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UNIT 1-“SHOW ME THE MONEY”AMERICAN WESTManifest DestinyIn 1845 John L. O'Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, referred in his magazine to America's "Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." One of the most influential slogans ever coined, "manifest destiny" expressed the romantic emotion that led Americans to risk their lives to settle the Far West.The idea that America had a special destiny to stretch across the continent motivated many people to migrate West. The very idea of manifest destiny encouraged men and women to dream big dreams. "We Americans," wrote Herman Melville, one of this country's greatest novelists, "are the peculiar, chosen people--the Israel of our time."Manifest destiny inspired a 29-year old named Stephen F. Austin to talk grandly of colonizing the Mexican province of Texas with "North American population, enterprise and intelligence." It led expansionists, united behind the slogan "54° 40' or fight!," to demand that the United States should own the entire Pacific Northwest all the way to the southern border of Alaska.Aggressive nationalists invoked the idea to justify Indian removal, war with Mexico, and American expansion into Cuba and Central America. More positively, the idea of manifest destiny inspired missionaries, farmers, and pioneers, who dreamed only of transforming plains and fertile valleys into farms and small towns.Westward MigrationMining, Farming and the Cattle IndustryThe Comstock Lode and the Mining FrontierThe richest silver deposit in American history was discovered in 1857 in Nevada. Two brothers, Evan and Hosea Grosh, found the deposit, but died before they were able to record their claims. Henry Comstock, a sheepherder and prospector, who cared for the brothers' cabin, unsuccessfully tried to find gold on the land, sold his claims within months, and died a poor man. But the silver lode came to bear his name.While the Comstock claim did contain some gold, miners were unable to get to it because it of an abundance of bluish clay. It turned out that the clay was silver of exceptional purity. This discovery triggered a rush of thousands of miners to the area. A railroad was quickly built and the area became one of the most heavily industrialized areas in the West.Virginia City, a town built on top of the mother lode, was the most important city between Chicago and the Pacific in the 1870s. The population soared from 4,000 in 1862 to 25,000 in 1874. The town's six-story hotel had the only elevator west of Chicago, and downtown had 110 saloons, several opium dens, and 20 theaters and music halls.Largely because of Virginia City's population boom, Nevada Territory was created in 1861 and statehood came just three years later. By the 1870s, over $230 million had been produced by the mines, helping to finance the Civil War and bolstering the value of the Union's paper greenbacks. But beginning in 1877, Virginia City's population began to decline, and by 1930, only 500 still lived in the town.Working the Comstock Lode was extraordinarily dangerous. Apart from the risk of cave-ins and underground fires, miners had to worry about underground flooding. The temperature of water below 700 feet rose to 108 degrees. When miners penetrated through rock, steam and scalding water would pour into the tunnel, and miners had to jump into cages, risking death if the hoisting mechanisms failed to lift them quickly enough.It was in Virginia City that Samuel Clemens acquired the pseudonym Mark Twain. At the age of 26 in the summer of 1862, with just $45 to his name, Clemens accepted a job as a $25 a week reporter for Virginia City's most influential daily newspaper. A year later he began signing the name "Mark Twain" to his columns. In a letter to his mother he described life in the rowdy mining town:I have just heard five pistol shots down the street.... The pistol did its work well...two of my friends [were shot]. Both died within three minutes.In his book, Roughing It, Twain described the arduous process of refining the ore. Workers, wielding sledgehammers, broke up the ore, which was then pulverized by machines. The dust was mixed with water, mercury, and salt in heated tubs. The mercury attracted particles of silver and gold. When heated, the mercury evaporated, leaving pure gold and silver. About 15 million pounds of poisonous mercury were used to extract gold and silver from the ore. Today, the Comstock mines are contaminated with levels of mercury 26 times higher than the federal standard.One of the earliest discovers of the Comstock Lode's silver riches was George Hearst, who later found more mineral wealth in the mountains of Utah and South Dakota and finally the Anaconda copper deposits in Montana. His son, William Randolph Hearst would become the nation's most powerful publishing baron. Beginning with The San Francisco Examiner, which his father gave him in 1887, when William was 24, he would develop the nation's first media empire, including newspapers in most major cities and a string of magazines.In the late 1850s and 1860s, gold and silver strikes brought thousands of miners to Nevada and Colorado. The discovery of gold in Colorado in 1858 brought more than 100,000 to the area. On land that was promised to Arapahoe and Cheyenne Indians in an 1851 treaty, Denver was founded in November 1858. The discovery of precious metals in Nevada and Colorado in the late 1850s was followed by rushes to Idaho and Montana in the 1860s, and the Black Hills of South Dakota in the 1870s.The Farming Frontier Farming on the Great Plains depended on a series of technological innovations. Lacking much rainfall, farmers had to drill wells several hundred feet into the ground to tap into underground aquifers. Windmill-powered pumps were necessary to bring the water to the surface and irrigate fields. Steel tipped plows were necessary to cut through the plains' grasses dense roots. To make up for a scarcity of farm labor, farmers relied heavily on mechanical threshing machinery.The Homestead ActTo encourage farmers to settle on the Great Plains, Congress passed the Homestead Act in 1862. This act allowed any citizen or any immigrant intending to become a citizen to get title to 160 acres of land by paying a small fee, living on the tract for five years, and making a few improvements. It also allowed settlers to pay $1.25 an acre and own the land immediately.Homestead Patent No. 1 was granted to a Daniel Freeman in 1862 for a tract in Nebraska. Between 1862 and 1900, the Homestead Act provided farms to more than 400,000 families.Homesteading proved to be very difficult. About a third of those who tried to develop homesteads eventually failed. On the Great Plains, rain was scarce and a farm or ranch of 160 acres was too small to be economical.ExodustersExodusters were African American homesteaders who moved westward during the last decades of the nineteenth century to settle the Great Plains. After federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877 at the end of the twelve-year period of Reconstruction (1865–1877), civil rights for African Americans began to erode. Southern state legislatures adopted laws, so-called "black codes," to restrict the movement, prosperity, and freedom of African Americans. A campaign of intimidation led by the Ku Klux Klan was intended to keep former slaves "in their place," a sentiment that seemed precariously close to the pre-Civil War slave-owner mentality. The system of sharecropping, whereby plantation owners—out of economic necessity—divided up their lands for former slave families to farm, resulted in numerous former slaves being indebted to landowners. State laws, such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses, were also designed to keep African American citizens from voting, and effectively disenfranched them. Unable to improve their economic conditions, severely oppressed by the terror of the Ku Klux Klan, and unable to participate in government, southern African Americans became disillusioned—the American Civil War (1861–1865) had seemingly done little to change their quality of life. This situation prompted a mass exodus of blacks from the South during the last two decades of the nineteenth century.While many southern African Americans migrated to cities in the North, in 1879 a major migration onto the dusty plains of Kansas began a flow westward as well. By the end of the 1800s, "all-black" towns could be found in Oklahoma and other western states. Some who migrated onto the Great Plains took advantage of the Homestead Act of 1862, which allowed them to settle up to 160 acres (64 hectares) of land, and lay claim to it after a period of five (and later just three) years. These homesteaders braved the harsh climate of the open plains to carve out a living for themselves. The exodusters ("exodus" since they had left the South en masse, and "dusters" since they settled the dry prairie region) helped transform the Great Plains into a prosperous agricultural region.The Cattle FrontierThe development of the railroad made it profitable to raise cattle on the Great Plains. In 1860, some five-million longhorn cattle grazed in the Lone Star state. Cattle that could be bought for $3 to $5 a head in Texas could be sold for $30 to $50 at railroad shipping points in Abilene or Dodge City in Kansas. Cowboys had to drive their cattle a thousand miles northward to reach the Kansas railheads.Although the popular image of the cowboy is of John Wayne or Roy Rodgers, many of the cowboys were African Americans or Mexican Americans. About one in five cowboys was a Mexican American and one in seven was black.By the 1880s, the cattle boom was over. An increase in the number of cattle led to overgrazing and destruction of the fragile Plains grasses. Sheep ranchers competed for scarce water, and the sheep ate the grass so close to the ground that cattle could no longer feed on it. Bitter range wars erupted when cattle ranchers, sheep ranchers, and farmers fenced in their land using barbed wire. The romantic era of the long drive and the cowboy came to an end when two harsh winters in 1885-1886 and 1886-1887, followed by two dry summers, killed 80 to 90 percent of the cattle on the Plains. As a result, corporate-owned ranches replaced individually owned ranches.After the terrible winters, many ranchers decided to fence in their cattle rather than letting them roam freely. The invention of barbed wire made it possible to build fences without lumber and protect railroad tracks from stampeding animals. The first barbed wire was produced in 1868 and early barbed wire had to be manufactured by hand. Two strands of wire were wound together and barbs were then threaded through the wires.A salesman, John "Bet a Million" Gates, helped convince ranchers to adopt barbed wire. (He received his nickname because he reportedly lost $1 million when he bet about which raindrop would slide down a train window the fastest). In San Antonio, Texas, Gates bet local ranchers that they could not drive steers out of a corral made up of eight strands of barbed wire.Plains IndiansThe Plains Indians got their name because they lived among the Great Plains of the United States. This vast expansion of land extended all the way from Mississippi to the mountains of Canada. In order to survive, the Plains Indians hunted buffalo as their main source of food. They would typically surround the buffalo on horse, until the group of Indians drove it to run off of a cliff. At that point, the buffalo would be dead and ready for consumption. Not only was hunting an integral part of Plains Indians’ life, religion was as well.The worship of the Great Spirit was key to their beliefs. A dance performed called the Sun Dance was a way to show respect and love for their God. This dance would often take place over the span of four days; much of it spent staring up at the sun.The use of shamans was also a large part of the Plains Indians way of life. These shamans were like medicine men, which tended to the sick and made up medicinal concoctions. Many times they would simply approach the sick person and try to convince them that were not really sick. Other times, they would attempt to use natural medicines by combining fruits and vegetables into a sort of potion believed to promote healing. The Earth was considered the Plains Indians’ female God, and so all of her rich resources were utilized in some way. Usually the men would be assigned to hunt, traveling in groups wielding shields, arrows, and handmade knives and swords. The men’s shields often had various symbols on them such as animals, feathers, and stones which were used to represent protection. The women would stay back at the camp, watching the children, weaving blankets, and cooking. Overall, Plains Indians life was efficient, spiritual, and integral to Native American history.Plains Indian WarsAfter the Civil War, thousands of Americans poured into the Great Plains on a collision course with western Indian tribes. Homesteaders, ranchers, and miners encroached on Indian lands and threatened native game and ways of life. They called on the U.S. Army to crush Indian resistance and confine tribes to government-controlled reservations.In the decades following the Civil War, the U.S. Army fought dozens of engagements with Indians in the West. Lakota Chief Sitting Bull asked, “If the white men take my country, where can I go?”The Fort Laramie treaty between the United States and the Lakota Indians was signed in 1868. Designed to bring long-lasting peace, it promised the Lakota that the Black Hills, which they considered sacred, would become a permanent part of the Lakota Indian reservation.In 1874, however, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer led an expedition of 1,000 men and 110 wagons to explore the Black Hills. His stated goal was to identify a site for a fort to protect this Indian land. In fact, he was also interested in rumors that the Black Hills contained gold deposits. Custer found the rumor was correct. Prospectors quickly began staking illegal claims on the land, and then demanding that the army protect them from Indian attacks. This set the stage for another clash of arms.The Sand Creek MassacreSenator Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, the lone American Indian in Congress, called it "one of the most disgraceful moments in American history." About 700 U.S. army volunteers stormed through an Indian encampment near Big Sandy Creek in Colorado, slaughtering scores of women and children. This episode became known as the Sand Creek Massacre.In the Spring of 1864, a wing of the Cheyenne tribe unleashed attacks on white settlers, which prompted John M. Chivington, a Methodist minister who had become Colorado's military commander and was eager to become a member of Congress, to call for volunteer Indian fighters for 100-day enlistments. On November 29, 1864, the colonel and his volunteers rode into the Arapaho-Cheyenne reservation, where Indians led by the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle had set up a camp weeks earlier. A white flag and an American flag flew above Black Kettle's tepee.After unleashing cannon fire into the village, the volunteers swept the Creek bed, killing every Indian they could find, often hunting down fleeing children. "Kill them big and small," Chivington reportedly said, "nits become lice" (nits are the eggs of lice). After six hours, about 150 Indians, a quarter of the camp's population, lay dead. The soldiers took three prisoners, all children. A dozen soldiers were killed, some apparently by friendly fire in the frenzy.Eyewitness accounts are chilling. Lt. Joseph Cranmer described "a squaw ripped open and a child taken from her. Little children shot while begging for their lives." Capt. Silas Soule, who was assassinated after testifying at a congressional inquiry, said, "it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized." A joint congressional committee concluded that Chivington "deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre, which would have disgraced the savage among those who were victims of his cruelty."In response to the massacre, President Lincoln replaced Colorado's territorial governor. A Congressional inquiry condemned the battle as a massacre. The Cheyenne and Arapaho were promised reparations in an 1865 treaty, but none were paid.Little BighornAt Little Bighorn (known to Indians as Greasy Grass), the U.S. Army suffered its greatest loss during the western Indian Wars.On June 25, 1876, the army sent some 1,600 troops, including the Seventh Cavalry, to trap a large group of roaming Lakota Indians and force them onto a reservation. The plan was to attack simultaneously from three sides. However, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer, who led one body of troops, thought he had enough men to defeat the Indians alone. He divided his 600 troops into thirds and attacked. The Indians greatly outnumbered Custer, and defeated each group in turn, killing Custer and more than 200 others. The loss so outraged the government that it mounted a new offensive that finally crushed armed Lakota resistance.Buffalo SoldiersIn 1866 and 1867, the army recruited six regiments of African Americans for regular service, about 6,000 men. Organized as four infantry and two cavalry regiments, they participated in many actions against Indians. Because of their thick curly hair and fighting spirit, the Indians called them buffalo soldiers.GeronimoGeronimo and his band of Chiricahua Apache fought government domination longer than any other group of Indians. In the 1870s, the United States forcibly moved the Chiricahua to an arid reservation in eastern Arizona. Geronimo resisted at first, but was caught and seemingly became resigned to reservation life. In 1881, however, he and his band escaped and began raiding settlements in the United States and Mexico.Until his final surrender in 1886, Geronimo would at times agree to stay on the reservation, and then flee with marauding warriors. He became infamous in sensational press reports. In the final campaign against him, the army needed Apache scouts plus more than 5,000 soldiers to hunt him down. General Nelson A. Miles led the force that finally captured Geronimo. Miles had served bravely in the Civil War, when he was wounded four times and accorded the Medal of Honor. He received the medal shown here for service in the Indian Wars, during which he defeated Crazy Horse of the Lakota and captured Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce.Wounded KneeStirred by a spiritual revival centering on the “Ghost Dance,” a group of Lakota left their reservation in South Dakota. On December 29, 1890, as they returned to surrender, a scuffle broke out. Hearing a shot, soldiers fired, killing more than 200 men, women, and children—the last to die in the Indian Wars.AmericanizationAfter being forced off their native lands, many American Indians found life to be most difficult. Beginning in the first half of the 19th century, federal policy dictated that certain tribes be confined to fixed land plots to continue their traditional ways of life.The problems with this approach were manifold. Besides the moral issue of depriving a people of life on their historic land, many economic issues plagued the reservation. Nomadic tribes lost their entire means of subsistence by being constricted to a defined area. Farmers found themselves with land unsuitable for agriculture. Many lacked the know-how to implement complex irrigation systems. Hostile tribes were often forced into the same proximity. The results were disastrous.The Dawes ActFaced with disease, alcoholism, and despair on the RESERVATIONS, federal officials changed directions with the DAWES SEVERALTY ACT of 1887. Each Native American family was offered 160 acres of tribal land to own outright. Although the land could not be sold for 25 years, these new land owners could farm it for profit like other farmers in the West.Congress hoped that this system would end the dependency of the tribes on the federal government, enable Indians to become individually prosperous, and assimilate the Indians into mainstream American life. After 25 years, participants would become American citizens.The Dawes Act was widely resisted. Tribal leaders foretold the end of their ancient folkways and a further loss of communal land. When individuals did attempt this new way of life, they were often unsuccessful. Farming the West takes considerable expertise. Lacking this knowledge, many were still dependent upon the government for assistance.Many 19th century Americans saw the Dawes Act as a way to "civilize" the Native Americans. Visiting missionaries attempted to convert the Indians to Christianity, although they found few new believers."Americanizing" the IndiansLand not allotted to individual landholders was sold to railroad companies and settlers from the East. The proceeds were used to set up schools to teach the reading and writing of English. Native American children were required to attend the established reservation school. Failure to attend would result in a visit by a truant officer who could enter the home accompanied by police to search for the absent student. Some parents felt resistance to "white man education" was a matter of honor.In addition to disregarding tribal languages and religions, schools often forced the pupils to dress like eastern Americans. They were given shorter haircuts. Even the core of individual identity — one's name — was changed to "AMERICANIZE" the children. These practices often led to further tribal divisions. Each tribe had those who were friendly to American "assistance" and those who were hostile. Friends were turned into enemies.The Dawes Act was an unmitigated disaster for tribal units. In 1900, land held by Native American tribes was half that of 1880. Land holdings continued to dwindle in the early 20th century. When the Dawes Act was repealed in 1934, alcoholism, poverty, illiteracy, and suicide rates were higher for Native Americans than any other ethnic group in the United States. As America grew to the status of a world power, the first Americans were reduced to hopelessness.Transcontinental RailroadAlong with the development of the atomic bomb, the digging of the Panama Canal, and landing the first men on the moon, the construction of a transcontinental railroad was one of the United States' greatest technological achievements. Railroad track had to be laid over 2,000 miles of rugged terrain, including mountains of solid granite.Before the transcontinental railroad was completed, travel overland by stagecoach cost $1,000, took five or six months, and involved crossing rugged mountains and arid desert. The alternatives were to travel by sea around the tip of South America, a distance of 18,000 miles; or to cross the Isthmus of Panama, then travel north by ship to California. Each route took months and was dangerous and expensive. The transcontinental railroad would make it possible to complete the trip in five days at a cost of $150 for a first-class sleeper.The first spikes were driven in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War. Two companies competed to lay as much track as possible. The Central Pacific built east from Sacramento, Calif., while the Union Pacific built west from Omaha, Neb. The government gave the companies rights of way of 200 feet on each side of the track and financial aid of $16,000 to $48,000 for each mile of track laid.At first, the Union Pacific, this had flat terrain, raced ahead. The Central Pacific had to run train track through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Working three shifts around the clock, Chinese immigrants hand drilled holes into which they packed black powder and later nitroglycerine. The progress in the tunnels through the mountains was agonizingly slow, an average of a foot a day.Stung by the Union Pacific's record of eight miles of track laid in a single day, the Central Pacific concocted a plan to lay 10 miles in a day. Eight Irish tracklayers put down 3,520 rails, while other workers laid 25,800 ties and drove 28,160 spikes in a single day. On May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah, a golden spike was hammered into the final tie.The transcontinental railroad was built in six years almost entirely by hand. Workers drove spikes into mountains, filled the holes with black powder, and blasted through the rock inch by inch. Handcarts moved the drift from cuts to fills. Bridges, including one 700 feet long and 126 feet in the air, had to be constructed to ford streams. Thousands of workers, including Irish and German immigrants, former Union and Confederate soldiers, freed slaves, and especially Chinese immigrants played a part in the construction. Chinese laborers first went to work for the Central Pacific as it began crossing California's Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1865. At one point, 8,000 of the 10,000 men toiling for the Central Pacific were Chinese. At one point, Chinese workers were lowered in hand-woven reed baskets to drill blasting holes in the rock. They placed explosives in each hole, lit the fuses, and were, hopefully, pulled up before the powder was detonated. Explosions, freezing temperatures, and avalanches in the High Sierras killed hundreds. When Chinese workers struck for higher pay, a Central Pacific executive withheld their food supplies until they agreed to go back to work.An English-Chinese phrase book from 1867 translated the following phrases into Chinese:Can you get me a good boy? He wants $8 a month? He ought to be satisfied with $6.... Come at 7 every morning. Go home at 8 every night. Light the fire. Sweep the rooms. Wash the clothes. Wash the windows. Sweep the stairs. Trim the lamps. I want to cut his wages.Many of the railroad's builders viewed the Plains Indians as obstacles to be removed. General William Tecumseh Sherman wrote in 1867: "The more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next year, for the more I see of these Indians the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers."Construction of the railroad provided many opportunities for financial chicanery, corruption, graft, and bribery. The greatest financial scandal of the 19th century grew out of the railroad's construction. The president of the Union Pacific helped found a construction company, called Credit Mobilier, which allowed investors, including several members of Congress, to grant lucrative construction contracts to themselves, while nearly bankrupting the railroad.The railroad had profound effects on American life. New phrases entered the American vocabulary such as "time's up," "time's a wasting," and "the train is leaving the station." It also led to the division of the nation into four standard time zones. In addition, the railroads founded many of the towns on the Great Plains on land grants they were awarded by the federal government, and then sold the land to settlers.The completion of the transcontinental railroad changed the nation. Western agricultural products, coal, and minerals could move freely to the east coast. Just as the Civil War united North and South, the transcontinental railroad united East and West. Passengers and freight could reach the west coast in a matter of days instead of months at one-tenth the cost. Settlers rushed into what was previously considered a desert wasteland. The 1890 Census would declare that the American frontier had disappeared. The railroad was a major cause.Equally important, the success of the transcontinental railroad encouraged an American faith that with money, determination, and organization anything can be accomplished. The construction of railroad demonstrated the effectiveness of complex military-like organization and assembly-line processes.INDUSTRIALIZATION AND URBANIZATIONThe Making of Modern AmericaThe late 19th century saw the advent of new communication technologies, including the phonograph, the telephone, and radio; the rise of mass-circulation newspapers and magazines; the growth of commercialized entertainment, as well as new sports, including basketball, bicycling, and football, and appearance of new transportation technologies, such as the automobile, electric trains and trolleys.The Wizard of Menlo ParkHe was hailed as "The Wizard of Menlo Park." The New York World, in 1901, called him "Our Greatest Living American, The Foremost Creative and Constructive Mind of This Country, Our True National Genius." He was portrayed in the movies by two different Hollywood stars, Mickey Rooney and Spencer Tracy.He had 1,093 patents to his name and paved the way for many electricity based technologies years before the physics of electricity was understood. His inventions include the dictating machine, the electric light, the electrified railroad, the fluorescent lamp, the mimeograph machine, the movie camera, the phonograph, Portland cement, and wax paper. But his greatest invention was none of these--it was the development of the modern research laboratory and a research team.Born in rural Ohio in 1847, Thomas Edison was the archetypal self-made titan who had risen from humble origins to become the most famous inventor in the world. He had little formal schooling and his outlook was quintessentially American: practical, optimistic, and suspicious of intellectuals. By the age of 10, he had a small chemical laboratory in his cellar and was operating a home made telegraph. When he was 12, he hawked newspapers, magazines, and candy on a train from 7 in the morning until 9 at night. He printed a newspaper and conducted experiments in the train's baggage room. When one of his experiments started a fire, he lost his job.He was partially deaf, and was ridiculed by other students and never completed grade school. When a teacher pronounced his mind "addled," his mother took him out of school and taught him herself. His second wife would tap out conversations in Morse code on his knee. In later years, he said that his lack of hearing saved him from many distractions.His started out as an itinerant telegraph operator, traveling from town to town; his first invention was a device that repeated Morse code at a slower speed, so he could more easily transcribe the messages. His first invention to make money was a ticker tape to convey stock market prices to brokerage houses. He became a millionaire in his forties.He often worked 24 hours straight, except for five-minute naps. "Genius," he said, "was one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration."When he announced the phonograph in 1877, a Yale University professor told the New York Sun that "The idea of a talking machine is ridiculous." After he announced that he had made an incandescent lamp, a board of inquiry convened by the British Parliament concluded that his claim was impossible and "unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men."Contrary to popular belief, he did not invent the light bulb. Rather, he figured out how to make it a durable and inexpensive consumer item. He promised to make bulbs "so cheap that only the wealthy can afford to burn candles." The key was to find a long-lasting filament. He tested over 6,000 different materials.Far from being a solitary genius, Edison created the first modern research laboratory. Far from being a lone tinkerer, he employed as many as 200 laboratory assistants and machinists at his facilities in Menlo Park and West Orange, N.J. His West Orange factory had 10,000 employees in the mid-1910s. Edison demonstrated that it was possible to produce a steady stream of new inventions and technologies. Early in his career he said that his goal was "a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so."He was also the first inventor to develop links with major corporations that were willing to finance his inventions. He formed links with Cornelius Vanderbilt, who owned Western Union, the telegraph company, and with J.P. Morgan.He made some mistakes. He championed direct current (DC), when George Westinghouse pushed for alternating current (AC), which could move efficiency over long distances. He stuck with a battery-powered electric car, while Henry Ford put out a cheaper gas-powered model. He spent millions on pre-fabricated concrete houses.A prankster, he nicknamed his children Dot and Dash and proposed to his second wife in Morse code.An Age of InnovationThe late 19th century witnessed the birth of modern America. These years saw the advent of new technologies of communication, including the phonograph, the telephone, and radio. They also saw the rise of the mass media: of mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, best-selling novels, million dollar national advertising campaigns. These years witnessed the rise of commercialized entertainment, including the amusement park, the urban nightclub, the dance hall, and first motion pictures. Many modern sports, including basketball, bicycling, football, and golf were introduced to the United States, as were new transportation technologies, such as the automobile, electric trains and trolleys, and, in 1903, the airplane. They also saw the birth of the modern university.In the span of a single decade, the