from European powers in the Western Hemisphere. Dollar Diplomacy A foreign policy initiative under President William Howard Taft that promoted the spread of American influence through loans and economic investments from American banks. moral imperialism The Wilsonian belief that U.S. foreign policy should be guided by morality and should teach other peoples about democracy. Wilson used this belief to both repudiate Dollar Diplomacy and justify frequent military interventions in Latin America. Lusitania British passenger liner sunk by a German U-boat, May 7, 1915, creating a diplomatic crisis and public outrage at the loss of 128 Americans (roughly 10 percent of the total aboard); Germany agreed to pay reparations, and the United States waited two more years to enter World War Ⅰ. Zimmermann Telegram Telegram from the German foreign secretary to the German minister in Mexico, February 1917, instructing the minister to offer to recover Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona for Mexico if it would fight the United States to divert attention from Germany in the event that the United States joined the war. Fourteen Points President Woodrow Wilson’s 1918 plan for peace after World War Ⅰ; at the Versailles peace conference, however, he failed to incorporate all of the points into the treaty. Selective Service Act Law passed in 1917 to quickly increase enlistment in the army for the United States’ entry into World War Ⅰ; required men to register with the draft. War Industries Board Board run by financier Bernard Baruch that planned production and allocation of war materiel, supervised purchasing, and fixed prices, 1917–1919. Eighteenth Amendment Prohibition amendment passed in 1919 that made illegal the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages; repealed in 1933. Espionage Act 1917 law that prohibited spying and interfering with the draft as well as making “false statements” that hurt the war effort. Sedition Act

1918 law that made it a crime to make spoken or printed statements that criticized the U.S. government or encouraged interference with the war effort. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Founded in 1910, the civil rights organization that brought lawsuits against discriminatory practices and published The Crisis, a journal edited by African-American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois. Great Migration Large-scale migration of southern blacks during and after World War Ⅰ to the North, where jobs had become available during the labor shortage of the war years. Tulsa riot A race riot in 1921—the worst in American history—that occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after a group of black veterans tried to prevent a lynching. Over 300 African-Americans were killed, and 10,000 lost their homes in fires set by white mobs. Red Scare of 1919–1920 Fear among many Americans after World War Ⅰ of communists in particular and noncitizens in general, a reaction to the Russian Revolution, mail bombs, strikes, and riots. Versailles Treaty The treaty signed at the Versailles peace conference after World War Ⅰ, which established President Woodrow Wilson’s vision of an international regulating body, redrew parts of Europe and the Middle East, and assigned economically crippling war reparations to Germany, but failed to incorporate all of Wilson’s Fourteen Points. League of Nations Organization of nations to mediate disputes and avoid war, established after World War Ⅰ as part of the Versailles Treaty; President Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” speech to Congress in 1918 proposed the formation of the league, which the United States never joined. Garvey, Marcus The leading spokesman for Negro Nationalism, which exalted blackness, black cultural expression, and black exclusiveness. He called upon African-Americans to liberate themselves from the surrounding white culture and create their own businesses, cultural centers, and newspapers. He was also the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

CHAPTER 20

FROM BUSINESS CULTURE TO GREAT DEPRESSION

THE TWENTIES, 1920–1932

FOCUS QUESTIONS Who benefited and who suffered in the new consumer society of the 1920s? In what ways did the government promote business interests in the 1920s? Why did the protection of civil liberties gain importance in the 1920s? What were the major flash points between fundamentalism and pluralism in the 1920s? What were the causes of the Great Depression, and how effective were the government’s responses by 1932?

In May 1920, at the height of the postwar Red Scare, police arrested two Italian immigrants accused of participating in a robbery at a South Braintree, Massachusetts, factory in which a security guard was killed. Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, an itinerant unskilled laborer, were anarchists who dreamed of a society in which government, churches, and private property had been abolished. They saw violence as an appropriate weapon of class warfare. But very little evidence linked them to this particular crime. In the atmosphere of anti-radical and anti-immigrant fervor, however, their conviction was a certainty. “I have suffered,” Vanzetti wrote from prison, “for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian.”