country underwent a decisive series of shifts. Between 1896 and 1905 the economic depression of the mid-1890s ended and the Populist movement collapsed. A great merger movement consolidated American business. The Republican Party achieved dominance in national politics that it largely maintained until the Great Depression. A new immigration from eastern and southern Europe altered the nation's ethnic and religious composition. Laboratory based science reshaped the practice of medicine. The United States emerged as a world on the international scene. Improved communication facilitated the rapid rise of national organizations, complex bureaucracies, and professionalization. At the same time, communication, entertainment, and transportation were revolutionized.The Birth of Modern CultureToward the end of the 19th century, a New York neurologist named George M. Beard coined the term "neurasthenia" to describe a psychological ailment that afflicted a growing number of Americans. Neurasthenia's symptoms included "nervous dyspepsia, insomnia, hysteria, hypochondria, asthma, sick-headache, skin rashes, hayfever, premature baldness, inebriety, hot and cold flashes, nervous exhaustion, brain-collapse, or forms of 'elementary insanity.'" Among those who suffered from neurasthenia-like symptoms at some point in their lives were Theodore Roosevelt, settlement house founder Jane Addams, psychologist William James, painter Frederic Remington, and novelist Theodore Dreiser.According to expert medical opinion, neurasthenia's underlying cause was "over-civilization." The frantic pace of modern life, nervous overstimulation, stress, and emotional repression produced debilitating bouts of depression, anxiety attacks, and nervous prostration. Fears of over-civilization pervaded late 19th century American culture. Social critics worried that urban life was producing a generation of pathetic, pampered, physically and morally enfeebled 97 pound weaklings. Modern Americans, in this view, were poor successors to the stalwart Americans who had fought the Civil War and tamed a continent.A sharply falling birth rate sparked fears that the native-born middle class was, in Theodore Roosevelt's words, committing "race suicide" by allowing their numbers to be swamped by a flood of immigrants. A host of therapies promised to relieve the symptoms of neurasthenia, including such precursors of modern tranquilizers as Dr. Hammond's Nerve and Brain Pills. Sears even sold an electrical contraption called the Heidelberg Electric Belt, designed to reduce anxiety by sending electric shocks to the genitals. Many physicians prescribed physical exercise for men and rest cures for women. But the main form of release for late 19th century Americans from the pressures, stresses, and restrictions of modern life was by turning to sports, outdoor activities, and a vibrant popular culture.Few Americans are unfamiliar with the wrenching economic transformations of the late 19th century, the consolidation of economic transformations of the late 19th century, the consolidation of industry, the integration of the national economy, and the rise of the corporation. But few Americans realize that this period also saw the birth of modern culture.In the last years of the 19th century, an ethos of self-fulfillment, leisure and sensual satisfaction began to replace the Victorian spirit of self-denial, self-restraint, and domesticity. Visual images took their place beside words and reading, which had been the essence of Victorian high learning. A new respect for energy, strength, and virility overtook the genteel endorsement of eternal truths and high moral ideals. Above all, a varied culture deeply divided by class, gender, religion, ethnicity, and locality gave way to a vibrant, commercialized mass culture that provided all Americans with standardized entertainment and information.The Revolt Against VictorianismThe new mood could be seen in a rage for competitive athletics and team sports. It was in the 1890s that boxing began to rival baseball as the nation's most popular sport, basketball was invented, football swept the nation's college campuses, and golf, track, and wrestling became popular pastimes. The celebration of vigor could also be seen in a new enthusiasm for such outdoor activities as hiking, hunting, fishing, mountain climbing, camping, and bicycling.A new bold, energetic spirit was also apparent in popular music, in a craze for ragtime, jazz, and patriotic military marches. The culture of toughness and virility appeared in the growth of nationalism (culminating in 1898 in America's "Splendid Little War" against Spain), the condemnation of sissies and stuffed shirts, and the growing popularity of aggressively masculine western novels such as Owen Wister's The Virginian.Toward the end of the 19th century, the New Woman--personified by the tall, athletic Gibson Girl--supplanted the frail, submissive Victorian woman as a cultural ideal. The new woman began to work outside the home in increasing numbers, attend high school and college, and, increasingly, press for the vote. During the 1890s, American popular culture was in a full-scale revolt against the stifling Victorian code of propriety.During the mid-19th century, urban reformers had responded to the rapid growth of cities by advocating the construction of parks to serve as rural retreats in the midst of urban jungles. Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York City's Central Park, believed that the park's bucolic calm would instill the values of sobriety and self-control in the urban masses. But by the end of the century, it was clear that those masses had grown tired of sobriety and self-control. This was clearly seen at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, where the most popular area was the boisterous, rowdy Midway. Here visitors rode the ferris wheel and watched "Little Egypt" and "hootchie-koochie girls" perform exotic dances.Entrepreneurs were quick to satisfy the public's desire for fast-paced entertainment. During the 1890s, a series of popular amusement parks opened in Coney Island in New York. Unlike Central Park, Coney Island glorified adventure. It offered exotic, dreamlike landscapes and a loose, free social environment. At Coney Island men could remove their coats and ties and both sexes could enjoy rare personal freedom.Central Park was supposed to reinforce self-control and delayed gratification. Coney Island was a consumer's world of extravagance, gaiety, abandon, revelry, and instant gratification. It attracted working-class Americans who longed for a taste of the good life. If a person could never hope to own a mansion in Newport, R.I., he or she could for a few dimes experience the exotic pleasures of Luna Park or Dreamland Park. Even the rides in the amusement park were designed to create illusions and break down reality. Mirrors distorted peoples' images and rides threw them off balance. At Luna Park, the "Witching Waves" simulated the bobbing of a ship at high sea, and the "Tickler" featured spinning circular cars that threw riders together.In part, the desire for intense physical and emotional experience was met through sports, athletics, and out-of-door activities. But its primary outlet was vicarious--through mass culture. Craving more intense experience, eager to break free of the confining boundaries of genteel culture, Americans turned to new kinds of newspapers and magazines and new forms of commercial entertainment.The Rise of Mass CommunicationThe last ten years of the 19th century were critical in the emergence of modern American mass culture. In those years emerged the modern instruments of mass communication--the mass-circulation metropolitan newspaper, the best-seller, the mass-market magazine, national advertising campaigns, radio, and the movies. American culture also made a critical shift to commercialized forms of entertainment.The Mass Market NewspaperThe urban tabloid was the first instrument to appear. It was pioneered by Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, and E.W. Scripp's St. Louis Post-Dispatch. These popular newspapers differed dramatically from the upper-class and staunchly partisan political newspapers that had dominated 19th century journalism. They featured banner headlines, a multitude of photographs and cartoons, and an emphasis on local news, crime, scandal, society news, and sports. Large ads made up half a paper's content, compared to just thirty percent in earlier newspapers. For easier reading on street railways, page size was cut, stories were shortened, and the text heavily illustrated.The Hungarian born Pulitzer migrated to the United States at the age of 17 and purchased the struggling New York World from financier Jay Gould. His newspaper crusaded against corruption and fraud. He pledged that the World would be "dedicated to the cause of the people rather than that of the purse-potentates" and would "expose all fraud and sham, fight all public evils and abuses...[and] serve and battle for the people." Using simple words, a lively style, and many illustrations, his newspaper could be read by many immigrants who understood little English. By 1905, the World had a circulation of two million.Hearst developed the newspaper's entertainment potential. Entertainment was stick in trade of yellow journalism (named for the "yellow kid" comic strip that appeared in the Journal). Among the innovations he pioneered were the first color comic strips, advice columns, women's pages, fashion pages, and sports pages.Scripps's legacy was the development of the business side of the modern American newspaper. From the early 1870s through his retirement in 1908, he established or bought more than 40 newspapers, stretching from Portland, Ore., to New York City. His biggest innovations were a national news service and a feature syndicate that provided all of his newspapers with common material. He claimed that he only needed two employees--a reporter and an editor--to start a newspaper, because he could rely on his news service and features syndicate. Syndicated material accounted for 25 to 35 percent of each issue and, at times, even up to half or three-quarters.Instead of directly competing for established readers, he instead sought to serve new readers. In his opinion, most newspapers either ignored or were hostile to the working class. His news stressed labor issues and was directed to a less-educated audience. His newspapers sold for just a penny at a time when others sold for two cents for home delivery and five cents on the street. His papers were half the size of other papers of the time.His papers exposed trusts, supported strikes, and favored government regulation of food and transportation industries, as well as government ownership of water and electric utilities. They advocated power for the common people by direct election of public office and through initiative, referendum, and recall. They offered advice on how to run a home on a limited budget.The Mass Circulation National Magazine, the Bestseller, and RecordsAlso during the 1890s the world of magazine publishing was revolutionized by the rise of the country's first mass circulation national magazines. After the Civil War, the magazine field was dominated by a small number of sedate magazines?-like The Atlantic, Harper's, and Scribner's--written for "gentle" reader with highly intellectual tastes. The poetry, serious fiction, and wood engravings that filled these monthly's pages rigidly conformed to upper-class Victorian standards of taste. These magazines embodied what the philosopher George Santayana called the "genteel tradition," the idea that art and literature should reinforce morality not portray reality. Art and literature, the custodians of culture believed, should transcend the real and uphold the ideal. Poet James Russell Lowell spoke for other genteel writers when he said that no man should describe any activity that would make his wife or daughter blush.The founders of the nation's first mass-circulation magazines considered the older "quality" magazines stale and elitist. In contrast, their magazines featured practical advice, popularized science, gossip, human interest stories, celebrity profiles, interviews, "muckraking" investigations, pictures, articles on timely topics--and a profusion of ads. Instead of cultivating a select audience, the new magazines had a very different set of priorities. By running popular articles, editors sought to maximize circulation, which, in turn, attracted advertising that kept the magazine's price low. By 1900, the nation's largest magazine, the Ladies’ Home Journal reached 850,000 subscribers--more than eight times the readership of Scribner's or Harper's.The end of the 19th century also marked a critical turning point in the history of book publishing, as marketing wizards like Frank Doubleday organized the first national book promotional campaigns, created the modern best seller, and transformed popular writers like Jack London into celebrities. The world of the Victorian man of letters, the defender of "Culture" against "Anarchy," had ended.At the International Exposition in Paris in 1878, 30,000 people lined up to see the first demonstration of Thomas Edison's phonograph. The phonograph was treated as a dictation machine for a decade after Thomas Edison invented it in 1877. It was not until 1890 that cylinders of recorded music were first sold. In 1901, cylinders gave way to discs.AdvertisingIn 1898, the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) launched the first million dollar national advertising campaign. It succeeded in making Uneeda biscuits and their water-proof "In-er-Seal" box popular household items. During the 1880s and 1890s, patent medicine manufacturers, department stores, and producers of low price packaged consumer goods (like Campbell Soups, H.J. Heinz, and Quaker Oats), developed modern advertising techniques. Where earlier advertisers made little use of brand names illustrations, or trademarks, the new ads made use of snappy slogans and colorful packages. As early as 1900, advertisements began to use psychology to arouse consumer demand by suggesting that a product would contribute to the consumer's social and psychic well-being. To induce purchases, observed a trade journal in 1890, a consumer "must be aroused, excited, terrified." Listerine mouthwash promised to cure "halitosis." Scott tissue claimed to prevent infections caused by harsh toilet paper.By stressing instant gratification and personal fulfillment in their ads, modern advertising helped undermine an earlier Victorian ethos emphasizing thrift, self-denial, delayed gratification, and hard work. In various ways, it transformed Americans from "savers" to "spenders" and told them to give in to their desire for luxury.The Purveyors of Mass CultureThe creators of the modern instruments of mass culture tended to share a common element in their background. Most were "outsiders"--recent immigrants or Southerners, Midwesterners, or Westerners. Joseph Pulitzer was an Austrian Jew, the pioneering "new" magazine editors, Edward W. Bok and Samuel Sidney McClure, were also first-generation immigrants. Where the "genteel tradition" was dominated by men and women from Boston's elite culture or upper-class New York, the men who created modern mass culture had their initial training in daily newspapers, commerce, and popular entertainment--and, as a result, were more in touch with popular tastes. As outsiders, the creators of mass culture betrayed an almost voyeuristic interest in what they called the "romance of real life," with high life, low life, power, and status.The new forms of popular culture that they helped create shared a common style: simple, direct, realistic, and colloquial. The 1890s were the years when a florid Victorian style was overthrown by a new "realistic" aesthetic. At various levels of American culture, writers and artists rebelled against the moralism and sentimentality of Victorian culture and sought to live objectively and truthfully, without idealization or avoiding the ugly. The quest for realism took a variety of guises. It could be seen in the naturalism of writers like Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane, with their nightmarish depictions of urban poverty and exploitation in the paintings of the "ashcan" school of art, with their vivid portraits of tenements and congested streets and in the forceful, colorful prose of tabloid reporters and muckraking journalists, who cut through the Victorian veil of reticence surrounding such topics as sex, political corruption, and working conditions in industry.Mass Culture BlossomsAlthough they relied on 19th century inventions, the most influential innovations in mass culture would take place after the turn-of-the-century. Thomas Edison first successfully projected moving pictures on a screen in 1896, but it would not be until 1903 that Edwin S. Porter's "The Great Train Robbery"--the first American movie to tell a story --demonstrated the commercial appeal of motion pictures. And while Guglielmo Marconi proved the possibility of wireless communication in 1895, commercial radio broadcasting did not begin until 1920 and commercial television broadcasts until 1939. In the 20th century, these new instruments of mass communication would reach audiences of unprecedented size. By 1922, movies sold 40 million tickets a week and radios could be found in three million homes.The emergence of these modern forms of mass communication had far-reaching effects upon American society. They broke down the isolation of local neighborhoods and communities and ensured that for the first time all Americans, -- regardless of their class, ethnicity, or locality -- began to share standardized information and mercialized LeisureOf all the differences between the 19th and 20th centuries, one of the most striking involves the rapid growth of commercialized entertainment. For much of the 19th century, commercial amusements were viewed as somehow suspect. Drawing on the Puritan criticisms of play and recreation and a Republican ideology that was hostile to luxury, hedonism, and extravagance, American Victorians tended to associate theaters, dance halls, circuses, and organized sports with such vices as gambling, swearing, drinking, and immoral sexual behavior. In the late 19th century, however, a new outlook--which revered leisure and play--began to challenge Victorian prejudices.During the first 20 years of the 20th century, attendance at professional baseball games doubled. Vaudeville, too, increased in popularity, featuring singing, dancing, skits, comics, acrobats, and magicians. Amusement parks, penny arcades, dance halls, and other commercial amusements flourished. As early as 1910, when there were 10,000 movie theaters, the movies had become the nation's most popular form of commercial entertainment.The rise of these new kinds of commercialized amusements radically reshaped the nature of American leisure activities. Earlier in the 19th century leisure activities had been sharply segregated on the basis of gender, class, and ethnicity. The wealthy attended their own exclusive theaters, concert halls, museums, restaurants, and sporting clubs. For the working class, leisure and amusement was rooted in particular ethnic communities and neighborhoods, each with its own saloons, churches, fraternal organizations, and organized sports. Men and women participated in radically different kinds of leisure activities. Many men (particularly bachelors and immigrants) relaxed in barber shops, billiard halls, and bowling alleys, joined volunteer fire companies or militias, and patronized saloons, gambling halls, and race tracks. Women took part in church activities and socialized with friends and relatives.After 1880, as incomes rose and leisure time expanded, new commercialized forms of cross-class, mixed-sex amusements proliferated. Entertainment became a major industry. Vaudeville theaters attracted women as well as men. The young, in particular, increasingly sought pleasure, escape, and the freedom to experiment free of parental control in mixed-sex crowds in relatively inexpensive amusement parks, dance halls, urban night clubs, and, above all, nickelodeons and movie theaters.The transformation of Coney Island symbolized the emergence of a new leisure culture, emphasizing excitement, glamour, fashion, and romance. Formerly a center of male vice--of brothels, saloons, and gambling dens--Coney Island became the nation's first modern amusement park, complete with ferris wheels, hootchie kootchie girls, restaurants, and concert halls. Its informality and sheer excitement attracted people of every class.If Coney Island offered an escape from an oppressive urban landscape to an exotic one, the new motion picture industry would offer an even less expensive, more convenient escape. During the early 20th century, it quickly developed into the country's most popular and influential form of art and entertainment.The UniversityColleges underwent profound changes after the Civil War. Before the war, colleges relied heavily on drill and rote memorization. These institutions prescribed almost all of a student's course of study. Subjects that were viewed as too practical were excluded from the curriculum.The Morrill Act, which granted land for higher education in each state, had been opposed by southerners on constitutional grounds and vetoed by President James Buchanan. It became law in 1862. The Morrill Act specifically directed that the endowed institutions were "to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts." The underlying idea was that educational institutions should support occupations in industry and the professions.The Gilded Age gave birth to the major intellectual institution in modern American life: the university. Modeled on German universities, these institutions did not simply train undergraduates. They also provided graduate and professional training in law, medicine, engineering, and other fields.Within these new universities, the sciences received stature equal to that of the humanities and the curriculum was flexible and unrestricted. The elective system, promoted at Cornell and Harvard from the 1860s onward, made universities more attractive to a broader range of students and expanded the skills that they acquired. Cornell promptly provided programs in civil engineering. Cornell's president, Andrew D. White, insisted that the institution prove its value by investigating social problems and training public leaders. But the new universities were also interested in knowledge for its own sake. They offered courses in areas that were not obviously practical, such as archaeology, astronomy, and Sanskrit.By the 1890s, universities began to borrow organizations and procedures from business. University presidents delegated responsibility to subordinates known as the administration. University education was better organized numerically, with credit hours, grade points. The faculty divided into departments and divisions. Modern higher education had been born.Industrialization and the Working ClassThis chapter examines the impact of and responses to industrialization among American workers, including the attempt to form labor unions despite strong opposition from many industrialists and the courts.Labor in the Age of IndustrializationLabor conflict was never more contentious or violent in the United States than during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when bloody confrontations wracked the railroad, steel, and mining industries. During the early 1880s, there were about 500 strikes a year involving about 150,000 workers. By the 1890, the number had climbed to a thousand a year involving 700,000 workers a year, and by the early 1900s, the number of strikes had climbed to 4,000 annually. Some 500 times government sent in militias or federal troops to put down labor strikes. While most labor clashes took place in the mines and mills of the east and Midwest, bloody incidents involving private police forces, state militias, and federal troops also took place on the New Orleans and San Francisco waterfronts and in the mining districts of Colorado and Idaho.During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, labor struggles were more acute in the United States than in many European countries. Today, in contrast, labor relations in the United States are more cooperative and less conflict-ridden than elsewhere. The story of how the United States forged an enduring and workable system of collective bargaining after more than half a century of bitter struggles is one of the most important themes in modern American history.American Labor in Comparative PerspectiveIn 1905, Werner Sombart, a German social democrat who became a Nazi party supporter in the 1930s, asked why the American working class--unlike the workers in every other industrialized country--never produced a genuinely mass-based political party of its own. In Europe, the working class created Labor, Social Democratic, and Socialist parties with massive popular support; in sharp contrast, American workers threw their support to the Democratic and Republican Parties, which were broad-based coalitions that included business, middle-class, and labor interests.Sombart's explanation was that the political and economic position of the American working class made it much more conservative than its European counterpart. In contrast to Europe, where the working class had to struggle to win the vote, universal manhood suffrage was the practice in the United States. Further, American workers, Sombart insisted, enjoyed a much higher standard of living than their European counterpart and had a much greater chance to rise into the middle class.Sombart overestimated the economic well being of the American working class. While the average income of industrial workers in the United States were indeed higher than in Europe, between 1860 and 1913, working-class wages, adjusted for inflation, rose more slowly than in Britain, France, Germany, or Sweden. In addition, the American economy between the Civil War and World War I was even more subject to boom and bust cycles than the economies of other industrial countries.During the late 19th century, the average American worker was jobless for three or four months a year due to illness, inclement weather, or seasonal unemployment.In the late 19th century, the average income of an urban worker was only about $400 or $500 a year, a sum insufficient to support a family. The remainder was made up by wives and especially by older children. Children under the age of 16 contributed about 20 percent of the income. These children worked not because their parents were heartless, but because their earnings were absolutely essential for their family's well-being.Sources of Worker UnrestMany American workers experienced the economic transformations of the late 19th century in terms of a wrenching loss of status. For free white men, pre-Civil War America, more than any previous society, was a society of independent producers and property holders. Farmers, shopkeepers, and craftsmen generally owned the property they worked. About four-fifths of free adult men owned property on the eve of the Civil War. High rates of physical mobility combined with the availability of western lands to foster a sense that the opportunity to acquire property was available to anyone who had sufficient industry and initiative.After the Civil War, however, many American workers feared that their status was rapidly eroding. The expanding size of factories made relations between labor and management increasingly impersonal. Mechanization allowed many industries to substitute semi-skilled and unskilled laborers for skilled craft workers. A massive influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe saturated labor markets, slowing the growth of working-class incomes.Echoing earlier debates over slavery, many working men and women feared that the great industrialists were imposing a new form of feudalism in America, which was reducing "freemen" to "wage slaves." They demanded "a fair day's wages for a fair day's work" and an eight-hour work day. Native-born workers, fearing competition from low-wage immigrant workers, sometimes agitated for immigration restriction. Many observers feared that the United States was on the brink of a ruinous class war.At the end of the 19th century, American workers intensely debated how they could best defend their interests in the face of powerful national corporations. One of the most contentious questions that late 19th century workers debated was whether labor should agitate for higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions, or for more fundamental transformations in the nation's economy. Some of the earliest labor organizations called for a "cooperative" rather than a corporate economy, built around worker-controlled producer cooperatives.Another source of controversy was whether unions should try to organize whole industries (what are called industrial unions) or organize particular skilled crafts (craft unions). Unlike unskilled or semi-skilled craft workers who could be easily replaced by immigrant labor, skilled craft workers, the "aristocracy of labor," had greater power to bargain with employers.What was at stake in these debates was the very meaning of American democracy in a modern, industrial society. Among the crucial questions was government's role in labor disputes: Would government, at the local, state, and federal levels, align itself with labor or management?The Drive for UnionizationFor the last half-century, Americans have experienced a remarkable degree of labor-management peace and enormous rates of productivity. But this development did not come easily. It took decades of industrial strife, economic upheaval, and political battles to establish the right of workers to unionize and have some say in work rules. It would not be until the 1930s that the United States adopted laws that guaranteed the right of workers to bargain collectively.During the late 19th century, union members seeking higher wages and better working conditions were described as anarchists or Communists. The term "Communist" referred not to advocates of Marxism, but, rather, to a violent upheaval that had taken place in France in 1871 known as Paris Commune.The struggle for the right to unionize was a remarkable achievement. It not only involved overcoming employers' resistance, but also ethnic divisions within the working class itself. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the American working class was deeply split not just into the native and foreign born, but also into the "old" and "new" immigrants. The old immigrants not only included English-speaking immigrants from Ireland and Britain, but also northern European immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. The new immigrants, who came primarily from southern and eastern Europe, included many Hungarians, Italians, Jews, and Slavs. Employers often hired workers from different ethnic groups to work in the same plant in order to make unionization more difficult.The depth of labor conflict in post-Civil War America is illustrated by bitter disputes that erupted in the nation's rail yards and coalfields in 1877, the first year of the country's second century.The Great Railroad StrikeThe total miles of railroad track in the United States increased from just 23 in 1830 to 35,000 by the end of the Civil War to a peak of 254,000 in 1916. By the eve of World War I, railroads employed one out of every 25 American workers. The industry's growth was accompanied by bitter labor disputes. Many of the nation's most famous strikes involved the railroads.The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was the country's first major rail strike and witnessed the first general strike in the nation's history. The strikes and the violence it spawned briefly paralyzed the country's commerce and led governors in ten states to mobilize 60,000 militia members to reopen rail traffic. The strike would be broken within a few weeks, but it helped set the stage for later violence in the 1880s and 1890s, including the Haymarket Square bombing in Chicago in 1886, the Homestead Steel Strike near Pittsburgh in 1892, and the Pullman Strike in 1894.In 1877, northern railroads, still suffering from the Financial Panic of 1873, began cutting salaries and wages. The cutbacks prompted strikes and violence with lasting consequences. In May the Pennsylvania Railroad, the nation's largest railroad company, cut wages by 10 percent and then, in June, by another 10 percent. Other railroads followed suit. On July 13, the Baltimore & Ohio line cut the wages of all employees making more than a dollar a day by 10 percent. It also slashed the workweek to just two or three days. Forty disgruntled locomotive firemen walked off the job. By the end of the day, workers blockaded freight trains near Baltimore and in West Virginia, allowing only passenger traffic to get through.Also in July, the Pennsylvania Railroad announced that it would double the length of all eastbound trains from Pittsburgh with no increase in the size of their crews. Railroad employees responded by seizing control of the rail yard switches, blocking the movement of trains.Soon, violent strikes broke out in Baltimore, Chicago, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and San Francisco. Governors in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia called out their state militias. In Baltimore, Charles A. Malloy, a 20-year-old volunteer in the Maryland National Guard, described the scene: "We met a mob, which blocked the streets. "They came armed with stones and as soon as we came within reach they began to throw at us." Fully armed and with bayonets fixed, the militia fired, killing 10, including a newsboy and a 16-year-old student. The shootings sparked a rampage. Protesters burned a passenger car, sent a locomotive crashing into a side full of freight cars, and cut fire hoses. At the height of the melee, 14,000 rioters took to the streets. Maryland's governor telegraphed President Rutherford Hayes and asked for troops to protect Baltimore."The strike," an anonymous Baltimore merchant wrote, "is not a revolution of fanatics willing to fight for an idea. It is a revolt of working men against low prices of labor, which have not been accomplished with corresponding low prices of food, clothing and house rent."In Pittsburgh, where the local militia sympathized with the rail workers, the governor called in National Guard troops from Philadelphia. The troops fired into a crowd, killing more than 20 civilians, including women and at least three children. A newspaper headline read:Shot in Cold Blood by the Roughs of Philadelphia. The Lexington of the Labor Conflict at Hand. The Slaughter of Innocents.An angry crowd forced the Philadelphia troops to retreat to a roundhouse in the railroad complex, and set engines, buildings, and equipment ablaze. Fires raced through parts of the city, destroying 39 buildings, 104 engines, 46 passenger cars, and over 1,200 freight cars. The Pennsylvania Railroad claimed losses of more than $4 million in Pittsburgh.When the National Guard was at last able to evacuate the roundhouse, it was harassed by strikers and rioters. A legislative report said that the National Guard forces "were fired at from second floor windows, from the corners of the streets...they were also fired at from a police station, where eight or ten policemen were in uniform." Militia and federal troops opened the railroad in Pittsburgh and Reading, Pa. was occupied by U.S. Army troops.It appears that some 40 people were killed in the violence in Pittsburgh. Across the country more than a hundred died, including eleven in Baltimore and a dozen in Reading, Pa. By the end of July, most strike activity was over. But labor strikes in the rail yards recurred from 1884 to 1886 and from 1888 to 1889 and again in 1894.Native-born Americans tended to blame the labor violence on foreign agitators. "It was evident," said the Annals of the Great Strikes in the United States, published in 1877, "that there were agencies at work outside the workingmen's strike. The people engaged in these riots were not railroad strikers. The Internationalists had something to do with creating scenes of bloodshed.... The scenes...in the city of Baltimore were not unlike those which characterized the events in the city of Paris during the reign of the Commune in 1870."The Molly MaguiresOn June 21, 1877, in Schuylkill County, Pa., 10 Irish immigrants were hanged for terrorism and murder in the region's coalfields. According to the prosecution, the men were members of a secret organization, the Molly Maguires. Before they were hanged, the condemned men swore their loyalty to the Catholic Church.Soon, another 10 men would be executed. The Chicago Tribune editorialized, history "affords no more striking illustration of the terrible power for evil of a secret, oath-bound organization controlled by murderers and assassins than the awful record of crime committed by the Molly Maguires in the anthracite-coal region of Pennsylvania." A Philadelphia newspaper expressed thanks at the "deliverance from as awful a despotism of banded murderers as the world has ever seen in any age."Violence in the coalfields began during the Civil War and grew in intensity during the 1870s. Altogether, about 24 mine foremen and superintendents had been murdered in Pennsylvania's mining district. In 1873, Pinkerton's, a private detective agency, reported rumors about the existence of "the 'Molly Maguires," a band of roughs joined together for the purpose of instituting revenge against anyone whom they may have taken a dislike." The Reading Railroad, which controlled mining in the region, hired Pinkerton's to investigate. For two-and-a-half years, a Pinkerton detective, an Irish Catholic immigrant named James McParlan, worked undercover in the coalfields and later testified against the 20 accused men. The trial itself was a mockery of judicial process, with coal company attorneys prosecuted the case in court.Apparently, a scattering of Irish immigrant coal miners did engage in violence in the coal fields, though a majority of the men executed as assassins were probably innocent of the murder charges. The Mollies were apparently modeled after impoverished Catholic farmers in West Donegal County Ireland who disguised themselves wearing women's clothes who staged nocturnal raids against Protestant landowners. According to one tale, Molly Maguire was a woman who wore pistols strapped to her thighs and led bands of men through the countryside.Alarm over the Molly Maguires helped mine operators crush the miners' union, the Workingmen's Benevolent Association, eliminating unions from the coal field for many years. Fear of the Mollies also led Catholic bishops to excommunicate any Catholic who remained a member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a fraternal order to which some violent Irish miners belonged.In 1979, Pennsylvania's governor issued a posthumous pardon to John Kehoe, the last of the accused Mollies to be hanged.The Origins of American Labor UnionIt took American labor longer than industrialists to successfully organize on a national basis. By the 1820s, craft workers in the Northeast had organized the first unions to protest the increased use of unskilled and semi-skilled workers in the production process. But these were local organizations. It was not until 1834 that the first national organization of wage earners, the National Trades' Union, was formed. By 1836, the organization claimed 300,000 members, but it rapidly lost membership during the financial panic of 1837.In 1852, printers' locals in 12 cities organized the National Typographic Union, which fought for a common wage scale and restrictions on the use of apprentices. It was one of five national unions formed in the 1850s. Another 21 national unions were organized in the 1860s. By the early 1870s, about 300,000 workers were organization, making up about nine percent of the industrial labor force. But during the financial depression from 1873 to 1878, membership in labor organizations fell to just 50,000.The Knights of LaborDuring the 1870s and 1880s, American workers began to form national labor unions in order to effectively negotiate with big corporations. The Knights of Labor was one of the most important early labor organizations in the United States. It wanted to organize workers into "one big brotherhood" rather than into separate unions made up of workers who had a common skill or who worked in a particular industry.The Knights were founded in 1869 as a secret organization of tailors in Philadelphia. At first, the union had a strong Protestant religious orientation. But a decade later, when a Catholic, Terence V. Powderly was elected its head, the Knights became a national organization open to workers of every kind, regardless of their skills, sex, nationality, or race. The only occupations excluded from membership were bankers, gamblers, lawyers, and saloonkeepers.At its height in 1885, the Knights claimed to have 700,000 members. Despite the Knight's rejection of strikes as a tactic in labor disputes, the union won big victories against the Union Pacific railroad in 1884 and the Wabash railroad in 1885. The Knights had a wide-ranging platform for social and economic change. The organization campaigned for an eight-hour work day, the abolition of child labor, improved safety in factories, equal pay for men and women, and compensation for on-the-job injury. As an alternative to wage labor, the Knights favored cooperatively run workshops and cooperative stores. The organization held the first Labor Day celebration in 1882.The Knights declined rapidly after the 1886 Haymarket Square riot in Chicago, in which 11 people were killed by a bomb. The American Federation of Labor, a union of skilled workers, gradually replaced the Knights as the nation's largest labor organization. Unlike the Knights, which sought to organize workers regardless of craft, rejected the strike as a negotiating tool, and had a broad-based reform agenda, the American Federation of Labor was made up of craft unions and committed to "bread-and-butter" unionism. Its goals were narrower but also more realistic than those of the Knights. It sought to increase workers' wages, reduce their hours, and improve their working conditions.Haymarket SquareAn explosion in Chicago in 1886 helped to shift the labor movement toward "bread-and-butter" unionism.On May 1, 1886, thousands of people in Chicago began demonstrations in behalf of an eight-hour workday. The marchers' slogan was, "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will."On May 4, 1886, a deadly confrontation between police and protesters erupted at Chicago's Haymarket Square. A labor strike was in progress at the McCormick farm equipment works, and police and Pinkerton security guards had shot several workers.A public demonstration had been called to protest police violence. Eyewitnesses later described a "peaceful gathering of upwards of 1,000 people listening to speeches and singing songs when authorities began to move in and disperse the crowd." Suddenly a bomb exploded, followed by pandemonium and an exchange of gunfire. Eleven people were killed including seven police officers. More than a hundred were injured.The Chicago Tribune railed against "the McCormick insurrectionists." Authorities hurriedly rounded up 31 suspects. Eventually, eight men, "all with foreign sounding names" as one newspaper put it, were indicted on charges of conspiracy and murder.No evidence tied the accused to the explosion of the bomb. Several of the suspects had not attended the rally. But all were convicted and sentenced to death. Four were quickly hanged and a fifth committed suicide in his cell. Then, the Illinois Governor, Richard Ogelsby, who had privately expressed doubts "that any of the men were guilty of the crime," commuted the remaining men's death sentences to life in prison.Illinois's new governor, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned the three surviving men. A German born immigrant who had enlisted in the Union army at the age of 15, Altgeld declared, "The deed to sentencing the Haymarket men was wrong, a miscarriage of justice. And the truth is that the great multitudes annually arrested are poor, the unfortunate, the young and the neglected. In short, our penal machinery seems to recruit its victims from among those who are fighting an unequal fight in the struggle for existence."After granting the pardon, he said to the famous attorney Clarence Darrow: "Let me tell you that from this day, I am a dead man, politically." There was an immediate outcry. The Washington Post asked rhetorically: "What would one expect from a man like Altgeld, who is, of course, an alien himself?" The Chicago Tribune stated that the governor "does not reason like an American, does not feel like one, and consequently does not behave like one."In 1889, the American Federation of Labor delegate to the International Labor Congress in Paris proposed May 1 as international Labor Day. Workers were to march for an eight-hour day, democracy, the right of workers to organize, and to memorialize the eight "Martyrs of Chicago."Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of LaborThe labor movement gained strength in the 1850s in such crafts as typographers, molders, and carpenters. Fixed standards of apprenticeship and of wages, hours, and working conditions were drafted. Although such agreements often broke down in periods of depression, a strong nucleus of craft unions had developed by the 1880s so that a central federation emerged. This was the American Federation of Labor.Samuel Gompers (1850-1924) was the first president of the American Federation of Labor, the first enduring national labor union. He served as president from 1886 until his death in 1924, except for a single year, 1895. Born in London, he immigrated to the United States at the age of 13, and worked as a cigar-maker. He became the leader of the cigar-makers' union, and transformed it into one of the country's strongest unions.Gompers believed that labor had the most to gain by organizing skilled craft workers, rather than attempting to organize all workers in an industry. He refused to form an alliance with the Knights of Labor. "Talk of harmony with the Knights of Labor," he said, "is bosh. They are just as great enemies of trade unions as any employer can be."Gompers repudiated socialism and advocated a pragmatic "pure and simple" unionism that emphasized agreements with employees--which would spell out for a stipulated period the wages, hours of work, and the procedures for handling grievances. Gompers proposed that agreements contain clauses stipulating that employers hire only union members (the closed shop) and that any employee should be required to pay union dues. Employers advocated the open shop, which could employ non-union members.During the 1880s and 1890s, unions sought to secure and retain a foothold in such major industries as railways, steel, mining, and construction. It was in the building trades where the craft principle was most dominant that the American Federation of Labor developed its largest membership. Miners merged their crafts into the United Mine Workers of America, an industrial union that admitted to membership of those working in and about a mine, whether skilled or unskilled.In 1892, the AFL's affiliate in the steel industry, struck in protest against wage cuts. Following the bitter Homestead strike, the steel industry adopted an open shop policy. Craft unions were able to secure collective bargains on railroads, but when some workers a union of all rail workers, their effort collapsed in the Pullman boycott of 1894.But some efforts at unionization proved more successful, including efforts in organizing workers in immigrant sweatshops. The International Ladies' Garment Workers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers demonstrated that the new immigrants could be effectively organized.As trade unionism gained ground before World War I, employers in mines and factories established "company unions," to handle grievances and provide certain welfare benefits. The most notable company union was in the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.HomesteadIn 1986, United States Steel, once the world's largest steel producer, closed down its mills in Homestead, Pa., six miles from Pittsburgh. It was slightly less than a hundred years since the epic clash between labor and management at the plant in 1892 that helped eliminate unions from the steel industry for more than four subsequent decades.Originally built in 1880 and 1881 by local merchants, the Homestead Works was purchased by industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who installed open-hearth furnaces and electricity in order to boost the plant's efficiency and reduce the need for skilled labor. Carnegie's steel mills produced armor for battleships, rails for western railroads, and beams, girders, and steel plates for bridges and skyscrapers.Carnegie's drive for efficiency also led to an armed confrontation at Homestead. In contract talks in 1892, Henry Clay Frick, the superintendent of the Carnegie Steel Company, proposed to cut workers' wages, arguing that increased efficiency had inflated salaries. At the time, unskilled mill workers, who were mainly eastern European immigrants, made less than $1.70 for a 12-hour day. Skilled workers earned between $4 and $7.60 a day. Frick also wanted to eliminate the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers union from the plant.When the negotiations broke down, Frick shut down the mill, installed three-miles of wooden fence topped with barbed wire around the mill, and hired 300 guards supplied by the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The guards were placed aboard two company barges in Pittsburgh for the trip up the Monongahela River to nearby Homestead.On July 6, the guards were confronted by hundreds of workers and townsfolk. In the gun battle that ensued, seven workers and three Pinkerton guards were killed. Twelve hours after the battle for Homestead began, the guards surrendered.The union's apparent victory was short-lived. Within days, 8,500 members of the National Guard took control of the plant. When Frick was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in his Pittsburgh office, public opinion turned against the steel workers' union. By November, the union had been broken and the mill had reopened as a non-union plant using African American and eastern European workers. Union leaders were blacklisted from the steel industry for life.One of the strike's consequences was that the steel mills shifted from an eight hour to a 12-hour a day, six-day work week, with a 24-hour shift (followed by a day off), every two weeks. It would be some 44 years before the steel industry would again be unionized.Pullman1894 was the second of four years of depression. The pinch was felt even by the Pullman Palace Car Company, which manufactured the sleeping cars used by most of the nation's railroads. George Pullman responded by laying off several thousand of his 5,800 employees and cutting pay 25 to 50 percent, while refusing to reduce rents charged employees, who lived in the company town of Pullman, near Chicago. Then he fired three members of a workers' grievance committee.On May 11, 1894, 90 percent of his workers went on strike. The strike spread nationwide when the American Railway Union refused to move trains with Pullman cars. Within a month, more than a quarter million other railroad employees had joined the strike.The government, under President Grover Cleveland, swiftly won a court injunction ordering strikers back to work. When they refused to comply, he dispatched more than 14,000 federal troops and marshals. In Chicago, when soldiers fired into a crowd of 10,000, 25 persons were killed, 60 badly injured. Hundreds were jailed, including union leader Eugene Debs, who subsequently founded the Socialist party. Railroad attorney Clarence Darrow switched sides and defended Debs, launching his career as a defender of underdogs. Social Worker Jane Addams led an investigation of the strike.Samuel Gompers and his fellow craft unionists at the helm of the American Federation of Labor spurned Debs' plea for a general strike to protest enlistment of the White House and the courts on the side of management.Labor DayLabor Day, the holiday honoring America's workingmen and women, is today regarded as a day of rest and recreations signaling the end of summer and the beginning of the school year. Calls for a Labor Day had begun as early as 1869. But it was not until 1882 that the first Labor Day parade was held in New York City, under the sponsorship of the Knights of Labor. Ten thousand men and women marched down Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. The holiday was intended to fill the gap between the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving and to demonstrate labor's strength.The first Labor Day parade was organized by Peter J. McGuire, a New York City carpenter, who founded not only the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, but also the English-speaking branch of the Socialist Labor Party, and by Matthew Maguire, a machinist from Patterson, N.J., who later became the first Socialist Labor Party member elected to public office (as an alderman in Patterson, N.J).The parade drew the following negative reaction in a New York newspaper:A large force of working men of this city and neighborhood indulged in a parade and picnic yesterday, apparently for the purpose of enjoying a holiday, and at the same time making an exhibition of numerical strength.At the time, there was debate about when a holiday should be held. In 1888, labor leaders from several countries picked May 1 as International Labor Day, to commemorate the Haymarket Massacre, a gathering of 10,000 people that began peacefully on Tuesday May 4, 1886, at the Haymarket Square in Chicago. By that evening, The Chicago Herald described a scene of "wild carnage" and estimated at least fifty dead or wounded civilians lay in the streets along with at sixty policemen.In 1894, in the midst of the Pullman strike, Congress established a national labor day by unanimous vote. Six days after signing the act into law, Cleveland sent several thousand deputies to Chicago to enforce a court injunction barring workers from interrupting delivery of the mail.Socialist and Radical AlternativesThe rise of the American Federation of Labor did not spell the disappearance of more radical groups. Two organizations offered a more radical vision. The Industrial Workers of the World, formed in 1905, clamored for "one big union" to oust "the ruling class" and abolish the wage system.The Socialist Party, founded in 1901, had, by 1912, grown to 118,000 members. By that year, it had elected 1,200 public officials, including the mayors of Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Flint, Michigan.; and Schenectady, New York. More than 300 Socialist periodicals appeared. A weekly socialist newspaper, the Appeal to Reason, reached a circulation of over 700,000 copies in 1913.Socialist support was concentrated between two immigrant groups: Germans, who had left Europe in the 1840s, and East European Jews, who were refugees from Czarist repression. The largest daily socialist newspaper in the United States, the Jewish Daily Forward, which had a circulation of 142,000 in 1913, was published in Yiddish, not in English. The Socialist Party's first major electoral victories occurred in Milwaukee, which had a large German community. In 1910, the city elected a Socialist mayor and member of Congress.The Socialist Party declined in influence during Democratic President Woodrow Wilson's first term, as many reforms enacted by Congress diminished the party's appeal. Support for the party briefly surged during World War I, but had dissipated by 1919 as a result of federal, state, and local campaigns to suppress the party and internal disputes involving how the party should respond to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.The Rise of Big BusinessBetween the Civil War and World War I, the modern American economy emerged. A national transportation and communication network was created, the corporation became the dominant form of business organization, and a managerial revolution transformed business operations. By the beginning of the twentieth century, per capita income and industrial production in the United States exceeded that of any other country except Britain.Unlike the pre-Civil War economy, this new one was dependent on raw materials from around the world and it sold goods in global markets. Business organization expanded in size and scale. There was an unparalleled increase in factory production, mechanization, and business consolidation. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the major sectors of the nation's economy--banking, manufacturing, meat packing, oil refining, railroads, and steel--were dominated by a small number of giant corporations.J.P. MorganDuring the Gilded Age, J.P. Morgan stood astride the nation's financial world like a colossus. His banking house erected the structure of the most prominent American industries in the Gilded Age beginning with the railroad. Convinced that cutthroat competition had to give way to order, he consolidated competing railroad lines and many other industries. He organized syndicates to float bond and stock issues that gave birth to such companies as AT&T (which dominated the nation's telephone industry for decades), General Electric, and U.S. Steel (the world's largest steel manufacturer). A voracious collector, he also spent $60 million on paintings, sculptures, rare books, and manuscripts.His critics considered him a ruthless capitalist pirate, the personification of the oppressive power of Wall Street that would crucify mankind on a cross of gold. But his goal was to replace cutthroat competition with economic stability. Morgan was instrumental in helping to create the modern American economy. After the Panic of 1893, he reorganized many bankrupt railroads and industrial companies. He assembled U.S. Steel, the world's first billion-dollar corporation, and helped establish International Harvester and General Electric. He believed that the combination of rival interests into rational systems was necessary to stabilize the U.S. economy and to prevent harmful price wars.During a financial panic in 1907, which threatened to trigger a run on the nation's banks, Morgan took charge. He assembled the leading bank presidents in his library and locked the door. At 4 a.m., his lawyer read them an agreement stipulating how much each must pledge to the bailout package. "There the place..." Morgan told one banker, "and here's the pen."When he decided to buy the Carnegie Steel Company on the way to forming United States Steel, he asked Andrew Carnegie to name his price. Carnegie wrote $480 million on a sheet of paper. Morgan glanced at the paper and said, "I accept this price."The Rise of Big BusinessBetween 1869 and 1910, the value of American manufacturing rose from $3 billion to $13 billion. The steel industry produced just 68,000 tons in 1870, but 4.2 million tons in 1890. The central vehicle of this surge in economic productivity was the modern corporation.In recent years, Americans have often been told that we have entered a "new economy." The older industrial economy, it is said, is giving way to a new global economy based on computers, the Internet, telecommunications, and entertainment. This is not the first new economy in American history. Following the Civil War, a new economy emerged in the United States resting on steam-powered manufacturing, the railroad, the electric motor, the internal combustion engine, and the practical application of chemistry. Unlike the pre-Civil War economy, this new one was dependent on raw materials from around the world and it sold goods in global markets.The transformations that took place in American business following the Civil War involved far more than a change in industrial techniques or productivity. Business organization expanded in size and scale. There was an unparalleled increase in factory production and mechanization. By the beginning of the 20th century, the major sectors of the nation's economy--banking, manufacturing, meat packing, oil refining, railroads, and steel--were dominated by a small number of giant corporations.The rise of big business was accompanied by the emergence of a new class of millionaires. At the beginning of the Civil War, there were only 400 millionaires in the United States. By 1892, the number had risen to 4,047.The emergence of the modern corporation was accompanied by many positive developments. Through mechanization, standardization, and economies of scale, economic productivity soared. Between 1890 and 1929, the average urban worker put in one less day of work a week and brought home three times as much in pay. The proportion of families confined to the drudgery of farm life declined by half. Families enjoyed comforts and conveniences that were unimaginable before 1890. By 1929, nine out of ten Americans had electricity and indoor plumbing; four-fifths had automobiles; two-thirds had radios; and nearly half refrigerators and phonographs. At the same time, infant mortality fell by two-thirds, and life expectancy increased by 20 years. In 1888, Charles E. Perkins, the president of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad asked:Have not the great merchants, great manufacturers, great inventors, done more for the world than preachers and philanthropists? Can there be any doubt that cheapening the cost of necessaries and conveniences of life is the most powerful agent of civilization and progress?Yet the rise of big business also produced many anxieties. Corporations were accused of abusing workers, corrupting the political process, and producing shoddy, unsafe products. Many feared that corporate power allowed companies to fix prices and influence government decision-making.The Corporate RevolutionDuring the late 19th century, a radical transformation took place in the way in which American business was structured and operated. The most obvious contrast involved the corporation's larger size and capitalization. The typical business establishment before the 1870s was financed by a single person or by several people bound together in a partnership. As a result, most businesses represented the wealth of only a few individuals. As late as 1880, the average factory had less than $1,800 in investment. Even the largest textile factories represented less than a million dollars in investment. In contrast, John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company was worth $600 million and U.S. Steel was valued at $1 billion.Another contrast between the new corporate enterprises of the late 19th century and earlier businesses lies in the systems of ownership and management. Before the Civil War, almost all businesses were owned and managed by the same people. In the modern corporation, actual management was increasingly turned over to professional managers. Within corporations, a management revolution took place.In the days before big business, business operations required little in the way of management and administration. Companies usually involved only a few partners and clerks. Usually, an owner oversaw all of a business' operations. To insure honesty in a distant office, a merchant might staff it with a relative.As businesses grew larger, new bureaucratic hierarchies were necessary. A business' success increasingly depended on central coordination. To address this challenge, businesses created formal administrative structures, such as purchasing and accounting departments. Various levels of managers were established, clear lines of authority were devised, and formal rules were created to govern the company's operations. The managerial revolution helped to create a "new" middle class. Unlike the older middle class, which consisted of farmers, shopkeepers, and independent professionals, the new middle class was made up of white collar employees of corporations.Yet another sweeping change in business operation was the corporation's increased size and geographical scale. Before the 1880s, most firms operated in a single town from a single office or factory. Most sales were made to customers in the immediate area. But the new corporate enterprises carried out their functions in widely scattered locations. As early as 1900, General Electric had plants in 23 cities.In addition to carrying out business in an increasing number of locations, the new corporations also engaged in more kinds of business operations. Prior to the Civil War, merchants, wholesalers, and manufacturers tended to specialize in a single operation. But the late 19th century, greatly expanded their range of operations.During the late 19th century, businesses typically grew as a result of vertical and horizontal integration. When a company integrated vertically, it brought together various phases in the process of production and distribution. Thus U.S. Steel took iron ore from the ground, transported it to its mills, turned it into steel and manufactured finished products, and shipped the products to wholesalers. Somewhat similarly, the great meat packing houses like Swift, which had 4,000 employees, and Armour, with 6,000, combined the business of raising, slaughtering, transporting, and wholesaling meat. Swift developed a fleet of refrigerator railroad cars, which allowed it to bring cattle and hogs to a central packing house in Chicago, where the company could make use of every part of the animal "except the squeal."When a company integrated horizontally, it expanded into related fields of business. In the 1850s, an iron furnace might produce a single product such as cast iron or nails. But U.S. Steel produced a vast array of metal goods.During the last third of the 19th century, the American economy was dramatically transformed. After 30 years of periodic economic crises marked by high unemployment and large numbers of business failures, business began to consolidate into progressively larger economic units.Mythmakers sometimes look back on the late 19th century as the golden age of free enterprise. But it is important to emphasize that the rise of a new economy did not take place easily. Working conditions in many factories were appalling. Labor conflict was intense. Businesses were accused of price fixing, stock watering, and other abuses.In the end, these abuses would bring about a political reaction. To address the problems of corporate power, the federal government instituted new forms of regulation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Why Business GrewBy 1906, six large railroad systems controlled 95 percent of the nation's mileage. As early as 1904, the 2,000 largest firms in the United States made up less than one percent of the country's businesses. Yet they produced 40 percent of the nation's goods. By the early 20th century, many important sectors of the American economy were dominated by a handful of firms, a condition that economists call "oligopoly."Why did business grow bigger? The classic explanation stresses such factors as:the shift from water-powered to coal-powered factories, which freed manufacturers to locate their plants nearer to markets and suppliers.transportation improvements that meant that firms could distribute their products to regional or national markets.the development of new financial institutions--such as the stock market, commercial banks, and investment houses--that increased the availability of investment capital.One of the pacesetters of the "new economy" was Montgomery Ward, the nation's first mail-order business. From its founding until 1926, Montgomery Ward owned no stores. It operated strictly on a mail order basis. Through its catalog, Ward brought consumer goods to a largely rural clientele.To list these factors makes business growth seem like an orderly process. But this was not the way the process was experienced. The emergence of the modern corporation came largely as a response to economic instability.During the late 19th century, business competition was cutthroat. In 1907, there were 1,564 separate railroad companies in the United States, and two years later there were 446 companies manufacturing steel. The challenges of competition were compounded by frequent economic contractions or panics as they were known. Violent contractions gripped the country from 1873 to 1878 and from 1893 to 1897. There were briefer contractions in 1884, 1888, 1903, 1907, and 1911. During the panic of the mid-1870s, 47,000 businesses went bankrupt. In hard times, the competitive marketplace became a jungle and businessmen sought to find ways to overcome the rigors of competition.Faced with recurring business slumps, mounting competition, and declining profits, the boldest businessmen experimented with new ways of creating financial stability. The first attempt to overcome destructive competition was the formation of pools or cartels. These were agreements among competitors to divide markets and forbid price cutting. As early as the 1870s, pools were formed to divide markets, fix production quotas, and set prices. Over the years, pools became trade associations, which devised methods for dividing markets and assisting failing firms.The problem with pools was that they rarely survived an economic contraction. Financial depressions tempted some firms to cut prices and seek a larger share of the market.Pools were too weak to solve the problem of competition because they were voluntary agreements. An alternative was the trust, under which owners of rival firms assigned their stock to a single board of trustees in return for non-voting, interest-bearing certificates. The trustees then fixed prices and marketing policies for all the companies. John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company was the first trust. Half a dozen industries followed, including alcohol distilling and sugar refining.Trusts faced intense legal challenges on the grounds that they illegal restrained trade and violated the corporate charters of the participating firms. In 1890, Congress adopted the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which declared trusts illegal. Trusts were then supplanted by a new legal entity, the holding company. This was a company with the power to purchase other companies. Perhaps the most famous holding company was General Motors, which purchased a number of automobile manufacturers.A great surge in mergers took place in the American economy after 1897, when many of the largest corporations in such industries as steel and railroads were created. The number of mergers rose from 69 in 1897 to 303 in 1898 and 1,208 in 1899. By 1900, there were 73 combinations worth more than $10 million. Two thirds had been established in the previous three years.Corporations and the LawEarlier in American history, states attempted to keep tight reins over corporations. Corporations had to apply to a state legislature for a charter, which restricted the scope of the company's operations, limited the amount of investment, and even specified how long the charter would be in effect. But as the pace of economic activity quickened, it proved cumbersome for legislatures to grant individual charters. As a result, state legislatures adopted general incorporation acts which allowed any business to incorporate and removed limits on capitalization. Even in the 19th century, states, seeking revenue, competed with one another to get businesses to incorporate within their boundaries.One source of public anxiety over corporations is summed up by a legal maxim, that "a corporation has no pants to kick or soul to damn." It was unclear what powers states had to regulate big business or who should be held responsible if a corporation committed a legal offense, such as fixing prices or polluting the environment.In an 1877 case, Munn v. Illinois, which is also known as the "Granger Cases," the Supreme Court had ruled that a state law setting maximum rates for grain storage was constitutional, establishing the principle that states have the power to regulate businesses with "a public interest." In subsequent cases, the court retreated from this ruling. In an 1886 decision, Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the court held that the 14th Amendment's guarantee of due process applies to corporations. In another decision that same year, in the case of Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railroad v. Illinois, the court ruled that Congress has an exclusive right to regulate interstate commerce. The court subsequently invalidated a number of state attempts to regulate business operations.In 1895, in the case of U.S. v. E.C. Knight, the court held that the Sherman Antitrust Act, adopted five years earlier, did not apply to companies located within a single state. This decision severely weakened the ability of the federal government to enforce antitrust laws.The Debate Over Big BusinessA great debate over big business took place during late 19th century. Among the issues that Americans debated was:whether wealth came from exploitation or from patience, frugality, and virtue;whether bigness was the result of conspiracy or of pressures of blind economic forces;whether men of wealth and power were free to use their riches as they wish or whether they should be taxed to support the public good.Henry Demarest Lloyd, a precursor for the muckraking journalists of the Progressive Era, considered the lords of industry monopolists and profiteers, who blocked the road to success for those who tried to compete with them. Others, like Edward Atkinson, a successful investor and businessman, asserted that the great business titans made all Americans better off through their innovations in management, finance, and production. Lloyd and Atkinson helped set the terms for a long lasting public debate: Were the business leaders of the Gilded Age robber barons or creative industrial pioneers?There can be no doubt that the late 19th century business titans were business innovators, who, through their technical, administrative, and financial skills, achieved economies of scale, eliminated waste, and brought order and stability to large sectors of the American economy. In large part, their wealth was the product of innovations that transformed business practice. Rockefeller developed the oil tank-car; Swift the refrigerated rail car; and Montgomery Ward the mail-order catalog. As philanthropists in later life, some also served important welfare and educational functions.But big business' critics accused the captains of industry of financial trickery, such as cornering and watering stock, and of political corruption and the bribing of legislatures. They attacked them for the inhumane treatment of labor--including the imposition of heavy hours, wage cuts, lockouts and the suppression of trade unions. They also condemned them for using cheap immigrant contract labor to undercut wage rates and defeat strikes, as well as for imposing monopoly prices. Above all, they were condemned as sinister monopolists who engaged in ruthless competition - choking off rivals by use of railroad rebates and kickbacks, control of raw material supplies, industrial espionage, and the forced purchase of competing firms.Many people likened J.P. Morgan, Jay Gould, and other business leaders to the "robber barons" of the Middle Ages, who set up barriers across rivers and forced boats to pay a toll in order to navigate the waterways. A U.S. Senator described Morgan as a "thick-necked financial bully, drunk with wealth and power, [who] bawls his orders to stock markets, Directors, courts, Governments, and Nations."The Gospel of WealthAndrew Carnegie did not believe that men of great wealth were robber barons, but trustees whose duty it was to devote their talents to the common good. This, he wrote, is "the true Gospel concerning Wealth, obedience to which is destined someday to solve the problem of the Rich and the Poor, and to bring 'Peace on earth, among men of Good-Will.'"Drawing on the doctrine of St. Paul, that the rich had to be stewards of wealth, defenders of the Gospel of Wealth, like the Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts, argued that it was God's will that some men attained great wealth, and "in the long run, it is only to the man of morality that wealth comes." He concluded: "Material prosperity is helping to make the national character sweeter, more joyous, more unselfish, more Christ like."In an 1889 essay, steel magnate Carnegie told his fellow business leaders, "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced." Carnegie believed that the wealthy should repay their debt to society. True to his beliefs, by his death in 1919 he had divested himself of more than 95 percent of his fortune. He built a library building for any town that would provide a site, stock the building with books, and guarantee maintenance expenses. He provided pensions for professors at universities that agreed to meet strict academic standards. In addition to funding music halls, outdoor swimming pools, and church organs, he also set up endowments to promote teaching and world peace.Social DarwinismIn 1895, an attorney named Joseph H. Choate persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to declare an income tax approved by Congress unconstitutional. Choate told the court that:The act of Congress which we are impugning before you is communist in its purposes and tendencies and is defended here upon principles as communistic, as socialistic, what shall I call them, as populistic as ever have been addressed to any political assembly in the world.As a result of the court decision in the case of Pollock v. Farmers' Loan and Trust Co., the United States did not institute an income tax until the 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913.Choate rested his arguments partly on ideas associated with Charles Darwin, who published his theory of evolution in 1859. Darwin had argued that within nature, there was a process of competition within and between species, and that, through a process of natural selection, the fittest organisms prevail. Closely associated with the English theorist Hebert Spencer (1820-1903) and the Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), Social Darwinism sought to apply the Darwinian principles of survival of the fittest and the struggle of existence to economics, ethics, and other realms of life. Social Darwinists like Spencer believed that this theory of evolution gave scientific validity to the notion that government should keep its hands off the economy.Critics of Social Darwinism, including John Dewey and William James, rejected the notion that the process of social and economic change should occur unregulated, arguing that government should intervene to address the social ills that accompanied industrial development.Controlling the Shop FloorHe revolutionized manufacturing by insisting that managers should eliminate unnecessary motions in order to increase output by workers. He gained national visibility in 1910 when Louis Brandeis, the future Supreme Court justice, said that his notions of scientific management could save railroad companies $300 million a year.Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) was the first efficiency expert. Using slow-motion photography and stop watches, he broke down the production process into separate movements, then he redesigned the work process to make it more efficient. His advocacy of scientific management earned the admiration of Henry Ford, Benito Mussolini, and Vladimir Lenin. But many workers condemned his time-and-motion studies because his system sought to remove decision making from labor and hand it over to management.Before Taylor introduced scientific management onto the factory floor, production was largely in the hands of skilled craftsmen, who followed their own routines and worked at their own pace. In the interest of increasing productivity, Taylor advised managers to study, reorganize, and control the work process. The success of his system, he wrote a Bethlehem Steel manager in 1906, required that absolute control must reside in management. Each worker, he said, must receive "clear-cut, definite instructions as to just what he is to do and how he is to do it." His obsession with efficiency spilled over into his family life, where he regimented the lives of his adopted children. He convinced professional baseball that pitching overhand was more efficient than throwing underhand.Born into a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker family, he attended the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy, and, after passing Harvard's admission examination with distinction, apprenticed himself as a pattern maker and machinist to a company that made hydraulic pumps. He subsequently became a machinist at a steel company. Soon, he became obsessed by the idea that management, applying the principles of scientific management could organize the productive process more efficiently, identify the one, best way to perform a job, and increase workers' output. Factories, he believed, should be organized like the military, with directions flowing from superiors to subordinates. He recommended that bonuses go to workers who exceed quotas.Industry considered him a visionary who made factories more productive by eliminating wasteful motion that allowed the company to cut prices and raise wages. Management argued that Taylor's emphasis on simplified production methods was essential in dealing with a labor force that consisted of unskilled immigrant workers with low proficiency in English. But his time-and-motion studies enraged labor leaders who condemned him as a monster who valued machine-like efficiency more than the health and well being of labor. Trade unionists charged that his system reduced workers to robots. Said one labor leader:No tyrant or slave driver in the ecstasy of his most delirious dream ever sought to place upon abject slaves a condition more repugnant.In 1910, a strike broke out at the Waterford Arsenal near Boston, when a manager stood behind a worker with a stopwatch. Two years later, a hostile Congressional committee held hearings about Taylorism. The committee's chair condemned scientific management as undemocratic and dehumanizing.Although few companies used Taylor's ideas in their pure form, the principles of scientific management were applied on assembly lines, factory floors, secretarial pools, and housework. The relentless quest for efficiency helped to fuel the great gains in productivity in American industry during the 20th century. During World War II, Taylor's principles of scientific management helped American industry convert unskilled workers into welders and shipbuilders in 60 to 90 days. But Taylor's techniques also exacted a cost, increasing stress in the workplace, "de-skilling" manual labor, and widening the gap between technical and manual work, even as it made labor better off.As early as the late 1920s, Taylorism had begun to provoke a counter-reaction. Between 1927 and 1933, studies were conducted of factory workers at Western Electric's Hawthorne plant in Illinois. The Hawthorne studies showed that regardless of the changes made in working conditions--increasing or reducing the number and length of breaks or tinkering with lighting--productivity increased. By paying attention to workers and treating their jobs as important, productivity rose. The results of these studies encouraged business managers to adjust workplace conditions and improve interpersonal relations in order to improve worker morale and bolster productivity.Jay GouldHe was the prototype for the "Robber Baron" and the corrupt railroad king. The railroad "pirate" Jay Gould stirred up the most enmity. He was painted as an unscrupulous pirate who manipulated and watered stock, deliberately running businesses down and building them up again to his own advantage.Jay Gould considered himself to be the most hated man in late-19th century America. He was vilified by the press as a reckless speculator and brutal strikebreaker. To many late 19th century Americans, he personified the unscrupulous, greedy robber baron.In an age of scandal and corruption, Jay Gould was regarded as a master of bribery and insider stock manipulation. He paid off President Grant's brother-in-law to learn the president's intentions about government gold sales; he bribed members of New York's legislature; and he tried to corner the gold market. But Gould was much more than a robber baron. At a time when the rules of modern American business were just being written, he was one of the architects of a consolidated national railroad and communication system. One of his major achievements was to lead Western Union to a place of dominance in the telegraph industry.Born into poverty on an upstate New York in 1836, Gould was too sickly to go into farming. Instead, he went into surveying and then into tanning animal hides. He speculated first in hides and then in railroad stocks, engaging in one of the most colorful struggles in American business history: a fight with Commodore Vanderbilt for control of the Erie Railroad. To prevent gangs of toughs sent by Vanderbilt from gaining access to his records, Gould placed cannons on the Jersey City waterfront and launched a flotilla of four vessels of armed gunmen. As quickly as Vanderbilt bought stock in the railroad, Gould illegally issued more. When Gould was placed under the custody of a court officer for this illegal act, he bribed members of New York's legislature to change the law.He reduced the wages of imported Chinese laborers in his mines to just $27 a month. He was damned as a speculator, rigging markets for short-term gains. But in fact he had a number of actual achievements to his name. He was actually an empire builder who sought to create railroad and communication systems capable of meeting the needs of an expanding nation. He operated New York City's elevated railroad and led Western Union to victory in its battle for control of the telegraph industry.The Rise of the City (Urbanization)This chapter traces the changing nature of the American city in the late 19th century, the expansion of cities horizontally and vertically, the problems caused by urban growth, the depiction of cities in art and literature, and the emergence of new forms of urban entertainment.The Great Chicago Fire of 1871Legend has it that on the evening of October 7, 1871, Mrs. Catherine O'Leary's cow kicked over a lantern, touching off the Great Chicago Fire. On the drought-stricken evening that the fire started, a 30-mile-per-hour wind was blowing from the southwest. Fanned to ferocity the blazed scorched its way north and east. Curiously, Mrs. O'Leary's house was almost untouched. Even the barn where the fire started had only a corner burned out. Today, the Chicago Fire Academy occupies their place.The fire raged for 30 hours. The blaze, leaping from house to house, ultimately destroyed four-and-a-half square miles of Chicago--some 17,500 buildings. By the time the fire burned itself out on October 10, the entire business district was destroyed. Six railroad depots and Marshall Field's department store had gone up in flames. At times, temperatures reached 1,500 to 1,800 degrees. People were incinerated; limestone disintegrated into powder. Some 250 people were known dead and another 200 were listed as missing and 100,000 people were left homeless.It seems doubtful that Mrs. O'Leary's cow actually started the fire. It seems likely that this myth, which was popularized by a 1938 movie "In Old Chicago," was the product of anti-Irish, anti-Catholic prejudice. Lyrics about Mrs. O'Leary were written to the tune of "Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight." Chicago had thousands of wooden buildings and miles of wood-paved streets and sidewalks to burn. There was a months-long drought that year. In 1997, the Chicago City Council passed a resolution officially exonerating Mrs. O'Leary of blame.Firefighters were exhausted from battling a 16-hour fire the previous days. That blaze had injured 30 firefighters. To fight the new fire, Civil War General Philip Sheridan mobilized private citizens. When the fire was finally extinguished, he declared martial law and used guards from the Pinkerton Detective Agency to prevent looting.The Great Fire overshadowed another huge blaze at the same time. On October 8, 1871, the most devastating forest fire in American history swept through northeast Wisconsin. Apparently, railroad workers clearing land for tracks started a brush fire that soon became an inferno. Peshtigo, Wisconsin, a lumber town not far from Green Bay, was devastated along with 16 other towns and 1.25 million acres of surrounding forest. Nearly 1,200 people died.The Rise of the Modern CityIn the 40 years after the Civil War, over 24 million people flocked to American cities. They came from rural areas in the United States but also across oceans from farming areas and industrial cities in Europe. While the United States' rural population doubled during these years, the urban population increased more than seven-fold. In 1860, 16 cities had a population over 50,000 and only nine had a population over 100,000. By 1900, 38 cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants.The modern American city was not simply a larger version of older towns. In the late 19th century, American cities changed dramatically in physical size and spatial layout. In Boston in 1873, the outer boundary of settlement stood just two-and-a-half miles from City Hall. In the 1890s, after the establishment of the electric street railway, the outer border of settlement was six miles away. By annexing surrounding lands and filling in bays, cities grew larger, allowing for greater differentiation in the use of space.Manufacturing and commerce crowded into city centers. Meanwhile, the development of steam railroad lines in the 1860s, electric-powered streetcars and elevated railways in the 1880s, and electric trolleys in the 1890s allowed the wealthy and the middle class to move along newly constructed trolley and rail lines to the country's first suburbs. At the same time the urban poor were concentrated in newly constructed tenements, few of which had outside windows. Less than 10 percent had indoor plumbing or running water.The SkyscraperCities grew upward as well as outward. In 1889, the tallest building in the United States was New York's Trinity Church, near Wall Street. The next year, it was overtaken by the 26-story New York World Building. Fueled by an intense demand for office space in downtown areas, the skyscraper transformed the appearance of American cities.Brick could not bear the weight of buildings higher than five or six stories. But beginning in Chicago in 1884, steel frame construction allowed architects to design buildings of unprecedented height.William LeBaron Jenney, a Chicago architect, designed the first skyscraper in 1884. Nine stories high, the Home Life Insurance Building was the first structure whose entire weight, including the exterior walls, was supported on an iron frame. But it would not be for another 14 years, when the Equitable Life Assurance Building was constructed in Manhattan that a skyscraper contained all the characteristics of a modern skyscraper, including central heating, elevators, and pressurized plumbing.The arrival of several new technologies permitted the construction of buildings taller than ever before. Foremost among the new technologies was the metal frame, a method pioneered by architect William Jenney in Chicago. Although it was possible to construct buildings more than 16 stories high using masonry walls, the buildings had to have such thick walls and small windows that they were unappealing to landlords. The falling price of steel during the 1880s meant that tall buildings with steel frames became cheaper to build. The metal skeleton not only supported the roof and floors, but also the external walls. Meanwhile, understanding of fireproofing advanced rapidly after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and construction of the Eiffel Tower in 1889 taught architects how to brace a metal frame against the winds.To transport people within the building, skyscraper needed elevators. During the 1870s, some five and six story buildings had steam-powered elevators, which had cables wound around a huge rotating drum; but these were not suitable for taller buildings, since the drum would have to be impractically large. The Eiffel Tower used hydraulic-powered elevators, which required a huge power source. During the 1880s, the electric elevator offered a more practical solution.Tall buildings also needed ventilation systems to heat them in the winter and cool them in the summer. The early ventilation systems, introduced in the 1860s, used steam-powered fans to move air through ducts. After 1890, fans were driven by electricity. Steam heating using radiators was widely used by 1885. Plumbing to circulate water through the building relied on pressure using electric pumps.The early 20th century skyscraper culminated with New York City's Empire State Building formally opened on May 1, 1931. President Herbert Hoover and New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt attended the dedication of the 102-story, 1,250 high building. Erected in just 13 months, the building grew at a rate of more than a story a day, while constructed workers toiled on girders a fifth of a mile above the ground. The building would remain the world's tallest for forty years, before it was overtaken by the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center.When the Empire State Building opened in the midst of the Depression, only 28 percent of the office space was rented. Revenue generated by thousands of visitors who stood on the building's observation deck helped keep the building from going bankrupt. A symbol of the modern city, the Empire State Building was where King Kong made his last stand in the 1931 movie.TenementsThe immigrant poor lived in overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe housing. Many lived in tenements, dumbbell-shaped brick apartment buildings, four to six stories in height. In 1900, two-thirds of Manhattan's residents lived in tenements.In one New York tenement, up to 18 people lived in each apartment. Each apartment had a wood-burning stove and a concrete bathtub in the kitchen, which, when covered with planks, served as a dining table. Before 1901, residents used rear-yard outhouses. Afterward, two common toilets were installed on each floor. In the summer, children sometimes slept on the fire escape. Tenants typically paid $10 a month rent.In tenements, many apartments were dark and airless because interior windows faced narrow light shafts, if there were interior windows at all. With a series of newspaper articles and then a book, entitled How the Other Half Lives, published in 1889, Jacob Riis turned tenement reform into a crusade.Boss TweedTo many late 19th century Americans, he personified public corruption. In the late 1860s, William M. Tweed was the political boss of New York City. His headquarters, located on East 14th Street, was known as Tammany Hall. He wore a diamond, orchestrated elections, controlled the city's mayor, and rewarded political supporters. His primary source of funds came from the bribes and kickbacks that he demanded in exchange for city contracts. The most notorious example of urban corruption was the construction of the New York County Courthouse, begun in 1861 on the site of a former almshouse. Officially, the city wound up spending nearly $13 million--roughly $178 million in today's dollars--on a building that should have cost several times less. Its construction cost nearly twice as much as the purchase of Alaska in 1867.The corruption was breathtaking in its breadth and baldness. A carpenter was paid $360,751 (roughly $4.9 million today) for one month's labor in a building with very little woodwork. A furniture contractor received $179,729 ($2.5 million) for three tables and 40 chairs. And the plasterer, a Tammany functionary, Andrew J. Garvey, got $133,187 ($1.82 million) for two days' work; his business acumen earned him the sobriquet "The Prince of Plasterers." Tweed personally profited from a financial interest in a Massachusetts quarry that provided the courthouse's marble. When a committee investigated why it took so long to build the courthouse, it spent $7,718 ($105,000) to print its report. The printing company was owned by Tweed.In July 1871, two low-level city officials with a grudge against the Tweed Ring provided The New York Times with reams of documentation that detailed the corruption at the courthouse and other city projects. The newspaper published a string of articles. Those articles, coupled with the political cartoons of Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly, created a national outcry, and soon Tweed and many of his cronies were facing criminal charges and political oblivion. Tweed died in prison in 1878.The Tweed courthouse was not completed until 1880, two decades after ground was broken. By then, the courthouse had become a symbol of public corruption. "The whole atmosphere is corrupt," said a reformer from the time. "You look up at its ceilings and find gaudy decorations; you wonder which is the greatest, the vulgarity or the corruptness of the place."Boss-rule, machine politics, payoff and graft, and the spoils system outraged late 19th century reformers. But were bosses and political machines as corrupt as their critics charged?George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, New York's Democratic political machine, distinguished between "honest" and "dishonest" graft. Dishonest graft involved payoffs for protecting gambling and prostitution. Honest graft might involve buying up land scheduled for purchase by government. As Plunkitt said, "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em."Paradoxically, a political machine often created benefits for the city. Many machines professionalized urban police forces and instituted the first housing regulations. Political bosses served the welfare needs of immigrants. They offered jobs, food, fuel, and clothing to the new immigrants and the destitute poor. Political machines also served as a ladder of social mobility for ethnic groups blocked from other means of rising in society.In The Shame of the Cities, the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens argued that it was greedy businessmen who kept the political machines functioning. It was their hunger for government contracts, franchises, charters, and special privileges, he believed, that corrupted urban politics.At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, urban reformers would seek to redeem the city through beautification campaigns, city planning, rationalization of city government, and increases in city services.IMMIGRATIONAround the turn of the twentieth century, mass immigration from eastern and southern Europe dramatically altered the population's ethnic and religious composition. Unlike earlier immigrants, who had come from Britain, Canada, Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia, the “new immigrants” came increasingly from Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Russia. The newcomers were often Catholic or Jewish and two-thirds of them settled in cities. In this chapter you will learn about the new immigrants and the anti-immigrant reaction.The Statue of LibertyIt is the tallest metal statue ever constructed, and, at the time it was completed, the tallest building in New York, 22 stories high. It stands 151 feet high and weighs 225 tons. Its arms are 42 feet long and its torch is 21 feet in length. Its index fingers are eight feet long and it has a 4-foot 6-inch nose. For people all around the world, the statue symbolizes American freedom, hope, and opportunity.There may be grander monuments, but this statute was not like the Egyptian pyramids or the Colossus of Rhodes, "the brazen statue of Greek fame."The statue was originally proposed by a now obscure French historian, Edouard de Laboulaye, a prominent French abolitionist, and designed by the French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi. The statue has severed chains on one of her feet.The Statue of Liberty was a gift from French Republicans who wanted to advance their political cause: the replacement of the monarchy of Napoleon III with a republican system of government. It was modeled, in part, on the Roman goddess Libertas, the personification of liberty and freedom in classical Rome, which led some critics to object to a heathen goddess standing in New York harbor. Others derided the statue as a "useless gift," "Neither an object of Art or of Beauty," and it seemed possible that the statue would be placed in Boston or Philadelphia.The final $100,000 for the statue's pedestal were raised by the Hungarian-born publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who asked New York's poor for contributions. In exchange, he printed their names in his newspaper. One wrote a letter to his paper, The World: "I am a young girl alone in the world, and earning my own living. Enclosed please find 60 cents, the result of self-denial. I wish I could make it 60 thousand dollars, instead of cents, but drops make the ocean."Over time, the statue's symbolic meaning has been transformed. It was originally intended to express opposition and slavery. After the America's emergence as a world power after its defeat of Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898, the statue became a symbol of American might. It was not until the 20th century and massive immigration from eastern and southern Europe that the statue became "a lady of hope" for immigrants and refugees.Emma LazarusOn a tablet on the pedestal of the statue of liberty is inscribed a poem. Entitled "The New Colossus," it contains the famous words, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."These words were not originally attached to the statue. The poem, which was written in 1883 to help raise money for the statue's pedestal, was forgotten until it was rediscovered in a Manhattan used-book store. The text was only placed on the pedestal in 1903, and it transformed the statue's meaning.Its author, Emma Lazarus, was an American Jew, born in New York City in 1849. She had a privileged upbringing, and wrote a volume of poetry that was privately printed by her father.In 1881, a wave of anti-Semitism swept across Russia. Soldiers destroyed Jewish districts, burned homes and synagogues. Thousands of Jews set sail for America. Lazarus was shocked by what she saw and devoted herself to helping the refugees.The final sum needed to complete the pedestal came from an auction of literary works by such authors as Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. Emma Lazarus was asked to contribute a poem. She was reminded of the Colossus of Rhodes, a huge bronze statue of the sun god Helios, one of the wonders of the ancient world. She called her poem "The New Colossus," and it was sold for $1,500. At the time, she was dying of cancer. She was just 38 years old when she died in 1887.The New ImmigrantsSome 334,203 immigrants arrived in the United States in 1886, the year of the statue's dedication. A Cuban revolutionary, Jose Marti, wrote: "Irishmen, Poles, Italians, Czechs, Germans freed from tyranny or want--all hail the monument of Liberty because to them it seems to incarnate their own uplifting."The immigrants who would catch a glimpse of the statue would mainly come from eastern and southern Europe.In 1900, 14 percent of the American population was foreign born, compared to 8 percent a century later. Passports were unnecessary and the cost of crossing the Atlantic was just $10 in steerage.European immigration to the United States greatly increased after the Civil War, reaching 5.2 million in the 1880s then surging to 8.2 million in the first decade of the 20th century. Between 1882 and 1914, approximately 20 million immigrants came to the United States. In 1907 alone, 1.285 million arrived. By 1900, New York City had as many Irish residents as Dublin. It had more Italians than any city outside Rome and more Poles than any city except Warsaw. It had more Jews than any other city in the world, as well as sizeable numbers of Slavs, Lithuanians, Chinese, and Scandinavians.Unlike earlier immigrants, who mainly came from northern and western Europe, the "new immigrants" came largely from southern and eastern Europe. Largely Catholic and Jewish in religion, the new immigrants came from the Balkans, Italy, Poland, and Russia.Birds of PassageMany of the millions of immigrants who arrived into the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries did so with the intention of returning to their villages in the Old World. Known as "birds of passage," many of these eastern and southern European migrants were peasants who had lost their property as a result of the commercialization of agriculture. They came to America to earn enough money to allow them to return home and purchase a piece of land. As one Slavic steelworker put it: "A good job, save money, work all time, go home, sleep, no spend."Many of these immigrants came to America alone, expecting to rejoin their families in Europe within a few years. From 1907 to 1911, of every hundred Italians who arrived in the United States, 73 returned to the Old Country. For Southern and Eastern Europe as a whole, approximately 44 of every 100 who arrived returned back home.Some immigrants, however, did not come as "sojourners." In particular, Jewish immigrants from Russia, fleeing religious persecution, came in family groups and intended to stay in the United States from the beginning.Chinese Exclusion ActFrom 1882 until 1943, most Chinese immigrants were barred from entering the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the nation's first law to ban immigration by race or nationality. All Chinese people--except travelers, merchants, teachers, students, and those born in the United States--were barred from entering the country. Federal law prohibited Chinese residents, no matter how long they had legally worked in the United States, from becoming naturalized citizens.From 1850 to 1865, political and religious rebellions within China left 30 million dead and the country's economy in a state of collapse. Meanwhile, the canning, timber, mining, and railroad industries on the United States's West Coast needed workers. Chinese business owners also wanted immigrants to staff their laundries, restaurants, and small factories.Smugglers transported people from southern China to Hong Kong, where they were transferred onto passenger steamers bound for Victoria, British Columbia. From Victoria, many immigrants crossed into the United States in small boats at night. Others crossed by land.The Geary Act, passed in 1892, required Chinese aliens to carry a residence certificate with them at all times upon penalty of deportation. Immigration officials and police officers conducted spot checks in canneries, mines, and lodging houses and demanded that every Chinese person show these residence certificates.Due to intense anti-Chinese discrimination, many merchants' families remained in China while husbands and fathers worked in the United States. Since Federal law allowed merchants who returned to China to register two children to come to the United States, men who were legally in the United States might sell their testimony so that an unrelated child could be sponsored for entry. To pass official interrogations, immigrants were forced to memorize coaching books which contained very specific pieces of information, such as how many water buffalo there were in a particular village. So intense was the fear of being deported that many "paper sons" kept their false names all their lives. The U.S. government only gave amnesty to these "paper families" in the 1950s.Angel IslandIt was called the "Ellis Island of the West." Located in San Francisco Bay, Angel Island was also a check point for immigrants in the early years of the 20th century. But only a small proportion of the 175,000 people who arrived at Angel Island were allowed to remain in the United States. Angel Island was a detention center for Chinese immigrants. It was surrounded by barbed wire.Thirteen-year-old Jack Moy and his mother sailed to the United States in 1927. The two spent a month in the detention center separated from one another. Immigration officials asked insulting personal questions, such as whether their mother had bound feet or how many water buffalo a village had or "who occupies the house on the fifth lot of your row in your native village." Discrepancies in an answer could mean deportation to China. Immigration officials marked down every identifying mark, including scars, boils, and moles.To join her husband in the United States, Suey Ting Gee had to pretend that she was the wife of another man. Under a U.S. law in effect from 1882 to 1943, the Chinese wives of resident alien laborers could not join them in this country.Japanese ImmigrationOverpopulation and rural poverty led many Japanese to emigrate to the United States, where they confronted intense racial prejudice. In California, the legislature imposed limits on Japanese land ownership, and the Hearst newspaper ran headlines such as 'The Yellow Peril: How Japanese Crowd out the White Race.'The San Francisco School Board stirred an international incident in 1906 when it segregated Japanese students in an 'Oriental School.' The Japanese government protested to President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt negotiated a 'gentlemen's agreement' restricting Japanese emigration.Contract LaborDuring the 19th century, demand for manual laborers to build railroads, raise sugar on Pacific Islands, mine precious metals, construct irrigation canals, and perform other forms of heavy labor, grew. Particularly in tropical or semi-tropical regions, this demand for manual labor was met by indentured or contract workers. Nominally free, these laborers served under contracts of indenture which required them to work for a period of time--usually five to seven years--in return for their travel expenses and maintenance. In exchange for nine hours of labor a day, six days a week, indentured servants received a small salary as well as clothing, shelter, food, and medical care.An alternative to the indenture system was the "credit ticket system." A broker advanced the cost of passage and workers repaid the loan plus interest out of their earnings. The ticket system was widely used by Chinese migrants to the United States. Beginning in the 1840s, about 380,000 Chinese laborers migrated to the U.S. mainland and 46,000 to Hawaii. Between 1885 and 1924, some 200,000 Japanese workers went to Hawaii and 180,000 to the U.S. mainland.Indentured laborers are sometimes derogatorily referred to as "coolies." Today, this term carries negative connotations of passivity and submissiveness, but originally it was an Anglicization of a Chinese work that refers to manual workers impressed into service by force or deception. In fact, indentured labor was frequently acquired through deceptive practices and even violence.Between 1830 and 1920, about 1.5 million indentured laborers were recruited from India, one million from Japan, and half a million from China. Tens of thousands of free Africans and Pacific Islanders also served as indentured workers.The first Indian indentured laborers were imported into Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean, in 1830. Following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, tens of thousands of Indians, Chinese, and Africans were brought to the British Caribbean. After France abolished slavery in 1848, its colonies imported 80,000 Indian laborers and 19,000 Africans. Also ending slavery in 1848, Dutch Guiana recruited 57,000 Asian workers for its plantations. Although slavery was not abolished in Cuba until 1886, the rising costs of slaves led plantations to recruit 138,000 indentured laborers from China between 1847 and 1873.Areas that had never relied on slave labor also imported indentured workers. After 1850, American planters in Hawaii recruited labor from China and Japan. British planters in Natal in southern Africa recruited Indian laborers and those in Queensland in northeastern Australia imported laborers from neighboring South Pacific Islands. Other indentured laborers toiled in East Africa, on Pacific Islands such as Fiji, and in Chile, where they gathered bird droppings known as guano for fertilizer.Steam transportation allowed Europeans and their descendants to extract "surplus" labor from overpopulated areas suffering from poverty and social and economic dislocation. In India, the roots of migration included unemployment, famine, demise of traditional industries, and the demand for cash payment of rents. In China, a society with a long history of long-distance migration, causes of migration included overpopulation, drought, floods, and political turmoil, culminating in the British Opium Wars (1839-1842 and 1856 and 1860) and the Taiping Rebellion, which may have cost 20 to 30 million lives.Overwhelmingly male, many indentured workers initially thought of themselves as sojourners who would reside temporarily in the new society. In the end, however, many indentured laborers remained in the regions where they worked. As a result, the descendents of indentured laborers make up a third of the population in British Guiana, Fiji, and Trinidad by the early 20th century.Some societies, such as the United States, passed legislation that hindered the migration of Asian women. In contrast, the British Caribbean colonies required 40 women to be recruited for every 100 men to promote family life.Immigration RestrictionGradually during the late 19th and early 20th century, the United States imposed additional restrictions on immigration. In 1882, excluded people were likely to become public charges. It subsequently prohibited the immigration of contract laborers (1885) and illiterates (1917), and all Asian immigrants (except for Filipinos, who were U.S. nationals) (1917). Other acts restricted the entry of certain criminals, people who were considered immoral, those suffering from certain diseases, and paupers. Under the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907-1908, the Japanese government agreed to limit passports issued to Japanese in order to permit wives to enter the United States; and in 1917, the United States barred all Asian immigrants except for Filipinos, who were U.S. nationals. Intolerance toward immigrants from southern and eastern Europe resulted in the Immigration Act of 1924, which placed a numerical cap on immigration and instituted a deliberately discriminatory system of national quotas. In 1965, the United States adopted a new immigration law which ended the quota system.During the 20th century, all advanced countries imposed restrictions on the entry of immigrants. A variety of factors encouraged immigration restriction. These include a concern about the impact of immigration on the economic well-being of a country's workforce as well as anxiety about the feasibility of assimilating immigrants of diverse ethnic and cultural origins. Especially following World War I and World War II, countries expressed concern that foreign immigrants might threaten national security by introducing alien ideologies.It is only in the 20th century that governments became capable of effectively enforcing immigration restrictions. Before the 20th century, Russia was the only major European country to enforce a system of passports and travel regulations. During and after World War I, however, many western countries adopted systems of passports and border controls as well as more restrictive immigration laws. The Russian Revolution prompted fear of foreign radicalism exacerbated by the Russian Revolution, while many countries feared that their societies would be overwhelmed by a postwar surge of refugees.Among the first societies to adopt restrictive immigration policies were Europe's overseas colonies. Apart from prohibitions on the slave trade, many of the earliest immigration restrictions were aimed at Asian immigrants. The United States imposed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. It barred the entry of Chinese laborers and established stringent conditions under which Chinese merchants and their families could enter. Canada also imposed restrictions on Chinese immigration. It imposed a "head" tax (which was $500 in 1904) and required migrants to arrive by a "continuous voyage."Xenophobia: Hatred of foreigners and immigrants.Nativism: The policy of keeping a society ethnically homogenous.Migration and DiseaseThroughout history, the movement of people has played a critical role in the transmission of infectious disease. As a result of migration, trade, and war, disease germs have traveled from one environment to others. As intercultural contact has increased--as growing numbers of people traveled longer distances to more diverse destinations--the transmission of infectious diseases has increased as well.No part of the globe has been immune from this process of disease transmission. In the 1330s, bubonic plague spread from central Asia to China, India, and the Middle East. In 1347, merchants from Genoa and Venice carried the plague to Mediterranean ports. The African slave trade carried yellow fever, hookworm, and African versions of malaria into the New World. During the early 19th century, cholera spread from northeast India to Ceylon, Afghanistan and Nepal. By 1826, the disease had reached the Arabian Peninsula, the eastern coast of Africa, Burma, China, Japan, Java, Poland, Russia, Thailand, and Turkey. Austria, Germany, Poland, and Sweden were struck by the disease by 1829, and within two more years, cholera had reached the British Isles. In 1832, the disease arrived in Canada and the United States.Epidemic diseases have had far-reaching social consequences. The most devastating pandemic of the 20th century, the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 and 1919, killed well over 20 million people around the world--many more people than died in combat in World War I. Resulting in such complications as pneumonia, bronchitis and heart problems, the Spanish Flu had particularly devastating impact in Australia, Canada, China, India, Persia, South Africa, and the United States. Today, the long-distance transfer of disease continues, evident, most strikingly with AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome), which many researchers suspect originated in sub-Saharan Africa.Disease played a critically important role in the success of European colonialism. After 1492, Europeans carried diphtheria, influenza, measles, mumps, scarlet fever, smallpox, tertian malaria, typhoid, typhus, and yellow fever to the New World, reducing the size of the indigenous population 50 to 90 percent. Measles killed one fifth of Hawaii's people during the 1850s and a similar proportion of Fiji's indigenous population in the 1870s. Influenza flu, measles, smallpox, whooping cough reduced the Maoris population of New Zealand from about 100,000 in 1840 to 40,000 in 1860.Fear of contagious diseases assisted nativists in the United States in their efforts to restrict foreign immigration. The 1890s was a decade of massive immigration from eastern Europe. When 200 cases of typhus appeared among Russian Jewish immigrants who had arrived in New York on French steamship in 1892, public health authorities acted swiftly. They detained the 1,200 Russian Jewish immigrants who had arrived on the ship and placed them in quarantine to keep the epidemic from spreading. The chairman of the U.S. Senate committee on Immigration subsequently proposed legislation severely restricting immigration, including the imposition of a literacy requirement.Fear that immigrants carried disease mounted with news of an approaching cholera pandemic. The epidemic, which had begun in India in 1881, did not subside until 1896, when it had spread across the Far East, Middle East, Russia, Germany, Africa, and the Americas. More than 300,000 people died of cholera in famine-stricken Russia alone.To prevent the disease from entering the United States, the port of New York in 1892 imposed a 20 day quarantine on all immigrant passengers who traveled in steerage. This measure, which did not apply to cabin-class passengers, was designed to halt foreign immigration, since few steamships could afford to pay $5,000 a day in daily port fees. Other cities including Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit, imposed quarantines on immigrants arriving in local railroad stations. Congress in 1893 adopted the Rayner-Harris National Quarantine Act which set up procedures for the medical inspection of immigrants and permitted the president to suspend immigration on a temporary basis.A fear that impoverished immigrants will carry disease into the United States has recurred during the 20th century. In 1900, after bubonic plague appeared in San Francisco's Chinatown, public health officials in San Francisco quarantined Chinese residents. In 1924, a pneumonia outbreak resulted in the quarantining of Mexican American immigrants. After Haitian immigrants were deemed to be at high risk of AIDS during the 1980s, they were placed under close scrutiny by immigration officials.Questions to think about?What factors might make a specific population particularly vulnerable to disease?In your view should immigrants be viewed as a possible source of disease? Or is such a fear overdrawn?The United States's Changing FaceToday, immigration to the United States is at its highest level since the early 20th century. Some 10 million legal and undocumented immigrants entered the country during the 1980s, exceeding the previous high of nine million between 1900 and 1910.Shaped by an unprecedented wave of immigrants from Latin America, Asia and Africa, the face of the United States has changed in the space of 20 years. In 1996, nearly one in ten U.S. residents was born in another country, twice as many as in 1970. Since 1965, when the United States ended strict national immigration quotas, the number of Hispanics in the United States tripled and the number of Asians increased nearly eight-fold.As recently as the 1950s, two-thirds of all immigrants to the United States came from Europe or Canada. Today, more than 80 percent are Latin American or Asian. The chief sources of immigrants are Mexico, the Philippines, China, Cuba, and India. Nearly half of the foreign-born population is Hispanic; a fifth is Asian; a twelfth is black.As a result of massive immigration, the United States is becoming the first truly multi-racial advanced industrial society in which every resident will be a member of a minority group. California recently became the first state in which no single ethnic group or race makes up half of the population.Immigration's impact has been geographically uneven, concentrated in distinct parts of the country. Immigrants have been attracted to areas of high growth and high rates of historic immigration. Immigrants are particularly attracted to areas where their countrymen already are. Three-quarters of all immigrants live in six states--California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Texas--and more than half of these migrants settled in just eight metropolitan areas.Meanwhile, the native-born population is itself on the move. For every ten immigrants who arrive in the nation's largest cities, nine native-born inhabitants leave for a residence elsewhere. Because most of those leaving metropolitan areas are non-Hispanic whites, the United States population has grown more geographically divided even as it becomes more ethnically diverse.As in the past, the South remains the region with the fewest foreign immigrants. But it is experiencing a rapid influx of native-born migrants--black and white. Reversing the great northward migration of the early and mid-20th century, a significant number of African Americans are abandoning northern industrial cities and are returning to big cities in the South.Work has always been the great magnet attracting migrants to the United States. Historically, immigrants tackled jobs that native-born Americans avoided, such as digging canals, building railroads, or working in steel mills and garment factories. Today, many immigrants help meet needs for highly skilled professionals, while other less-educated immigrants find employment as maids, janitors, farm workers, and poorly paid, non-unionized employees.Each wave of immigrants has also sparked a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. Since the first wave of mass immigration from Germany and Ireland in the 1840s, nativists have expressed fear that immigrants depress wages, displace workers, and threaten the nation's cultural values and security.Even though the United States conceives of itself as a refuge for the poor and tempest-tossed, it is also a society that has experienced periodic episodes of intense anti-immigrant fervor, particularly in times of economic and political uncertainty. Unlike 19th century nativists who charged that Catholic immigrants were subservient to a foreign leader, the Pope, or later xenophobes who accused immigrants of carrying subversive ideologies, today's immigration critics are more concerned about immigration's effects on the country's economic well-being.Many fear that newcomers make use of services like welfare or unemployment benefits more frequently than natives. Others argue that the new wave of immigrants is less skilled than its predecessors and is therefore more likely to become a burden on the government. Many worry that the society is being split into separate and unequal societies divided by skin color, ethnic background, language, and culture. Fear that immigrants are attracted to the United States by welfare benefits, led Congress in 1996 to restrict non-citizens' access to social services.Census data present a complicated picture of today's immigrants. They show that many immigrants are better educated than the native born, while others are less educated. Today, about 12 percent of immigrants over the age of 25 have graduate degrees, compared with 8 percent of the native born. Yet 36 percent have not graduated from high school, compared with 17 percent of the native born. Some immigrants have found employment as highly skilled engineers, mathematicians, and scientists; but about a third of immigrants live in poverty. On average they earn about $8,000 a year, compared with native-born average of nearly $16,000.Yet if some Americans express anxiety about immigration, others are hopeful that increasing population diversity will teach Americans to tolerate and even cherish the extraordinary variety of their country's people.Migration TodayAt the end of the 20th century, long-distance migration increasingly involves the movement of people from Third World to advanced industrial countries. Contributing to this immigration flow is a growing income gap between the richer and poorer countries; Third World populations increasing faster than economic growth; political conflicts that create large numbers of refugees; and improved means of communication and transportation, which alert migrants to opportunities available in affluent countries and make it easier to travel to them.Perhaps the most important factor stimulating global migration in the late 20th century is the advanced countries' need for workers to perform low wage jobs that their own citizens are unwilling to take. A heightened demand for low-wage laborers from underdeveloped areas arose at mid-century. During World War II, the United States instituted the bracero program to bring migrant farmworkers from Mexico. After the war, many Western European countries brought in guestworkers to work in construction, manufacturing, and service occupations. Many of these guestworkers came from North Africa and Eastern and Southern Europe and former European colonies.During the prolonged period of economic stagnation and inflation that began with the oil price hikes of 1973, immigration became an increasingly contentious political issue. Many European countries encouraged guestworkers to return to their homeland. Across the western world, societies debated whether to restrict immigration.Due to advances in communications, including the spread of cable television, the development of videocassettes, and the declining cost of long distance telephone service, migrants are able to maintain contact with their native culture to a much greater degree than in the past.Evaluating the Economic Costs and Benefits of ImmigrationFew subjects arouse more controversy than the economic impact of immigration. Some argue that migration benefits societies economically by providing a pool of young, energetic, reliable workers. Other argue, in contrast, that immigration overload the labor force, overburdens social services, and overwhelm society's capacity to absorb and assimilate newcomers.Critics of immigration make several economic arguments. They contend that immigrants take jobs away from low-skilled native born workers and depress wages. They maintain that immigrants make greater use of public services such as welfare, health services, and public education than do the native born. They also argue that the immigrants who are currently arriving into countries such as Canada, France, Germany, and the United States are relatively less-skilled and less-educated than those who came in the past, and that they are more cut off from mainstream culture than those who arrived earlier in history. Such critics argue that restricting immigration would open up job opportunities for many native-born minority workers and reduce tax burdens.Proponents of immigration respond to such arguments in several ways. For one thing, they argue that in evaluating the costs and benefits of immigration, it is important to recognize the ways that immigrants contribute to living standards, particularly for the middle class. Although low-wage immigrant workers are often blamed for unemployment and depressed wages, in fact they make it cheaper to buy many goods and services--everything from fresh fruit and vegetables to clothing, construction, and childcare. As birth rates fall, immigrants assume many necessary but less desirable jobs, picking crops, washing dishes in restaurants, laundering clothes, staffing hospitals, and running small shops.Undocumented (or "illegal") immigrants, they maintain, are overwhelmingly employed in sectors of the economy paying low wages, offering little job security, and few or no benefits. Because of the lack of opportunities for advancement, few native-born workers are attracted to these jobs.Proponents of immigration further argue that immigrants are not simply producers, but consumers as well, who create demand that helps invigorate an economy. They create markets for housing, clothing, and other products and services. In general, immigrants are attracted to areas of high economic growth and labor shortages and as a result they note that immigration has little or no effect on the wages or unemployment rate.How do you evaluate these contrasting points of view?What kinds of evidence in support of these positions would you find most persuasive?Migration as a Key Theme in U.S. and World HistoryThe massive movement of peoples as a result of voluntary choice, forced removal, and economic and cultural dislocation has been one of the most important forces for social change over the past 500 years. Changes produced by migration--such as urbanization or expansion into frontier regions--transformed the face of the modern world. Migration has also played a pivotal role in the formation of modern American culture. Our most cherished values as well as our art, literature, music, technology, and cultural beliefs and practices have been shaped by an intricate process of cultural contact and interaction. Because ours is a nation of immigrants, drawn from every part of the world, the study of migration provides a way to recognize and celebrate the richness of our population's ancestral cultures.Historical understanding, however, demands more than a solid grasp of historical events and personalities. It also requires students to understand