Although their 1921 trial aroused little public interest outside the Italian-American community, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti attracted international attention during the lengthy appeals that followed. There were mass protests in Europe against their impending execution. In the United States, the movement to save their lives attracted the support of an impressive array of intellectuals, including the novelist John Dos Passos, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Felix Frankfurter, a professor at Harvard Law School and a future justice of the Supreme Court. In response to the mounting clamor, the governor of Massachusetts appointed a three-member commission to review the case, headed by Abbott Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard University (and for many years an official of the Immigration Restriction League). The commission upheld the verdict and death sentences, and on August 23, 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti died in the electric chair. “It is not every prisoner,” remarked the journalist Heywood Broun, “who has a president of Harvard throw the switch for him.”

The Sacco-Vanzetti case laid bare some of the fault lines beneath the surface of American society during the 1920s. The case, the writer Edmund Wilson commented, “revealed the whole anatomy of American life, with all its classes, professions and points of view and . . . it raised almost every fundamental question of our political and social system.” It demonstrated how long the Red Scare extended into the 1920s and how powerfully it undermined basic American freedoms. It reflected the fierce cultural battles that raged in many communities during the decade. To many native-born Americans, the two men symbolized an alien threat to their way of life. To Italian-Americans, including respectable middle-class organizations like the Sons of Italy that raised money for the defense, the outcome symbolized the nativist prejudices and stereotypes that haunted immigrant communities. To Dos Passos, the executions underscored the success of the anti-radical crusade: “They are stronger. They are rich. They hire and fire the politicians, the old judges, . . . the college presidents.” Dos Passos’s lament was a bitter comment on the triumph of pro-business conservatism during the 1920s.

A 1927 photograph shows Nicola Sacco, center right, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti outside the courthouse in Dedham, Massachusetts, surrounded by security agents and onlookers. They are about to enter the courthouse, where the judge will pronounce their death sentences.

In popular memory, the decade that followed World War Ⅰ is recalled as the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties. With its flappers (young, sexually liberated women), speakeasies (nightclubs that sold liquor in violation of Prohibition), and a soaring stock market fueled by easy credit and a get-rich- quick outlook, it was a time of revolt against moral rules inherited from the nineteenth century. Observers from Europe, where class divisions were starkly visible in work, politics, and social relations, marveled at the uniformity of American life. Factories poured out standardized consumer goods, their sale promoted by national advertising campaigns. Conservatism dominated a political system from which radical alternatives seemed to have been purged. Radio and the movies spread mass culture throughout the nation. Americans seemed to dress alike, think alike, go to the same movies, and admire the same larger-than-life national celebrities.

Many Americans, however, did not welcome the new secular, commercial culture. They resented and feared the ethnic and racial diversity of America’s cities and what they considered the lax moral standards of urban life. The 1920s was a decade of profound social tensions—between rural and urban Americans, traditional and “modern” Christianity, participants in the burgeoning consumer culture and those who did not fully share in the new prosperity.

• CHRONOLOGY • 1915 Reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan

1919 Schenck v. United States

1920 American Civil Liberties Union established

1921 Trial of Sacco and Vanzetti

1922 Washington Naval Arms Conference

Cable Act

Herbert Hoover’s American Individualism

1923 Adkins v. Children’s Hospital

Meyer v. Nebraska

1924 Immigration Act of 1924

Indian Citizenship Act of 1924

1925 Scopes trial

1927 Charles Lindbergh flies nonstop over the Atlantic

Sacco and Vanzetti executed

1927–1928 President Coolidge vetoes McNary-Haugen farm bill

1929 Sheppard-Towner Act repealed

Stock market crashes

1930 Hollywood adopts the Hays code

Smoot-Hawley Tariff

1932 Reconstruction Finance Corporation established

Bonus march on Washington

Glossary Sacco-Vanzetti case A case held during the 1920s in which two Italian-American anarchists were found guilty and executed for a crime in which there was very little evidence linking them to the particular crime.

THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA

A Decade of Prosperity “The chief business of the American people,” said Calvin Coolidge, who became president after Warren G. Harding’s sudden death from a heart attack in 1923, “is business.” Rarely in American history had economic growth seemed more dramatic, cooperation between business and government so close, and business values so widely shared. After a sharp postwar recession that lasted into 1922, the 1920s was a decade of prosperity. Productivity and economic output rose dramatically as new industries—chemicals, aviation, electronics—flourished and older ones like food processing and the manufacture of household appliances adopted Henry Ford’s moving assembly line.

The automobile was the backbone of economic growth. The most celebrated American factories now turned out cars, not textiles and steel as in the nineteenth century. Annual automobile production tripled during the 1920s, from 1.5 to 4.8 million. General Motors, which learned the secret of marketing numerous individual models and stylish designs, surpassed Ford with its cheap, standardized Model T (replaced in 1927 by the Model A). By 1929, half of all American families owned a car (a figure not reached in England until 1980). The automobile industry stimulated the expansion of steel, rubber, and oil production, road construction, and other sectors of the economy. It promoted tourism and the growth of suburbs (already, some commuters were driving to work) and helped to reduce rural isolation.

During the 1920s, American multinational corporations extended their sway throughout the world. With Europe still recovering from the Great War, American investment overseas far exceeded that of other countries. The dollar replaced the British pound as the most important currency of international trade. American companies produced 85 percent of the world’s cars and 40 percent of its manufactured goods. General Electric and International Telephone and Telegraph bought up companies in other countries. International Business Machines (IBM) was the world’s leader in office supplies. American oil companies built new refineries overseas. American companies took control of raw materials abroad, from rubber in Liberia to oil in Venezuela.

One unsuccessful example of the global spread of American corporations was Fordlandia, an effort by the auto manufacturer Henry Ford to create a town in the heart of Brazil’s Amazon rain forest. Ford hoped to secure a steady supply of rubber for car tires. But as in the United States, where he had compelled immigrant workers to adopt American dress and diet, he wanted to bring local inhabitants up to what he considered the proper standard of life (this meant, for example, forbidding his workers from using alcohol and tobacco and trying to get them to stop eating traditional Brazilian foods). Eventually, the climate and local insects destroyed the rubber trees that Ford’s engineers, lacking experience in tropical agriculture, had planted much too close together, while the workers rebelled against the long hours of labor and regimentation of the community.

A New Society During the 1920s, consumer goods of all kinds proliferated, marketed by salesmen and advertisers who promoted them as ways of satisfying Americans’ psychological desires and everyday needs. Frequently purchased on credit through new installment buying plans, they rapidly altered daily life. Telephones made communication easier. Vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and refrigerators transformed work in the home and reduced the demand for domestic servants. Boosted by Prohibition and an aggressive advertising campaign that, according to the company’s sales director, made it “impossible for the consumer to escape” the product, Coca-Cola became a symbol of American life.

Americans spent more and more of their income on leisure activities like vacations, movies, and sporting events. By 1929, weekly movie attendance had reached 80 million, double the figure of 1922. Movies had been produced early in the century in several American cities, but shortly before World War Ⅰ filmmakers gravitated to Hollywood, a district of Los Angeles, attracted by the open space, year-round sunshine for outdoor filming, and varied scenery. In 1910, two French companies, Pathé and Gaumont, had been the world’s leading film producers. By 1925, American releases outnumbered French by eight to one. In the 1920s, both companies abandoned film production for the more profitable business of distributing American films in Europe.

Radios and phonographs brought mass entertainment into Americans’ living rooms. The number of radios in Americans’ homes rose from 190,000 in 1923 to just under 5 million in 1929. These developments helped to create and spread a new celebrity culture, in which recording, film, and sports stars moved to the top of the list of American heroes. During the 1920s, more than 100 million records were sold each year. RCA Victor sold so many recordings of the great opera tenor Enrico Caruso that he is sometimes called the first modern celebrity. He was soon joined by the film actor Charlie Chaplin, baseball player Babe Ruth, and boxer Jack Dempsey. Ordinary Americans followed every detail of their lives. Perhaps the decade’s greatest celebrity, in terms of intensive press coverage, was the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who in 1927 made the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic.

André Siegfried, a Frenchman who visited the United States four times, commented in 1928 that a “new society” had come into being, in which Americans considered their “standard of living” a “sacred acquisition, which they will defend at any price.” In this new “mass civilization,” widespread acceptance of going into debt to purchase consumer goods had replaced the values of thrift and self- denial, central to nineteenth-century notions of upstanding character.