basic historical and sociological terms and concepts. The following skill-building exercises are designed to increase understanding of the complexity of migration.The Language of Migration: Key ConceptsDemographers, historians, and sociologists have developed a technical vocabulary that is useful in understandings the nature, varieties, and results of migration.Career Migration: The movement of people or households in response to occupational opportunities in business enterprises, government bureaucracies, or the military.Chain Migration: The movement of clusters of individuals from a common place of origin to another place. The earlier migrants provide later migrants with aid and information.Circular Migration: A well-defined pattern of migration, such as seasonal work or grazing of livestock or sending children temporarily into domestic service in another family's home, in which migrants return to their place of origin.Diaspora: The dispersion abroad of a group of people.Emigration: The departure of people from their homeland to take up residence in a new place of residence.Forced Migration: Migration that takes place when the migrant has no choice about whether or not to move.Global Migration: Human movement across continents.Immigration: The movement into a country of which one is not a native.Impelled Migration: Migration that takes place under great economic, political, or social pressures.Internal Migration: The movement of people from one part of a country or region to another.Local Migration: Migration within a narrow geographical area, often within a single labor market or agricultural market.Long-Distance Movements: The movement of people from one country or region to another.Repatriation: The return of migrants or displaced persons to their place of origin or citizenship.Repeat Migration: Individuals who repeatedly migrate from and return to their place of origin.Seasonal Migration: Migration at a particular time of the year.Kinds of MigrantsWhen we think of migrants, one image quickly comes to mind: people who permanently depart their place of birth and travel hundreds and even thousands of miles to make a new home. But this kind of migration represents only one of many forms of migration.Migration may be voluntary or involuntary. Involuntary migrants are those people who are forced to move--by organized persecution or government pressure. Migration may be temporary or permanent. Approximately a third of the European immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1820 and World War I eventually returned to live in their country of origin. These "birds of passage," as they are known, often returned to the United States several times before permanently settling in their homeland.Migration may also be short distance or long distance. Short-distance migrants might move from a rural community to a nearby urban area or from a smaller city to a larger one. Migration may be cyclical and repetitive, like the rhythmic migrations of nomadic livestock herders or present day farm laborers. Or it may be tied to a particular stage in the life cycle, like the decision of an adolescent to leave home to go to college.The motives behind migration may also vary widely. Migration may occur in reaction to poverty, unemployment, overcrowding, persecution, or dislocation. It may also arise in response to employment opportunities or the prospects of religious or political freedom. In distinguishing between different kinds of migration, it is important to look at:--The distance traveled;--The causes of migration;--Whether migration is temporary, semi-permanent, or permanent;--Whether the migration is voluntary, involuntary, or the result of pressure."Coolie" Laborer: A pejorative term referring to a contract manual laborer, usually from South or East Asia.Displaced Person: A person displaced from a place of residence by war, political strife, or natural catastrophe.Nomad: A member of a people who have no fixed place of residence, usually a migratory pastoral people.Pioneer: An individual who helps to open up a frontier region to settlement.Refugee: A person who flees to a foreign country to escape danger or persecution.Slave: A person who is held in servitude as another person's chattel property.Sojourner: A temporary resident.Questions to think aboutDo you think that temporary migrants are less likely to learn the language of their new place of residence or to marry individuals outside their ethnic group?Do you think they are more or less likely to establish community, culture, labor, or religious organizations in their land of residence?Do you think that temporary migrants are more likely to select jobs that allow them to be mobile?The Language of Cultural Mixture and PersistenceThe study of migration encourages us to think about the process of cultural adjustment and adaptation that takes place after migrants move from one environment to another. In the early 20th century, Americans commonly thought of migration in terms of a "melting pot," in which immigrants shed their native culture and assimilated into the dominant culture. Today, we are more likely to speak of the persistence and blending of cultural values and practices.Assimilation: Absorption into the cultural tradition of another group.Creolization: Cultural patterns and practices that reflect a mixture of cultural influences. In terms of language, creolization refers to the way that a subordinate group incorporates elements of a dominant group's language, simplifying grammar and mixing each groups' vocabulary.Fusion:The melding together of various cultural practices.Hybridization: A fusion of diverse cultures or traditions.Redefinition: To alter the meaning of an existing cultural practice, tradition, or concept.Survival: The persistence of an earlier cultural practice in a new setting.Syncretization:The way that a group of people adapts to a changing social environment by selectively incorporating the beliefs or practices of a dominant group.Music and MigrationAs they traveled from one environment to another, immigrant groups carried their musical traditions with them. These musical traditions included ceremonial music, folk music, work songs, dance music, instrumental music, and popular songs as well as distinctive forms of musical instrumentation.The New World slaves, for example, created the banjo in the New World, modeled on earlier African musical instruments. West Africa had one of the most complex rhythmic cultures in the world, and in developing musical forms in the New World, African Americans made extensive use of rhythmic syncopation. This musical term refers to temporarily breaking the regular beat in a piece of music by stressing the weak beat and singing and embellishing around the beat. African Americans drew upon these earlier traditions to create music as diverse as the Spiritual (which blended together rhythmic and melodic gestures drawn from African music with white church music), Ragtime (which combined a syncopated melodic line with rhythms drawn from musical marches), the Blues (songs of lamentation which made extensive use of ambiguities of pitch), and Jazz (an amalgam of blues, ragtime, and Broadway musical forms).Migration resulted in the creation of new musical hybrids, styles, and genres. The polka, a popular dance of the mid-19th century, represented an American adaptation of German tradition.One of the earliest forms of commercial popular music was the minstrel song, which accompanied a popular form of 19th century theatrical entertainment. Minstrel songs represented an adaptation of earlier ethnic and popular musical traditions. The minstrel song--typified by Stephen Foster's Old Folk's At Home and his Camptown Race Track--drew its rhythm partly from the polka and its spicy syncopation from African and African American music.In Latin America, the music of various ethnic groups blended together to form musical and dance forms that would become recognizable worldwide. Spanish, African, and various Indian musical traditions combined in intricate ways to form the tango, the cha-cha, the mamba, the rumba, and reggae.Why Do People Migrate?In trying to understand why people migrate, some scholars emphasize individual decision-making, while others stress broader structural forces. Many early scholars of migration emphasized the importance of "push" and "pull" factors. According to this viewpoint, people decide to leave their homeland when conditions there are no longer satisfactory and when conditions in another area are more attractive.In recent years, many scholars have argued that a thorough understanding of the decision to migrate involves looking at various levels of explanation: the individual, the familial and the structural-institutional. The first level of explanation--the individual or the psychological--focuses on individual perception and asks what advantages individuals hope to obtain by migrating. These often include the prospects of increased economic opportunity or a higher standard of living or escape from social turmoil.A second level of explanation focuses on family needs. Often, the decision to migrate is not simply a personal but a family decision, reflecting the desire of a larger family unit to enhance its security or improve its well-being. Many family or kin groups receive "remittances"--cash payments that help to support family members--from relatives who have migrated to another area.A third level of explanation--the structural and institutional--focuses on the broad social, political and economic contexts that encourage or discourage population movement. Factors that stimulate migration include improvements in transportation and communication or income differentials between more economically advanced and less advanced areas. War, too, often induces migration. Factors that inhibit migration include immigration laws restricting exit or entry or laws or social practices that tie farmers to the land (such as sharecropping or debt peonage which prevented many African Americans from leaving the post-Civil War American South).Push Factors:Factors that repel migrants from their country of origin--include economic dislocation, population pressures, religious persecution, or denial of political rights.Pull Factors: Factors that attract migrants to move, including the attraction of higher wages, job opportunities, and political or religious liberty.Uneven Development:Disparities in income, standards of living, and the availability of jobs within and across societies.GILDED AGEThe 1880s and 1890s were years of unprecedented technological innovation, mass immigration, and intense political partisanship, including disputes over currency, tariffs, political corruption and patronage, and railroads and business trusts.A Distant Mirror: The Late Nineteenth CenturyIn the 1870s, a woman named Myra Bradwell did a most unladylike thing: She applied for a license to practice law.A Vermont native, she had moved to Illinois in the mid-1850s, and after the ratification in 1868 of the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed all citizens equal protection of the law, she sued to become an attorney. After the Illinois courts rejected her petition, she turned to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in April 1873, said it was within the power of Illinois to limit membership in the bar to men only. Only one Justice dissented. One Justice wrote:Man is, or should be, woman's protector of defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.... The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. And the rules of civil society must be adapted to the general constitution of things, and cannot be based on exceptional cases.At first glance, late 19th century America might seem remote and even irrelevant. It was a society without Social Security, Medicare, health insurance, and government regulation, not to mention airplanes, antibiotics, automobiles, computers, radio, and television. The telephone had been invented, but there were only 9 in the entire country.The government was tiny. There were only about 100,000 federal employees, and only 22,000 if the military and post office were excluded. There was no civil service system and no income tax. Government revenues were mainly raised through taxes on imports, tobacco, and alcohol.It was a small, predominantly rural society. In 1877, the country's total population was just 47 million, just a sixth of what it is today. Only one city had more than a million people and just three others had as many as half a million.Today, our birth rate is around the replacement level, but in 1877, 15 percent of married women had 10 or more children, and another 22 percent had between 7 and 9. As a result of the high birth rate, the population was very young. Half the population was twenty or younger; today the average American is over 30.Perhaps most striking to us was the lack of formal education. Only about three in five children attended school in a typical year, and they only attended about 80 days a year, compared to 180 today. Most left school in their early teens. Only about two-and-a-half percent of the school-aged population graduated from high school. Advanced degrees beyond college were almost unheard of. In 1877, only one Master's degree was conferred in the whole country.The other startling fact was how poor the average family was. The average income of an urban family in 1877 was $738, and two thirds of that was spent on food and heating. After clothing and housing were paid for, there was just $44 left over, to save for old age or to buy a house, to pay for medical care or simply to spend on entertainment. It was a society in which the average unskilled or semi-skilled worker toiled 10 hours a day for about 20 cents an hour. Of every thousand Americans, 939 died without any property to bequeath.One might well ask: What does a society where women wore corsets and men wore top hats have to say to us? It would be easy to dismiss this era as irrelevant to the problems of our society. But this would be a mistake. In many ways, the late 19th century was an age not radically dissimilar from our own.We are living through an era of unprecedented technological change. They witnessed the invention of the light bulb, the telephone, and the discovery of germs. Our society is undergoing a communication revolution. Their society did too, with the invention of the telephone and the laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable and the appearance of the mass circulation newspaper and magazine.Many think that our society is uniquely affected by globalization. But late 19th century America was also reshaped by global forces. Much as the contemporary United States has been radically reshaped by massive foreign immigration, so was late 19th century America. Late 19th century America became increasingly embroiled in foreign affairs lying well outside its borders. Other similarities include bitter partisanship in politics, disputed elections, deep worries about the corrupting influence of money in politics, and angry debates over morality and women's roles.Many of the issues that we think of as uniquely modern were hotly debated during the late 19th century: corruption in business and government, ostentatious displays of wealth, the ruthless exploitation of natural resources, the growth of corporate power, and the gulf between the rich and the poor.Even drugs, which we tend to think of as a modern plague, first became a problem during the late 19th century. By 1900, one in 200 Americans was addicted to opiates or cocaine. Many wounded Civil War veterans returned home addicted to morphine, a pain-killing opiate. The typical user became addicted during medical treatment. By the end of the 19th century, opiates could be legally purchased at corner drugstores. Laudanum, a form of opium, cost 28 cents for a three-ounce bottle from Sears, Roebuck.In 1885, cocaine was introduced as an elixir for every ailment from depression to hay fever. A label instructed users: "For catarrh and all head disease, snuff very little up the nose 5 times a day until cured...." Advertisements urged mothers to give cranky children a dose of Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, which was laced with morphine.By the early 20th century, the human cost of drug addiction had become obvious, and the country enacted laws criminalizing the manufacture and distribution of addictive drugs.The Gilded AgeMark Twain called the late 19th century the "Gilded Age." In the popular view, the late 19th century was a period of greed and guile, when rapacious robber barons, unscrupulous speculators, and corporate buccaneers engaged in shady business practices and vulgar displays of wealth. It is easy to caricature the Gilded Age as an era of corruption, scandal-plagued politics, conspicuous consumption, and unfettered capitalism. But it is more useful to think of this period as modern America's formative era, when the rules of modern politics and business practice were just beginning to be written.It was during the Gilded Age that Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to break up monopolistic business combinations, and the Interstate Commerce Act, to regulate railroad rates. State governments created commissions to regulate utilities and laws regulating work conditions. Several states filed suits against corporate trusts and tried to revoke the charges of firms that joined trusts.The Purity CrusadeDuring the Gilded Age there were repeated attempts to enforce moral purity. In 1880, Massachusetts became the first state to reenact "Blue Laws" that prohibited most forms of business on Sunday. Lotteries, which had been widely used by government in the early 19th century to raise revenue, were outlawed, by 1890, in 43 of the 44 states. A number of states enacted laws forbidding horse racing, boxing, and even the manufacture of cigarettes. The earliest attempts to suppress narcotics were made. In 1877, Utah became the first state to forbid the sale of opiates for non-medical purposes.The largest movement to enforce morality was the movement to prohibit the manufacture and sale of alcohol. The Women's Christian Temperance Union, which was founded in 1874, lobbied for a constitutional amendment to prohibit alcohol.Perhaps the most striking example of the politics of piety was the crusade to enforce sexual prudery. In 1872, Congress enacted the Comstock Act, which banned obscene literature from the mails. The law was interpreted broadly and was used to prevent the distribution of birth control information and contraceptive devices through the mails. The law was named for Anthony Comstock, head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who became the government agent responsible for enforcing the statute. Comstock had 3,000 persons arrested for obscenity and took credit for hounding 16 people to their deaths. Among the books he successfully banned were Fanny Hill and A Peep Behind the Curtains of a Female Seminary. He also convinced the Department of Interior to ban Walt Whitman for writing poetry that he considered obscene.Many Northerners, mainly Republic in politics, were convinced that one of the Civil War's lessons was that government action was sometimes necessary to solve deep-seated social problems. During the Gilded Age, there were repeated attempts to use government to purify and morally uplift society. Laws were enacted against against polygamy and obscenity. At the state and local level, there were repeated efforts to censor books, the theater, and in the first decade of the 20th century, the movies.The most contentious moral issue in politics involved prohibition of beer and whiskey. Many Catholic and German Lutheran voters were deeply offended by efforts to use government to enforce moral standards. Together, Catholics and German Lutheran made up about 35 percent of the Northern electorate and in urban areas Germans alone comprised 15 to 50 percent of the urban vote.There were also attempts to purify the American society by excluding undesirable groups and "uplifting" the electorate. After the Civil War, for the first time there were concerted efforts to restrict foreign immigration. The first group to be excluded were Chinese immigrants in 1882, a subject that is discussed in our unit on ernment Retrenchment and Government CorruptionIn recent years, politicians from both parties have called for efforts to eliminate wasteful government expenditures and to balance the federal budgets. During the late 1870s and 1880s, retrenchment was a very serious matter, especially in the South. Salaries of many government officials were slashed dramatically. Some southern states reduced by half. To discourage its legislature from remaining in session too long, Texas cut the pay of legislators from $5 to $2 a day if they met for more than 60 days every two years.Ironically, the attempts to scale back government spending coincided with a spectacular wave of government corruption. Iowa built a new state capitol only to find out that its foundation stones had cracked and had to be replaced. New York spent $13 million on a county court house, including $100,000 on a table and chairs. In Louisiana, a state treasurer was accused of stealing $777,000. His counterpart in Tennessee was accused of taking $400,000. One Republican Senator, Joseph Foraker, received more than $44,000 in "lobbying fees" in a single year from John D. Rockefeller.Politics During the Gilded AgeIn recent years, it has become commonplace to characterize politics in the Gilded Age as corrupt and issueless. The major parties "divided over spoils, not issues" and over "patronage, not principle," in the words of the historian Richard Hofstadter, and maintained voter loyalty by waving the bloody shirt (i.e., appealing to Civil War loyalties) and playing on religious, ethnic, and regional divisions.This view is quite misleading. An era of intense partisan fervor, the Gilded Age had a higher level of voter turnout than at any other time in American history. The federal government assumed greater authority and power over banking and currencies, taxes and tariffs, land and immigration. This period also witnessed the rise of a number of highly politicized movements--including the temperance and women's rights crusades and the Populist insurgency--that sought to address the wrenching social transformations of the age.Civil Service ReformGeorge Plunkitt, a local leader of New York City's Democratic Party, defended the spoils system. "You can't keep an organization together without patronage," he declared. "Men ain't in politics for nothin'. They want to get somethin' out of it."But in one of the most significant political reforms of the late 19th century, Congress adopted the Pendleton Act, creating a federal civil service system, partly eliminating political patronage.Andrew Jackson introduced the spoils system to the federal government. The practice, epitomized by the saying "to the victory belong the spoils," involved placing party supporters into government positions. An incoming president would dismiss thousands of government workers and replace them with members of his own party. Scandals under the Grant administration generated a mounting demand for reform.Ironically, the president who led the successful campaign for civil service, Chester Arthur, a Republican, was linked to a party faction from New York that was known for its abuse of the spoils of office. In fact, in 1878, Arthur had been fired from his post at New York Federal Custom's Collection for giving away too many patronage jobs.In 1880, Arthur had been elected vice president on a ticket headed by James A. Garfield. Garfield's assassination in 1881 by a mentally disturbed man, Charles J. Guiteau, who thought he deserved appointment to a government job, led to a public outcry for reform.As president, Arthur became an ardent reformer. He insisted that high ranking members of his own party be prosecuted for their part in a Post Office scandal. He vetoed a law to improve rivers and harbors. In 1883, he helped push through the Pendleton Act. Failing to please either machine politicians or reformers, Arthur was the last incumbent president to be denied renomination for a second term by his own party.The Pendleton Act stipulated that government jobs should be awarded on the basis of merit. It provided for selection of government employees through competitive examinations. It also made it unlawful to fire or demote covered employees for political reasons or to require them to give political service or payment, and it set up a Civil Service Commission to enforce the law.When the Pendleton Act went into effect, only 10 percent of the government's 132,000 civilian employees were placed under civil service. The rest remained at the disposal of the party power, which could distribute for patronage, payoffs, or purchase. Today, more than 90 percent of the 2.7 million federal civilian employees are covered by merit systems.In 1884, New York became the first state to adopt a civil service system for state workers. Massachusetts became the second state when it started a merit system in 1885.Tweedledum and TweedledeeDuring the 1870s and 1880s, the Democratic and Republican Parties were of almost exactly equal strength. In the elections between 1876 and 1892, no more than 3.1 percentage points separated the two parties. The two parties differed enormously in their principles, programs, and ethno-cultural composition.In the late 19th century, it was sometimes said that there wasn't a dime's difference between the two parties, that the difference between the two parties was the difference between tweedledum and tweedledee. This wasn't true.The Republican Party tended to emphasize national unity, economic modernization, and moral reform. Regarding the Democrats as the party of treason for opposing the Civil War, the Republicans ran Union veterans in eight of nine presidential elections between 1868 and 1900. The sole exception, James G. Blaine, lost in 1884. The party urged the faithful to "vote as you shot." They portrayed Democrats as "the old slave-owner and slave driver, the saloon-keeper, the ballot-box-stuffer, the Kuklux [Klan member], the criminal class of the great cities, the men who cannot read or write."The Republicans were committed to rapidly modernizing the economy through such measures as protective tariffs to assist industry and land grants to encourage railroad construction. The Republican Party was also committed to using the 14th Amendment to protect corporations' ability to operate free from excessive state regulation.The Democrats were split on this program of economic modernization. Grover Cleveland supported big business and the gold standard but in 1887 came out strongly against the tariff, which he viewed as a tax on consumers for the benefit of rich industrialists.The Election of 1884The presidential campaign of 1884 was one of the most memorable in American history. The Republican nominee, James G. Blaine of Maine, was nicknamed the "plumed knight," but disgruntled Republican reformers regarded him as a symbol of corruption. He "wallowed in spoils like a rhinoceros in an African pool."These liberal Republicans indicated to Democratic leaders that they would bolt their own party and support a Democrat, provided he was a decent and honorable man. Grover Cleveland seemed to meet these qualifications. He had started his career as sheriff of Erie County where he personally hanged two murderers to spare the sensitivities of his subordinates. He had been known as the "veto" Mayor of Buffalo for rejecting political graft, and as governor he repudiated Tammany Hall.Republicans waved the "bloody flag," harshly attacking Cleveland for avoiding service during the Civil War. He had hired a substitute to take his place.Democrats, in turn, claimed that Blaine had sold his influence in Congress to business interests. They published letters from a Boston bookkeeper which indicated that Blaine had personally benefited from helping a railroad keep a land grant. Democrats chanted: "Blaine! Blaine! James G. Blaine! The Continental Liar from the State of Maine!"Then a Buffalo newspaper dealt Cleveland a devastating blow. Under the headline, "A Terrible Tale," the newspaper revealed that the Democratic candidate had a child out of wedlock. Even worse, Republicans charged, Cleveland had placed the child in an orphanage and the mother in an insane asylum, Republicans wore white ribbons and campaigned under the phrase "home protection."But these moralistic attacks failed to ignite much public indignation against Cleveland. Republicans chanted, "Ma, ma, where's my pa?" Democrats replied: "Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha."Just six days before the election, a group of Protestant clergy were meeting in New York. The clergymen endorsed Cleveland with words that would alter the course of the election:We are Republicans and don't propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents are Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.The following Sunday, as Irish Americans filed out of Catholic Churches, they were handed bills containing the phrase "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion," attributed to Blaine himself. Blaine's denials were ineffective and he lost New York by 1,149 votes. In the election, white Southerners, Irish Americans, and German American voters turned out in record numbers.In office, Cleveland pleased conservatives by advocating sound money and reduction of inflation, curbing party patronage, and vetoing government pensions. But he alienated business and labor interests by proposing a lower tariff and was defeated by Republican Benjamin Harrison in 1888, winning the popular vote but losing the electoral vote.In 1892, Cleveland won reelection thanks in part to a third party movement--the Populists--that siphoned off some of the strength of the Republican Party, and by a vigorous campaign against the extravagance of the Republican "Billion Dollar Congress."But his second term was ruined by the economic depression of the mid-1890s, the worst economic crisis that the country had ever seen. Insisting on sound money, he sought to keep the country on the gold standard and helped convince Congress to enact an income tax (which was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court). In 1896, Cleveland's policies were repudiated by his own party.The Tariff QuestionAfter 1887, the tariff become the central issue in American politics. Democrats, led by Grover Cleveland, charged that the tariff raised prices, enriched the wealthy, and fostered inefficiency. Republicans argued that tariffs promoted infant industries, protected established industries, raised workers wages and protected them against low-wage competition, and fostered a rich home market for farm goods.In fact, the tariff was not especially important for manufacturers. European manufacturers could not compete with the American advantages of large efficient factories, vast internal markets, ample raw materials, sophisticated advertising, and a highly efficient distribution system. By 1885, the United States had become the world's low cost, high volume manufacturers. In 1900, a London newspaper lamented:We have lost to the American manufacturer electrical machinery, locomotives, steel rails, sugar-producing and agricultural machinery, and latterly even stationary engines, the pride and backbone of the British engineering industry.The actual beneficiaries from a high tariff were sugar growers and producers of wool, leather hides, coal, timber, and iron ore.Anti-TrustThe 1880s marked the emergence of trusts, companies that bought out locally-owned factories and merged them into conglomerates that sought to monopolize entire industries. The concentration of industry aroused "deep feelings of unrest," said Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, a conservative Republican:The conviction was universal that the country was in real danger from another form of slavery...that would result from the aggregation of capital in the hands of a few individuals controlling, for their own profit and advantage exclusively, the entire business of the country.A national consensus emerged that monopolies were dangerous to democracy. The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, which applied only to railroads passing through more than one state, declared that railroads could only charge just and reasonable rates. It required railroads to post their rates, provide 10-day notice before raising rates, prohibited railroads from charging less for a long haul than a short haul over the same line. The act also set up the first federal regulatory commission, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) had authority to investigate the railroads. Railroad operators found ways to circumvent the law, and many of the ICC's decisions were reversed by the Supreme Court.The Sherman Anti-Trust Act passed in 1890 outlawed any combination "in restraint of trade." In 1894, in the case of U.S. v. Debs, the Supreme Court ruled that the act could be used to stop labor unions from interfering with commerce. Between 1890 and 1901, the federal government filed 18 suits under the law, four against labor unions.Grover ClevelandHe was the first Democratic president elected after the Civil War and the only person ever to be elected to non-consecutive terms in office. A bachelor when he was elected to his first term, he became the first president to be married in the White House when he wed Frances Folsom, a former ward 27 years his junior. He became the first president to have children while in office. The Baby Ruth candy bar was named after one of his offspring.When confronted with a charge that he had fathered a child out of wedlock, Cleveland immediately acknowledged the truth. He also admitted that he had avoided military service in the Civil War by paying a substitute to take his place.When warned that his fight for lower tariffs might cost him the 1888 election, he replied: "What is the use of being elected or re-elected unless you stand for something." Cleveland was defeated by Benjamin Harrison in the Electoral College even though he won the popular count by more than 90,000 votes. He lost the election because he failed to carry his home state of New York.In 1892, his supporters urged him to seek accommodations with western Democrats who wanted unlimited coinage of silver. His response was, "I am supposed to be the leader of my party. If any world of mine can check these dangerous fallacies, it is my duty to give that word, whatever the cost may be to me."As president, he signed the Indian Emancipation Act, established the Departments of Agriculture and of Labor, lowered tariffs, and successfully defended the gold standard.The Political Crisis of the 1890sThe 1880s and 1890s were years of turbulence. Disputes erupted over labor relations, currency, tariffs, patronage, and railroads The most momentous political conflict of the late 19th century was the farmers' revolt. Drought, plagues of grasshoppers, boll weevils, rising costs, falling prices, and high interest rates made it increasingly difficult to make a living as a farmer. Many farmers blamed railroad owners, grain elevator operators, land monopolists, commodity futures dealers, mortgage companies, merchants, bankers, and manufacturers of farm equipment for their plight. Farmers responded by organizing Granges, Farmers' Alliances, and the Populist party. In the election of 1896, the Populists and the Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan for president. Bryan 's decisive defeat inaugurated a period of Republican ascendancy, in which Republicans controlled the presidency for 24 of the next 32 years.Panacea's for the Nation's IllsDuring the late nineteenth century, a growing number of Americans feared that the country's republican traditions were being steadily eroded by the growth of business monopolies, government corruption, and the violent struggle between capital and labor. In a series of best-selling books, a number of Protestant reformers envisioned a "cooperative society" and proposed cure-all formulas to solve the nation's social and economic problems.Henry George's 1879 book Progress and Poverty, argued that poverty and inequality were the product of the unearned increase in land values and that unemployment and monopolies could be eliminated through the abolition of all taxes except for a single tax on land. Edward Bellamy, in an 1888 bestseller Looking Backward, described an ideal society in the year 2000 in which the government nationalized all resources and takes over all business operations. William Hope Harvey, in Coin's Financial School, proposed to solve the nation's economic problems by backing the dollar with silver as well as gold.The Depression of the Mid-1890sThe Gilded Age ended with the financial panic of 1893. A conflict over the value of the nation's currency led lenders to call in their loans. A weakening American currency frightened foreign investors, helping to start a four-year depression.One way to limit the supply of money is to tie the dollar to gold. This was the practice in the Gilded Age. The government pledged to convert each dollar into a fixed amount of gold. Since there was not much gold available, federal government could not print many dollars. This galled farmers. Partly because of overproduction, prices for farm crops kept falling. Farmers needed low-interest credit to keep going, and because of the gold standard, they could not get it. Nor could they raise prices. Thousands of farmers lost their land.Their solution was silver, which was much more abundant than gold. Under pressure from the Populists, Congress in 1890 authorized the Treasury to issue dollars backed by silver as well as gold. This greatly increased the money supply and made credit available at lower rates. But the dollar lost value. The currency was in effect devalued, particularly in the eyes of lenders in Britain, a country on a pure gold standard. Nervous already from various bankruptcies, they called in their dollar loans and converted them into gold.President Grover Cleveland got the silver act repealed within months. But this did not lessen the concern that the dollar would be devalued. When gold reserves fell below $100 million in April 1893, the panic was on.The Farmers' PlightAt the end of the 19th century, about a third of Americans worked in agriculture, compared to only about four percent today. After the Civil War, drought, plagues of grasshoppers, boll weevils, rising costs, falling prices, and high interest rates made it increasingly difficult to make a living as a farmer. In the South, one third of all landholdings were operated by tenants. Approximately 75 percent of African American farmers and 25 percent of white farmers tilled land owned by someone else.Every year, the prices farmers received for their crops seemed to fall. Corn fell from 41 cents a bushel in 1874 to 30 cents by 1897. Farmers made less money planting 24 million acres of cotton in 1894 than they did planting 9 million acres in 1873. Facing high interests rates of upwards of 10 percent a year, many farmers found it impossible to pay off their debts. Farmers who could afford to mechanize their operations and purchase additional land could successfully compete, but smaller, more poorly financed farmers, working on small plots marginal land, struggled to survive.Many farmers blamed railroad owners, grain elevator operators, land monopolists, commodity futures dealers, mortgage companies, merchants, bankers, and manufacturers of farm equipment for their plight. Many attributed their problems to discriminatory railroad rates, monopoly prices charged for farm machinery and fertilizer, an oppressively high tariff, an unfair tax structure, an inflexible banking system, political corruption, corporations that bought up huge tracks of land. They considered themselves to be subservient to the industrial Northeast, where three-quarters of the nation's industry was located. They criticized a deflationary monetary policy based on the gold standard that benefited bankers and other creditors.All of these problems were compounded by the fact that increasing productivity in agriculture led to price declines. In the 1870s, 190 million new acres were put under cultivation. By 1880, settlement was moving into the semi-arid plains. At the same time, transportation improvements meant that American farmers faced competitors from Egypt to Australia in the struggle for markets.The first major rural protest was the Patrons of Husbandry, which was founded in 1867 and had 1.5 million members by 1875. Known as the Granger Movement, these embattled farmers formed buying and selling cooperatives and demanded state regulation of railroad rates and grain elevator fees.Early in the 1870s the Greenback Party agitated for the issue of paper money, not backed by gold or silver, with the idea that a depreciating currency would make it easier for debtors to meet their obligations.Another wave of protest grew out of the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union (the Southern Farmers Alliance) formed in Lampedusa County, Texas in 1875, and the Northwestern Farmers' Alliance, founded in Chicago in 1880. By the late 1880s, the cooperative business enterprises set up by the Farmers' Alliances had begun to fail due to inadequate capitalization and mismanagement. By 1890, the Farmers Alliances had begun to enter politics. In 1892 the Alliance formed the Peoples' or Populist Party. Among other things, the Populists financed commodity credit system that would have allowed farmers to store their crop in a federal warehouse to await favorable market prices and meanwhile borrow up to 80 percent of the current market price.The Populist platform also sought a graduated income tax, public ownership of utilities, the voter initiative and referendum, the eight-hour workday, immigration restrictions, and government control of currency.In the presidential election of 1892, the Populist candidate, James B. Weaver of Iowa, received more than a million popular votes (8.5 percent of the total) and 22 electoral votes. The Populists also elected 10 representative, 5 senators, and 4 governors, as well as 345 state legislators.PopulismA little more than a century ago, a grassroots political movement arose among small farmers in the country's wheat, corn, and cotton fields to fight banks, big corporations, railroads, and other "monied interests." The movement burned brightly from 1889 to 1896, before fading out. Nevertheless, this movement fundamentally changed American politics.The Populist movement grew out of earlier movements that had emerged among southern and western farmers, such as the Grangers, the Greenbackers, and the Northern, Southern, and Colored Farmers Alliances. As early as the 1870s, some farmers had begun to demand lower railroad rates. They also argued that business and the wealthy--and not land--should bear the burden of taxation.Populists were especially concerned about the high cost of money. Farmers required capital to purchase agricultural equipment and land. They needed credit to buy supplies and to store their crops in grain elevators and warehouses. At the time, loans for the supplies to raise a crop ranged from 40 percent to 345 percent a year. The Populists asked why there was no more money in circulation in the United States in 1890 than in 1865, when the economy was far smaller, and why New York bankers controlled the nation's money supply.After nearly two decades of falling crop prices, and angered by the unresponsiveness of two political parties they regarded as corrupt, dirt farmers rebelled. In 1891, a Kansas lawyer named David Overmeyer called these rebels Populists. They formed a third national political party and rallied behind leaders like Mary Lease, who said that farmers should raise more hell and less corn. The Populists spread their message from 150 newspapers in Kansas alone.Populist leaders called on the people to rise up, seize the reins of government, and tame the power of the wealthy and privileged. Populist orators venerated farmers and laborers as the true producers of wealth and reviled blood-sucking plutocrats. Tom Watson of Georgia accused the Democrats of sacrificing "the liberty and prosperity of the country...to Plutocratic greed," and the Republicans of doing the wishes of "monopolists, gamblers, gigantic corporations, bondholders, [and] bankers. The Populists accused big business of corrupting democracy and said that businessmen had little concern for the average American "except as raw material served up for the twin gods of production and profit." The Populists blamed a protective tariff raised prices by keeping affordable foreign goods out of the country.The party's platform endorsed labor unions, decried long work hours, and championed the graduated income tax as a way to redistribute wealth from business to farmers and laborers. The party also called for an end to court injunctions against labor unions. "The fruits of the toil of millions," the Party declared in 1892, "are boldly stolen to build up the fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind." The Populists also called for a secret ballot; women's suffrage; an eight-hour workday, direct election of U.S. Senators and the President and Vice President; and initiative and recall to make the political system more responsive to the people.The party put aside moral issues like prohibition in order to focus on economic issues. "The issue," said one Populist, "is not whether a man shall be permitted to drink but whether he shall have a home to go home to, drunk or sober." A significant number of Populists were also willing to overcome racial divisions. As one leader put it, "The problem is poverty, not race."In the 1892 presidential election, Populist candidate James Weaver of Iowa received a million votes and 22 electoral votes. Five Populist Senators and ten Representatives were elected, along with three governors, and 1,500 state and county officials.The Populists embraced government regulation to get out from the domination of unregulated big business. The platform demanded government ownership of railroads, natural resources, and telephone and telegraph systems. Even more radically, some Populists called for a coalition of poor white and poor black farmers.Populism had an unsavory side. The Populists had a tendency toward paranoia and overblown rhetoric. They considered Wall Street an enemy. Many Populists were hostile toward foreigners and saw sinister plots against liberty and opportunity. The party's 1892 platform described "a vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents and is rapidly taking possession of the world." After their crusade failed, the embittered Georgia Populist Tom Watson denounced Jews, Catholics, and African Americans with the same heated rhetoric he once reserved for "plutocrats."But in the early 20th century, many of the Populist proposals would be enacted into law, including the secret ballot; women's suffrage; the initiative, referendum, and recall; a Federal Reserve System; farm cooperatives, government warehouses; railroad regulation; and conservation of public lands.The Populists also provided the inspiration for later grassroots movements, including the Anti-Saloon League, which helped make Prohibition a part of the Constitution; and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which persuaded millions of auto workers, stevedores, and steel workers to unionize with its call for industrial democracy.Populist rhetoric still plays an important role in contemporary American politics. Politicians speak the language of populism whenever they defend ordinary people against entrenched elites and a government dominated by special interests. During the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt hailed "the forgotten man" and railed against "economic royalists" and in 1992 Bill Clinton ran for the presidency by pledging to "put people first."The Election of 1896Not since the election of 1860 were political passions so deeply stirred. At stake appeared to be two very different visions of what kind of society America was to become.Rarely in American history had conditions seemed so unsettled. The financial panic of 1893 was followed by four years of high unemployment and business bankruptcies. The panic led Jacob Coxey, a businessman from Massillon, Ohio, to organize the first mass march on Washington. Coxey's army demanded a federal public works program. As rumors of revolution swept Washington, the government responded by jailing the march's leaders.The violent steel strike at Homestead mills near Pittsburgh in 1892 and the intervention of federal troops in the Pullman Strike and the imprisonment of labor leader Eugene V. Debs in 1894 stirred the public passions. By 1896, the situation of many southern and western farmers was desperate.At the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, delegates repudiated the leadership of President Grover Cleveland, seized the Free Silver issue from the Populists, and nominated William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska. Bryan won his party's nomination with one of the most famous speeches ever delivered at a political convention. "The boy orator of the Platte" was viewed by his supporters as the champion of the plain people, the prairie avenger who promised financial relief to hard-pressed farmers. Bryan's supporters viewed his campaign as a continuation of the old American struggle between producers and exploiters, debtors and creditors. To hard-pressed farmers, Bryan's program of financial relief offered hope that they might survive financially.Bryan's radical attacks on Wall Street, banks, and railroads frightened many prosperous farmers and businessmen. The gulf between populist farmers and immigrant and urban laborers made it impossible for the Populists to forge successful ties with the urban working class. The Populist movement was deeply imbued with the values of Evangelical Protestantism, alienating many Catholics.Bryan's opponent, Republican William McKinley, campaigned on a platform of jobs and sound money, promising a "full dinner pail."Business interests spent nearly $16 million to elect McKinley, allowing the Republicans to adopt a new style of campaigning. Instead of relying on party organization to turn out the vote, Republicans relied increasingly on advertisements.Unlike some earlier Republican candidates, McKinley rejected moralistic crusades, like prohibition, that alienated ethnic groups. In 1896, McKinley assembled a political coalition that included both the new industrialists and their workers. Most of industrial America voted Republican, including most workers in factories, mines, mills, and railroads. As a result the Republican Party went on to dominate the presidency for most of the next three decades.During the late 1890s, two solutions appeared to the nation's monetary problems. New discoveries of gold in South Africa and Australia greatly increased the world's gold supply. At the same time, bankers created a new "currency"--bank checks. More and more of the nation's business transactions took place through checks rather than through paper money and gold coins.The Wonderful Wizard of OzIs the Wizard of Oz just a fairy tale about a girl from Kansas transported to a colorful land of witches and munchkins? Or does the story have a political dimension? Scholars still disagree about whether L. Frank Baum's great children's story was about the collapse of the Populist movement.Henry Littlefield, a teacher in Pebble Beach, California, was the first person to suggest that the story was about Populism. He argued that:the Scarecrow (who has no brain) represented the farmers;the Tin Man (who had once been a human wood-cutter, but chopped his body parts off and replaced them with metal) represented industrial workers;the Cowardly Lion represented northern reformers;the Emerald City represented Wall Street, greenback colored; andthe Wizard represented the Money Power, whose influence rests on manipulation and illusion.Littlefield interpreted the yellow brick road as representing gold and Dorothy's silver slippers (which were changed in the movie to ruby slippers) as representing the Populist call for backing the dollar with silver. Oz was the abbreviation for ounces, a reference to the Populist call for the government to coin.Segregation and DiscriminationAfrican Americans Fight Legal DiscriminationAs African Americans exercised their newly won political and social rights during Reconstruction, they faced hostile and often violent opposition from whites. African Americans eventually fell victim to laws restricting their civil rights but never stopped fighting for equality. For at least ten years after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, African Americans in the South continued to vote and occasionally to hold political office. By the turn of the 20th century, however, Southern states had adopted a broad system of legal policies of racial discrimination and devised methods to weaken African-American political power. African Americans led the fight against voting restrictions and Jim Crow laws. Today, African Americans have the legacy of a century-long battle for civil rights.Voting RestrictionsAll Southern states imposed new voting restrictions and denied legal equality to African Americans. Some states, for example, limited the vote to people who could read, and required registration officials to administer a literacy test to test reading. Blacks trying to vote were often asked more difficult questions than whites, or given a test in a foreign language. Officials could pass or fail applicants as they wished. Another requirement was the poll tax, an annual tax that had to be paid before qualifying to vote. Black as well as white sharecroppers were often too poor to pay the poll tax. To reinstate white voters who may have failed the literacy test or could not pay the poll tax, several Southern states added the grandfather clause to their constitutions. The clause stated that even if a man failed the literacy test or could not afford the poll tax, he was still entitled to vote if he, his father, or his grandfather had been eligible to vote before January 1, 1867. The date is important because before that time, freed slaves did not have the right to vote. The grandfather clause therefore did not allow them to vote.Jim Crow LawsDuring the 1870s and 1880s, the Supreme Court failed to overturn the poll tax or the grandfather clause, even though the laws undermined all federal protections for African Americans’ civil rights. At the same time that blacks lost voting rights, Southern states passed racial segregation laws to separate white and black people in public and private facilities. These laws came to be known as Jim Crow laws after a popular old minstrel song that ended in the words “Jump, Jim Crow.” Racial segregation was put into effect in schools, hospitals, parks, and transportation systems throughout the South.PLESSY v. FERGUSON Eventually a legal case reached the U.S. Supreme Court to test the constitutionality of segregation. In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled that the separation of races in public accommodations was legal and did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision established the doctrine of “separate but equal,” which allowed states to maintain segregated facilities for blacks and whites as long as they provided equal service. The decision permitted legalized racial segregation for almost 60 yearsTurn-of-the-Century Race RelationsAfrican Americans faced not only formal discrimination but also informal rules and customs, called racial etiquette that regulated relationships between whites and blacks. Usually, these customs belittled and humiliated African Americans, enforcing their second-class status. For example, blacks and whites never shook hands, since shaking hands would have implied equality. Blacks also had to yield the sidewalk to white pedestrians, and black men always had to remove their hats for whites. Some moderate reformers, like Booker T. Washington, earned support from whites. Washington suggested that whites and blacks work together for social progress. Washington hoped that improving the economic skills of African Americans would pave the way for long-term gains. People like Ida B. Wells and W. E. B. Du Bois, however, thought that the problems of inequality were too urgent to postpone.VIOLENCE African Americans and others who did not follow the racial etiquette could face severe punishment or death. All too often, blacks who were accused of violating the etiquette were lynched. Between 1882 and 1892, more than 1,400 African-American men and women were shot, burned, or hanged without trial in the South. Lynching peaked in the 1880s and 1890s but continued well into the 20th century.DISCRIMINATION IN THE NORTH Most African Americans lived in the segregated South, but by 1900, a number of blacks had moved to Northern cities. Many blacks migrated to Northern cities in search of better-paying jobs and social equality. But after their arrival, African Americans found that there was racial discrimination in the North as well. African Americans found themselves forced into segregated neighborhoods. They also faced discrimination in the workplace. Labor unions often discouraged black membership, and employers hired African-American labor only as a last resort and fired blacks before white employees. Sometimes the competition between African Americans and working-class whites became violent, as in the New York City race riot of 1900. Violence erupted after a young black man, believing that his wife was being mistreated by a white policeman, killed the policeman. Word of the killing spread, and whites retaliated by attacking blacks. Northern blacks, however, were not alone in facing discrimination. Non-whites in the West also faced oppression.Booker T. WashingtonAlthough empowered to vote by the Fifteenth Amendment, POLL TAXES, LITERACY TESTS, and outright violence and intimidation reduced the voting black population to almost zero. Economically, African Americans were primarily poor sharecroppers trapped in an endless cycle of debt. Socially, few whites had come to accept blacks as equals. While progressive reformers ambitiously attacked injustices, it would take great work and great people before change was felt. One man who took up the challenge was BOOKER T. WASHINGTON.Founding Tuskegee InstituteBorn into slavery in 1856, Washington had experienced racism his entire life. When emancipated after the Civil War, he became one of the few African Americans to complete school, whereupon he became a teacher.Believing in practical education, Washington established a TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE in Alabama at the age of twenty-five. Washington believed that Southern racism was so entrenched that to demand immediate social equality would be unproductive. His school aimed to train African Americans in the skills that would help the most.Tuskegee Institute became a center for agricultural research. The most famous product of Tuskegee was GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER. Carver concluded that much more productive use could be made of agricultural lands by diversifying crops. He discovered hundreds of new uses for sweet potatoes, pecans, and peanuts. Peanut butter was one such example. Washington saw a future in this new type of agriculture as a means of raising the economic status of African Americans.The Atlanta "Compromise"In 1895, Washington delivered a speech at the ATLANTA EXPOSITION. He declared that African Americans should focus on VOCATIONAL EDUCATION. Learning Latin and Greek served no purpose in the day-to-day realities of Southern life.African Americans should abandon their short-term hopes of social and political equality. Washington argued that when whites saw African Americans contributing as productive members of society, equality would naturally follow.For those dreaming of a black utopia of freedom, Washington declared, "Cast down your bucket where you are." Many whites approved of this moderate stance, while African Americans were split. Critics called his speech the Atlanta Compromise and accused Washington of coddling Southern racism.Still, by 1900, Washington was seen as the leader of the African American community. In 1901, he published his autobiography, UP FROM SLAVERY. He was a self-made man and a role model to thousands. In 1906, he was summoned to the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt. This marked the first time in American history that an African American leader received such a prestigious invitation.Despite his accomplishments, he was challenged within the black community until his death in 1915. His most outspoken critic was W. E. B. DuBois.W. E. B. DuBois Founding members of the Niagara Movement, formed to assert full rights and opportunity to African Americans. "We want full manhood suffrage and we want it now.... We are men! We want to be treated as men. And we shall win." W.E.B. DuBois is on the second row, second from the right.WILLIAM EDWARD BURGHARDT DUBOIS was very angry with Booker T. Washington. Although he admired Washington's intellect and accomplishments, he strongly opposed the position set forth by Washington in his Atlanta Exposition Address. He saw little future in agriculture as the nation rapidly industrialized. DuBois felt that renouncing the goal of complete integration and social equality, even in the short run, was counterproductive and exactly the opposite strategy from what best suited African Americans.Early Life and Core BeliefsThe childhood of W. E. B. DuBois could not have been more different from that of Booker T. Washington. He was born in Massachusetts in 1868 as a free black. DuBois attended FISK UNIVERSITY and later became the first African American to receive a Ph. D. from Harvard. He secured a teaching job at Atlanta University, where he believed he learned a great deal about the African American experience in the South.DuBois was a staunch proponent of a classical education and condemned Washington's suggestion that blacks focus only on vocational skills. Without an educated class of leadership, whatever gains were made by blacks could be stripped away by legal loopholes. He believed that every class of people in history had a "TALENTED TENTH." The downtrodden masses would rely on their guidance to improve their status in society.Political and social equality must come first before blacks could hope to have their fair share of the economic pie. He vociferously attacked the Jim Crow laws and practices that inhibited black suffrage. In 1903, he published THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, a series of essays assailing Washington's strategy of accommodation.The Niagra Movement and the NAACPIn 1905, DuBois met with a group of 30 men at Niagara Falls, Canada. They drafted a series of demands essentially calling for an immediate end to all forms of discrimination. The NIAGARA MOVEMENT was denounced as radical by most whites at the time. Educated African Americans, however, supported the resolutions.Four years later, members of the Niagara Movement formed the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE (NAACP). This organization sought to fight for equality on the national front. It also intended to improve the self-image of African Americans. After centuries of slavery and decades of second-class status, DuBois and others believed that many African Americans had come to accept their position in American society.DuBois became the editor of the organization's periodical called THE CRISIS, a job he performed for 20 years. The Crisis contained the expected political essays, but also poems and stories glorifying African American culture and accomplishments. Later, DuBois was invited to attend the organizational meeting for the United Nations in 1946.As time passed, DuBois began to lose hope that African Americans would ever see full equality in the United States. In 1961, he moved to Ghana. He died at the age of 96 just before Martin Luther King Jr. led the historical civil rights march on Washington.UNIT 2- A NEW CENTURYPROGRESSIVE ERAProgressive Era Reformleft000BackgroundThe?Progressive Movement?(1901-1917) was initiated as a response to political and corporate?abuses at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Religious groups, members of the press, and radical political groups all cried out for reform, with solutions ranging from subtle reforms of the American capitalist economy, to a call for the creation of a socialist government.Reforms were initiated by individuals, and at the city, state, and national levels of government.?President Theodore Roosevelt supported the movement by embracing environmental conservation, forcing arbitration in the Anthracite Coal Strike, and busting monopolies that were harmful to the public.A number of social reformers also worked to reform what they viewed as the ills negatively impacting United States society:Social ReformersJaneAddamsPioneer in the field of social work who founded the settlement house movement through the establishment of?Hull House?in Chicago, Illinois.MargaretSangerEducated urban poor about the benefits of family planning through birth control. She founded the organization that became Planned Parenthood.Booker T.WashingtonFormer slave who founded the?Tuskegee Institute?that focused on teaching African-Americans trade skills to earn a living and gain the trust of white society.W.E.B.DuBoisFounder of the?NAACP, and a Harvard-educated professor who focused on the need for a traditional liberal arts education for African-Americans who could then insist upon equal treatment and rights from white society.MuckrakersMuckrakers?were members of the press that investigated corruption in order to expose problems to the American people. They had a great amount of influence, often resulting in the passage of laws designed to reform the abuse that they reported.These muckrakers recalled the efforts of early reformers who exposed corruption in print.?Thomas Nast?worked diligently to expose the abuses of the NYC political machine called?Tammany Hall?and its leader?Boss Tweed?through the use of political cartoons. Jacob Riis exposed the plight of the urban poor and substandard housing in his 1890 book?How the Other Half Lives.MuckrakerWorkSubjectResultsThomas NastPoliticalCartoonsPolitical corruption by NYC's political machine, Tammany Hall, led by Boss Tweed.Tweed was convicted of embezzlement and died in prison.Jacob RiisHow the Other Half Lives(1890)Living conditions of the urban poor; focused on tenements.NYC passed building codes to promote safety and health.Ida B. WellsA Red Record(1895)Provided statistics on the lynching of African-Americans.NAACP joined the fight for Federal anti-lynching legislation.Frank NorrisThe Octopus(1901)This fictional book exposed monopolistic railroad practices in California.In?Northern Securities v. U.S.