The Limits of Prosperity “Big business in America,” remarked the journalist Lincoln Steffens, “is producing what the socialists held up as their goal—food, shelter, and clothing for all.” But signs of future trouble could be seen beneath the prosperity of the 1920s. The fruits of increased production were very unequally distributed. Real wages for industrial workers (wages adjusted to take account of inflation) rose by one-quarter between 1922 and 1929, but corporate profits rose at more than twice that rate. The process of economic concentration continued unabated. A handful of firms dominated numerous sectors of the economy. In 1929, 1 percent of the nation’s banks controlled half of its financial resources. Most of the small auto companies that had existed earlier in the century had fallen by the wayside. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler now controlled four-fifths of the industry.

At the beginning of 1929, the share of national income of the wealthiest 5 percent of American families exceeded that of the bottom 60 percent. A majority of families had no savings, and an estimated 40 percent of the population remained in poverty, unable to participate in the flourishing consumer economy. Improved productivity meant that goods could be produced with fewer workers. During the 1920s, more Americans worked in the professions, retailing, finance, and education, but the number of manufacturing workers declined by 5 percent, the first such drop in the nation’s history. Parts of New England were already experiencing the chronic unemployment caused by deindustrialization. Many of the region’s textile companies failed in the face of low-wage competition from southern factories, or shifted production to take advantage of the South’s cheap labor. Most advertisers directed their messages at businessmen and the middle class. At the end of the decade, 75 percent of American households still did not own a washing machine, and 60 percent had no radio.

The Farmers’ Plight Nor did farmers share in the decade’s prosperity. The “golden age” of American farming had reached its peak during World War Ⅰ, when the need to feed war-torn Europe and government efforts to maintain high farm prices had raised farmers’ incomes and promoted the purchase of more land on credit. Thanks to mechanization and the increased use of fertilizer and insecticides, agricultural production continued to rise even when government subsidies ended and world demand stagnated. As a result, the price of farm products fell, farm incomes declined steadily, and banks foreclosed tens of thousands of farms whose owners were unable to meet mortgage payments.

Kansas agricultural workers breaking new ground with disk plows, which eased the task of readying the sod of the Great Plains for planting and encouraged the emergence of larger farms. Simon Fishman, a Jewish farmer known as the “wheat king,” in jacket and tie, is on the last tractor.

For the first time in the nation’s history, the number of farms and farmers declined during the 1920s. For example, half the farmers in Montana lost their land to foreclosure between 1921 and 1925. Extractive industries, like mining and lumber, also suffered as their products faced a glut on the world market. During the decade, some 3 million persons migrated out of rural areas. Many headed for southern California, whose rapidly growing economy needed new labor. The population of Los Angeles, the West’s leading industrial center, a producer of oil, automobiles, aircraft, and, of course, Hollywood movies, rose from 575,000 to 2.2 million during the decade, largely because of an influx of displaced farmers from the Midwest. Well before the 1930s, rural America was in an economic depression.

The 1920s, however, was not simply a period of decline on the farm but of significant technological change. The mechanization of agriculture had been taking place since the mid-nineteenth century, especially in the West, but it now accelerated dramatically. New inventions came into widespread use on the Great Plains, especially the steam tractor and the disk plow, which killed weeds, chopped up the sod, and left the surface layer much easier to plant. Mechanization encouraged an increase in the scale of agriculture. From farms growing wheat to California orange groves, the western states became home to modern “factory farms,” employing large numbers of migrant laborers. Massive irrigation projects completed in the previous decades made the Far West much more suitable for farming. Farm output boomed in previously arid parts of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. With immigration from Asia barred and blacks unwanted, agribusinesses recruited workers from across the southern border, and immigrants from Mexico came to make up the vast majority of the West’s low-wage farm migrants.

The Image of Business Hollywood films spread images of “the American way of life” across the globe. America, wrote the historian Charles Beard, was “boring its way” into the world’s consciousness. In high wages, efficient factories, and the mass production of consumer goods, Americans seemed to have discovered the secret of permanent prosperity. Businessmen like Henry Ford and engineers like Herbert Hoover were cultural heroes. Photographers such as Lewis Hine and Margaret Bourke-White and painters like Charles Sheeler celebrated the beauty of machines and factories. The Man Nobody Knows, a 1925 best-seller by advertising executive Bruce Barton, portrayed Jesus Christ as “the greatest advertiser of his day, . . . a virile go-getting he-man of business,” who “picked twelve men from the bottom ranks and forged a great organization.”

After the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, discussed in Chapter 18, John D. Rockefeller himself hired a public relations firm to repair his tarnished image. Now, persuaded by the success of World War Ⅰ’s Committee on Public Information, numerous firms established public relations departments to justify corporate practices to the public and counteract its long-standing distrust of big business. They succeeded in changing popular attitudes toward Wall Street. Congressional hearings of 1912–1914 headed by Louisiana congressman Arsène Pujo had laid bare the manipulation of stock prices by a Wall Street “money trust.” The Pujo investigation reinforced the widespread view of the stock market as a place where insiders fleeced small investors—as, indeed, they frequently did. But in the 1920s, as the steadily rising price of stocks made front-page news, the market attracted more investors. Many assumed that stock values would rise forever. By 1928, an estimated 1.5 million Americans owned stock—still a small minority of the country’s 28 million families, but far more than in the past.

The Decline of Labor With the defeat of the labor upsurge of 1919 and the dismantling of the wartime regulatory state, business appropriated the rhetoric of Americanism and “industrial freedom” as weapons against labor unions. Some corporations during the 1920s implemented a new style of management. They provided their employees with private pensions and medical insurance plans, job security, and greater workplace safety. They established sports programs to occupy their employees’ leisure time. They spoke of “welfare capitalism,” a more socially conscious kind of business leadership, and trumpeted the fact that they now paid more attention to the “human factor” in employment.

At the same time, however, employers in the 1920s embraced the American Plan, at whose core stood the open shop—a workplace free of both government regulation and unions, except, in some cases, “company unions” created and controlled by management. Collective bargaining, declared one group of employers, represented “an infringement of personal liberty and a menace to the institutions of a free people.” Prosperity, they insisted, depended on giving business complete freedom of action. This message was reinforced in a propaganda campaign that linked unionism and socialism as examples of the sinister influence of foreigners on American life. Even the most forward-looking companies continued to employ strikebreakers, private detectives, and the blacklisting of union organizers to prevent or defeat strikes.

During the 1920s, organized labor lost more than 2 million members, and unions agreed to demand after demand by employers in an effort to stave off complete elimination. In cities like Minneapolis, New Orleans, and Seattle, once centers of thriving labor movements, unions all but disappeared. Uprisings by the most downtrodden workers did occur sporadically throughout the decade. Southern textile mills witnessed desperate strikes by workers who charged employers with “making slaves out of the men and women” who labored there. Facing the combined opposition of business, local politicians, and the courts, as well as the threat of violence, such strikes were doomed to defeat.

The Equal Rights Amendment The idealistic goals of World War Ⅰ, wrote the young Protestant minister Reinhold Niebuhr, seemingly had been abandoned: “We are rapidly becoming the most conservative nation on earth.” Like the labor movement, feminists struggled to adapt to the new political situation. The achievement of suffrage in 1920 eliminated the bond of unity between various activists, each “struggling for her own conception of freedom,” in the words of labor reformer Juliet Stuart Poyntz. Black feminists insisted that the movement must now demand enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment in the South, but they won little support from white counterparts. A few prominent feminists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch, joined the rapidly diminishing Socialist Party, convinced that women should support an independent electoral force that promoted governmental protection of vulnerable workers.

The long-standing division between two competing conceptions of woman’s freedom—one based on motherhood, the other on individual autonomy and the right to work—now crystallized in the debate over an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution promoted by Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party. This amendment proposed to eliminate all legal distinctions “on account of sex.” In Paul’s opinion, the ERA followed logically from winning the right to vote. Having gained political equality, she insisted, women no longer required special legal protection—they needed equal access to employment, education, and all the other opportunities of citizens. To supporters of mothers’ pensions and laws limiting women’s hours of labor, which the ERA would sweep away, the proposal represented a giant step backward. Apart from the National Woman’s Party, every major female organization, from the League of Women Voters to the Women’s Trade Union League, opposed the ERA.

In the end, none of these groups achieved success in the 1920s. The ERA campaign failed, as did a proposed constitutional amendment giving Congress the power to prohibit child labor, which farm groups and business organizations opposed. In 1929, Congress repealed the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, a major achievement of the maternalist reformers that had provided federal assistance to programs for infant and child health.

Women’s Freedom

(Left) Advertisers marketed cigarettes to women as symbols of female independence. The August 27, 1925, cover of Life magazine shows a young man and a young woman dressed identically at the beach in revealing bathing suits (by 1920s standards), both enjoying cigarettes. (Right) An ad for a