(1904), the holding company controlling railroads in the Northwest was broken up.Ida Tarbell"History of Standard Oil Company" in McClure’s Magazine(1904)Exposed the ruthless tactics of the Standard Oil Company through a series of articles published in McClure’s Magazine.In?Standard Oil v. U.S.?(1911), the company was declared a monopoly and broken up.Lincoln SteffansThe Shame of the Cities(1904)Examined political corruption in cities across the United States.Cities began to use city commissions and city managers.Upton SinclairThe Jungle(1906)Investigated dangerous working conditions and unsanitary procedures in the meat-packing industry.In 1906 the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act were passed.City ReformsProgressive reform began at the local or city level because it was easier to implement than at the vast state or national level. Urban corruption from political machines was a major focus, resulting in the reorganization of local government using the commissioner-and city-manager-styles of management.City ReformsCityCommissioner PlanCities hired experts in different fields to run a single aspect of city government. For example, the sanitation commissioner would be in charge of garbage and sewage removal.City ManagerPlanA professional city manager is hired to run each department of the city and report directly to the city council.State ReformsReform governors such as?Theodore Roosevelt?of New York,?Robert M. LaFollete?of Wisconsin, and?Woodrow Wilson?of New Jersey, all helped get reforms passed in their respective states. In addition, reforms first proposed by the Populist Party were enacted in order to make state governments more responsive to the needs of the people.?State ReformsSecret BallotPrivacy at the ballot box ensures that citizens can cast votes without party bosses knowing how they voted.InitiativeAllows voters to petition state legislatures in order to consider a bill desired by citizens.ReferendumAllows voters to decide if a bill or proposed amendment should be passed.RecallAllows voters to petition to have an elected representative removed from office.DirectPrimaryEnsures that voters select candidates to run for office, rather than party bosses.Federal ReformsDuring the Progressive Era, the Federal Government passed an enormous amount of legislation designed to conserve the environment, tighten past economic regulations, preserve the health and safety of American citizens, and generally provide needed capitalist reforms.Progressive Era Federal LegislationNewlands Reclamation Act(1902)Encouraged conservation by allowing the building of dams and irrigations systems using money from the sale of public lands.Elkins Act(1903)Outlawed the use of rebates by railroad officials or shippers.Pure Food and Drug Act(1906/1911)Required that companies accurately label the ingredients contained in processed food items.Meat Inspection Act(1906)In direct response to Upton Sinclair's?The Jungle, this law required that meat processing plants be inspected to ensure the use of good meat and health-minded procedures.Hepburn Act(1906)Strengthened the Interstate Commerce Commission, allowing it to set maximum railroad rates.Federal Reserve Act(1913)Created 12 district? Federal Reserve Banks, each able to issue new currency and loan member banks funds at the prime interest rate, as established by the Federal Reserve Board.Clayton Antitrust Act(1914)Strengthened the Sherman Antitrust Act by outlawing the creation of a monopoly through any means, and stated that unions were not subject to antitrust legislation.Federal Trade Act(1914)Established the Federal Trade Commission, charged with investigating unfair business practices including monopolistic activity and inaccurate product labeling.New AmendmentsTo provide a stable base of income for the Federal Government while providing graduated taxation, the?16th Amendment?was passed. Political machines were weakened by the passage of the?17th Amendment?which allowed state citizens to directly elect representatives to the U.S. Senate, instead of allowing party-controlled state legislatures to do so. In addition, the?Temperance Movement?and the?Women's Suffrage Movement?finally paid off with the passage of the?17th?Amendment?and the18th Amendment.Progressive Era Amendments16th?(1913)Granted Congress the power to tax income.17th?(1913)Provided for the direct election of U.S. Senators.18th?(1919)Prohibited making, selling, or transporting alcohol.19th?(1920)Provided women suffrage (voting).IMPERIALISMExpansion and empire, 1867–1914The last decades of the 19th century were a period of imperial expansion for the United States. The American story took a different course from that of its European rivals, however, because of the U.S. history of struggle against European empires and its unique democratic development.By 1910, a handful of colonial powers had carved up most of the world. The sources of American expansionism in the late 19th century were varied. Internationally, the period was one of imperialist frenzy, as European powers raced to carve up Africa and competed, along with Japan, for influence and trade in Asia. Many Americans, including influential figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Elihu Root, felt that to safeguard its own interests, the United States had to stake out spheres of economic influence as well. That view was seconded by a powerful naval lobby, which called for an expanded fleet and network of overseas ports as essential to the economic and political security of the nation. More generally, the doctrine of “manifest destiny,” first used to justify America’s continental expansion, was now revived to assert that the United States had a right and duty to extend its influence and civilization in the Western Hemisphere and the Caribbean, as well as across the Pacific.At the same time, voices of anti-imperialism from diverse coalitions of Northern Democrats and reform-minded Republicans remained loud and constant. As a result, the acquisition of a U.S. empire was piecemeal and ambivalent. Colonial-minded administrations were often more concerned with trade and economic issues than political control.The United States’ first venture beyond its continental borders was the purchase of Alaska – sparsely populated by Inuit and other native peoples – from Russia in 1867. Most Americans were either indifferent to or indignant at this action by Secretary of State William Seward, whose critics called Alaska “Seward’s Folly” and “Seward’s Icebox.” But 30 years later, when gold was discovered on Alaska’s Klondike River, thousands of Americans headed north, and many of them settled in Alaska permanently. When Alaska became the 49th state in 1959, it replaced Texas as geographically the largest state in the Union.Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines knocking at the door of the U.SA cartoon in the Chicago Tribune portrayed Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines as dirty and backwards children knocking on Uncle Sam’s door. About the illustrationThe Spanish-American War, fought in 1898, marked a turning point in U.S. history. It left the United States exercising control or influence over islands in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific.By the 1890s, Cuba and Puerto Rico were the only remnants of Spain’s once vast empire in the New World, and the Philippine Islands comprised the core of Spanish power in the Pacific. The outbreak of war had three principal sources: popular hostility to autocratic Spanish rule in Cuba; U.S. sympathy with the Cuban fight for independence; and a new spirit of national assertiveness, stimulated in part by a nationalistic and sensationalist press.By 1895 Cuba’s growing restiveness had become a guerrilla war of independence. Most Americans were sympathetic with the Cubans, but President Cleveland was determined to preserve neutrality. Three years later, however, during the administration of William McKinley, the U.S. warship Maine, sent to Havana on a “courtesy visit” designed to remind the Spanish of American concern over the rough handling of the insurrection, blew up in the harbor. More than 250 men were killed. The Maine was probably destroyed by an accidental internal explosion, but most Americans believed the Spanish were responsible. Indignation, intensified by sensationalized press coverage, swept across the country. McKinley tried to preserve the peace, but within a few months, believing delay futile, he recommended armed intervention.The war with Spain was swift and decisive. During the four months it lasted, not a single American reverse of any importance occurred. A week after the declaration of war, Commodore George Dewey, commander of the six-warship Asiatic Squadron then at Hong Kong, steamed to the Philippines. Catching the entire Spanish fleet at anchor in Manila Bay, he destroyed it without losing an American life.Meanwhile, in Cuba, troops landed near Santiago, where, after winning a rapid series of engagements, they fired on the port. Four armored Spanish cruisers steamed out of Santiago Bay to engage the American navy and were reduced to ruined hulks.From Boston to San Francisco, whistles blew and flags waved when word came that Santiago had fallen. Newspapers dispatched correspondents to Cuba and the Philippines, who trumpeted the renown of the nation’s new heroes. Chief among them were Commodore Dewey and Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, who had resigned as assistant secretary of the navy to lead his volunteer regiment, the “Rough Riders,” to service in Cuba. Spain soon sued for an end to the war. The peace treaty signed on December 10, 1898, transferred Cuba to the United States for temporary occupation preliminary to the island’s independence. In addition, Spain ceded Puerto Rico and Guam in lieu of war indemnity, and the Philippines for a U.S. payment of $20 million.Officially, U.S. policy encouraged the new territories to move toward democratic self-government, a political system with which none of them had any previous experience. In fact, the United States found itself in a colonial role. It maintained formal administrative control in Puerto Rico and Guam, gave Cuba only nominal independence, and harshly suppressed an armed independence movement in the Philippines. (The Philippines gained the right to elect both houses of its legislature in 1916. In 1936 a largely autonomous Philippine Commonwealth was established. In 1946, after World War II, the islands finally attained full independence.)U.S. involvement in the Pacific area was not limited to the Philippines. The year of the Spanish-American War also saw the beginning of a new relationship with the Hawaiian Islands. Earlier contact with Hawaii had been mainly through missionaries and traders. After 1865, however, American investors began to develop the islands’ resources – chiefly sugar cane and pineapples.Queen Liliuokalani of HawaiiWhen sugar planters and American businessmen threatened to depose her, Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii gave up her throne to prevent bloodshed.When the government of Queen Liliuokalani announced its intention to end foreign influence in 1893, American businessmen joined with influential Hawaiians to depose her. Backed by the American ambassador to Hawaii and U.S. troops stationed there, the new government then asked to be annexed to the United States. President Cleveland, just beginning his second term, rejected annexation, leaving Hawaii nominally independent until the Spanish-American War, when, with the backing of President McKinley, Congress ratified an annexation treaty. In 1959 Hawaii would become the 50th state.To some extent, in Hawaii especially, economic interests had a role in American expansion, but to influential policy makers such as Roosevelt, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and Secretary of State John Hay, and to influential strategists such as Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, the main impetus was geostrategic. For these people, the major dividend of acquiring Hawaii was Pearl Harbor, which would become the major U.S. naval base in the central Pacific. The Philippines and Guam complemented other Pacific bases – Wake Island, Midway, and American Samoa. Puerto Rico was an important foothold in a Caribbean area that was becoming increasingly important as the United States contemplated a Central American canal.U.S. colonial policy tended toward democratic self-government. As it had done with the Philippines, in 1917 the U.S. Congress granted Puerto Ricans the right to elect all of their legislators. The same law also made the island officially a U.S. territory and gave its people American citizenship. In 1950 Congress granted Puerto Rico complete freedom to decide its future. In 1952, the citizens voted to reject either statehood or total independence, and chose instead a commonwealth status that has endured despite the efforts of a vocal separatist movement. Large numbers of Puerto Ricans have settled on the mainland, to which they have free access and where they enjoy all the political and civil rights of any other citizen of the United States.The canal and the AmericasThe fifty-mile Panama Canal, shown here under construction in 1913, shortened travel from the Atlantic to the Pacific by weeks and realized a centuries-old dream of convenient sea travel from Europe to Asia. It was the most expensive construction project in U.S. history to that time, and more than 5,000 lives were lost to disease and accidents. About the photographThe war with Spain revived U.S. interest in building a canal across the isthmus of Panama, uniting the two great oceans. The usefulness of such a canal for sea trade had long been recognized by the major commercial nations of the world; the French had begun digging one in the late 19th century but had been unable to overcome the engineering difficulties. Having become a power in both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, the United States saw a canal as both economically beneficial and a way of providing speedier transfer of warships from one ocean to the other.At the turn of the century, what is now Panama was the rebellious northern province of Colombia. When the Colombian legislature in 1903 refused to ratify a treaty giving the United States the right to build and manage a canal, a group of impatient Panamanians, with the support of U.S. Marines, rose in rebellion and declared Panamanian independence. The breakaway country was immediately recognized by President Theodore Roosevelt. Under the terms of a treaty signed that November, Panama granted the United States a perpetual lease to a 16-kilometer-wide strip of land (the Panama Canal Zone) between the Atlantic and the Pacific, in return for $10 million and a yearly fee of $250,000. Colombia later received $25 million as partial compensation. Seventy-five years later, Panama and the United States negotiated a new treaty. It provided for Panamanian sovereignty in the Canal Zone and transfer of the canal to Panama on December 31, 1999.The completion of the Panama Canal in 1914, directed by Colonel George W. Goethals, was a major triumph of engineering. The simultaneous conquest of malaria and yellow fever made it possible and was one of the 20th century’s great feats in preventive medicine.Elsewhere in Latin America, the United States fell into a pattern of fitful intervention. Between 1900 and 1920, the United States carried out sustained interventions in six Western Hemispheric nations – most notably Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. Washington offered a variety of justifications for these interventions: to establish political stability and democratic government, to provide a favorable environment for U.S. investment (often called dollar diplomacy), to secure the sea lanes leading to the Panama Canal, and even to prevent European countries from forcibly collecting debts. The United States had pressured the French into removing troops from Mexico in 1867. Half a century later, however, as part of an ill-starred campaign to influence the Mexican revolution and stop raids into American territory, President Woodrow Wilson sent 11,000 troops into the northern part of the country in a futile effort to capture the elusive rebel and outlaw Francisco “Pancho” Villa.Exercising its role as the most powerful – and most liberal – of Western Hemisphere nations, the United States also worked to establish an institutional basis for cooperation among the nations of the Americas. In 1889 Secretary of State James G. Blaine proposed that the 21 independent nations of the Western Hemisphere join in an organization dedicated to the peaceful settlement of disputes and to closer economic bonds. The result was the Pan-American Union, founded in 1890 and known today as the Organization of American States (OAS).The later administrations of Herbert Hoover (1929-33) and Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-45) repudiated the right of U.S. intervention in Latin America. In particular, Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy of the 1930s, while not ending all tensions between the United States and Latin America, helped dissipate much of the ill-will engendered by earlier U.S. intervention and unilateral actions.The United States and AsiaNewly established in the Philippines and firmly entrenched in Hawaii at the turn of the century, the United States had high hopes for a vigorous trade with China. However, Japan and various European nations had acquired established spheres of influence there in the form of naval bases, leased territories, monopolistic trade rights, and exclusive concessions for investing in railway construction and mining.Idealism in American foreign policy existed alongside the desire to compete with Europe’s imperial powers in the Far East. The U.S. government thus insisted as a matter of principle upon equality of commercial privileges for all nations. In September 1899, Secretary of State John Hay advocated an “Open Door” for all nations in China – that is, equality of trading opportunities (including equal tariffs, harbor duties, and railway rates) in the areas Europeans controlled. Despite its idealistic component, the Open Door, in essence, was a diplomatic maneuver that sought the advantages of colonialism while avoiding the stigma of its frank practice. It had limited success.With the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, the Chinese struck out against foreigners. In June, insurgents seized Beijing and attacked the foreign legations there. Hay promptly announced to the European powers and Japan that the United States would oppose any disturbance of Chinese territorial or administrative rights and restated the Open Door policy. Once the rebellion was quelled, Hay protected China from crushing indemnities. Primarily for the sake of American good will, Great Britain, Germany, and lesser colonial powers formally affirmed the Open Door policy and Chinese independence. In practice, they consolidated their privileged positions in the country.A few years later, President Theodore Roosevelt mediated the deadlocked Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, in many respects a struggle for power and influence in the northern Chinese province of Manchuria. Roosevelt hoped the settlement would provide open-door opportunities for American business, but the former enemies and other imperial powers succeeded in shutting the Americans out. Here as elsewhere, the United States was unwilling to deploy military force in the service of economic imperialism. The president could at least content himself with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize (1906). Despite gains for Japan, moreover, U.S. relations with the proud and newly assertive island nation would be intermittently difficult through the early decades of the 20th century.The Spanish-American WarThe wreck of the U.S.S. Maine in the Havana harbor angered the American public and sparked the war with Spain.The Spanish-American War of 1898 ended Spain’s colonial empire in the Western Hemisphere and secured the position of the United States as a Pacific power. U.S. victory in the war produced a peace treaty that compelled the Spanish to relinquish claims on Cuba, and to cede sovereignty over Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to the United States. The United States also annexed the independent state of Hawaii during the conflict. Thus, the war enabled the United States to establish its predominance in the Caribbean region and to pursue its strategic and economic interests in Asia.The war that erupted in 1898 between the United States and Spain was preceded by three years of fighting by Cuban revolutionaries to gain independence from Spanish colonial rule. From 1895-1898, the violent conflict in Cuba captured the attention of Americans because of the economic and political instability that it produced in a region within such close geographical proximity to the United States. The long-held U.S. interest in ridding the Western Hemisphere of European colonial powers and American public outrage over brutal Spanish tactics created much sympathy for the Cuban revolutionaries. By early 1898, tensions between the United States and Spain had been mounting for months. After the U.S. battleship Maine exploded and sank in Havana harbor under mysterious circumstances on February 15, 1898, U.S. military intervention in Cuba became likely.On April 11, 1898, President William McKinley asked Congress for authorization to end the fighting in Cuba between the rebels and Spanish forces, and to establish a “stable government” that would “maintain order” and ensure the “peace and tranquility and the security” of Cuban and U.S. citizens on the island. On April 20, the U.S. Congress passed a joint resolution that acknowledged Cuban independence, demanded that the Spanish government give up control of the island, foreswore any intention on the part of the United States to annex Cuba, and authorized McKinley to use whatever military measures he deemed necessary to guarantee Cuba’s independence.The Spanish government rejected the U.S. ultimatum and immediately severed diplomatic relations with the United States. McKinley responded by implementing a naval blockade of Cuba on April 22 and issued a call for 125,000 military volunteers the following day. That same day, Spain declared war on the United States, and the U.S. Congress voted to go to war against Spain on April 25.“Moving pictures” were brand-new technology in 1898, and films of the Spanish-American War gave most Americans their first “live” look at battle. But this film, of course, was only a reenactment, shot in New Jersey the following year by Thomas Edison’s company. It shows the capture of trenches at Candabar (Candaba), in the Philippines. Edison Manufacturing Co. James H. White, producer. About the videoThe future Secretary of State John Hay described the ensuing conflict as a “splendid little war.” The first battle was fought on May 1, in Manila Bay, where Commodore George Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron defeated the Spanish naval force defending the Philippines. On June 10, U.S. troops landed at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and additional forces landed near the harbor city of Santiago on June 22 and 24. After isolating and defeating the Spanish army garrisons in Cuba, the U.S. Navy destroyed the Spanish Caribbean squadron on July 3 as it attempted to escape the U.S. naval blockade of Santiago.On July 26, at the behest of the Spanish government, the French ambassador in Washington, Jules Cambon, approached the McKinley Administration to discuss peace terms, and a cease-fire was signed on August 12. The war officially ended four months later, when the U.S. and Spanish governments signed the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898. Apart from guaranteeing the independence of Cuba, the treaty also forced Spain to cede Guam and Puerto Rico to the United States. Spain also agreed to sell the Philippines to the United States for the sum of $20 million. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty on February 6, 1899, by a margin of only one vote.The McKinley Administration also used the war as a pretext to annex the independent state of Hawaii. In 1893, American residents of the Hawaiian Islands had led a coup against native Queen Liliuokalani and established a new government. They promptly sought annexation by the United States, but President Grover Cleveland rejected their requests. In 1898, however, President McKinley and the American public were more favorably disposed toward acquiring the islands. Supporters of annexation argued that Hawaii was vital to the U.S. economy, that it would serve as a strategic base that could help protect U.S. interests in Asia, and that other nations were intent on taking over the islands if the United States did not. At McKinley’s request, a joint resolution of Congress made Hawaii a U.S. territory on August 12, 1898.WWIM.A.I.N. Reasons for WarMilitarismAlliancesImperialismNationalismMilitarismNationalism means being a strong supporter of the rights and interests of one's country. The Congress of Vienna, held after Napoleon's?exile?to Elba, aimed to sort out problems in Europe. Delegates from Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia (the winning allies) decided upon a new Europe that left both Germany and Italy as divided states. Strong nationalist elements led to the?re-unification?of Italy in 1861 and Germany in 1871. The settlement at the end of the Franco-Prussian war left France angry at the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany and keen to regain their lost territory. Large areas of both Austria-Hungary and Serbia were home to differing nationalist groups, all of whom wanted freedom from the states in which they lived.AlliancesAn?alliance?is an agreement made between two or more countries to give each other help if it is needed. When an alliance is signed, those countries become known as?Allies.A number of alliances had been signed by countries between the years 1879 and 1914. These were important because they meant that some countries had no option but to?declare war?if one of their allies declared war first. (The table below reads clockwise from the top left picture)1879The Dual AllianceGermany and Austria-Hungary made an alliance to protect themselves from Russia1881Austro-Serbian AllianceAustria-Hungary made an alliance with Serbia to stop Russia gaining control of Serbia1882The Triple Alliance?Germany and Austria- Hungary made an alliance with Italy to stop Italy from taking sides with Russia1914Triple Entente (no separate peace)Britain, Russia and France agreed not to sign for peace?separately.1894Franco-Russian Alliance?Russia formed an alliance with France to protect herself against Germany and Austria-Hungary1907Triple Entente?This was made between Russia, France and Britain to counter the increasing threat from Germany.1907Anglo-Russian EntenteThis was an agreement between Britain and Russia1904Entente CordialeThis was an agreement, but not a formal alliance, between France and Britain.ImperialismImperialism is when a country takes over new lands or countries and makes them?subject?to their rule. By 1900 the British?Empire?extended over five continents and France had control of large areas of Africa. With the rise of?industrialism?countries needed new markets. The amount of lands 'owned' by Britain and France increased the rivalry with Germany who had entered the scramble to acquire?colonies?late and only had small areas of Africa.?Note the contrast in the map below.NationalismMilitarism means that the?army?and military forces are given a high profile by the?government. The growing European divide had led to an?arms race?between the main countries. The armies of both France and Germany had more than doubled between 1870 and 1914 and there was fierce competition between Britain and Germany for mastery of the seas. The British had introduced the 'Dreadnought', an effective battleship, in 1906. The Germans soon followed suit introducing their own battleships. The German, Von Schlieffen also drew up a plan of action that involved attacking France through Belgium if Russia made an attack on Germany.?The map below shows how the plan was to work.Short Term Cause (the spark of the powder keg of Europe)The first world war began in August 1914. It was directly triggered by the assassination of the Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand and his wife, on 28th June 1914 by Serbian nationalist (terrorist), Gavrilo Princip.This event was, however, simply the trigger that set off declarations of war. The actual causes of the war are more complicated and are still debated by historians today.The war that engulfed Europe between 1914 and 1918 was so massive, widespread, and deadly, that it became known simply as the Great War — and, when an even greater war followed a few decades later, World War I. Although the United States was only involved in the fighting for a year and a half, North Carolina sent 86,457 soldiers overseas. Three military training camps were built in the state — Camp Greene near Charlotte, Camp Bragg near Fayetteville, and Camp Polk near Raleigh. In Wilmington, shipyards built warships for the Navy, while furniture workers in High Point made airplane propellers, and artillery shells were made in Raleigh. The state’s textile mills made blankets, tents, and socks for soldiers.In this chapter, you’ll learn the reasons for American involvement in the war, consider the experiences of soldiers, and examine the impact of the worldwide influenza pandemic that followed on the heels of the war in 1919.The United States and World War IWar and neutral rightsA tank in a field during World War I. Tank warfare began during the first world war.To the American public of 1914, the outbreak of war in Europe – with Germany and Austria-Hungary fighting Britain, France, and Russia – came as a shock. At first the encounter seemed remote, but its economic and political effects were swift and deep. By 1915 U.S. industry, which had been mildly depressed, was prospering again with?munitions?orders from the Western Allies. Both sides used propaganda to arouse the public passions of Americans – a third of whom were either foreign-born or had one or two foreign-born parents. Moreover, Britain and Germany both acted against U.S. shipping on the high seas, bringing sharp protests from President Woodrow Wilson.Britain, which controlled the seas, stopped and searched American carriers, confiscating “contraband” bound for Germany. Germany employed its major naval weapon, the submarine, to sink shipping bound for Britain or France. President Wilson warned that the United States would not forsake its traditional right as a neutral to trade with belligerent nations. He also declared that the nation would hold Germany to “strict accountability” for the loss of American vessels or lives. On May 7, 1915, a German submarine sunk the British liner Lusitania, killing 1,198 people, 128 of them Americans. Wilson, reflecting American outrage, demanded an immediate halt to attacks on liners and merchant ships.Anxious to avoid war with the United States, Germany agreed to give warning to commercial vessels – even if they flew the enemy flag – before firing on them. But after two more attacks – the sinking of the British steamer Arabic in August 1915, and the torpedoing of the French liner Sussex in March 1916 – Wilson issued an?ultimatum?threatening to break diplomatic relations unless Germany abandoned submarine warfare. Germany agreed and refrained from further attacks through the end of the year.Wilson won reelection in 1916, partly on the slogan: “He kept us out of war.” Feeling he had a mandate to act as a peacemaker, he delivered a speech to the Senate, January 22, 1917, urging the warring nations to accept a “peace without victory.”The U.S. enters the warA machine gunner from the 115th Machine Gun Battalion, 30th Division takes aim as he sits next to another soldier on an earthen ledge of a trench.On January 31, 1917, however, the German government resumed unrestricted submarine warfare. After five U.S. vessels were sunk, Wilson on April 2, 1917, asked for a declaration of war. Congress quickly approved. The government rapidly mobilized military resources, industry, labor, and agriculture. By October 1918, on the eve of Allied victory, a U.S. army of over 1,750,000 had been deployed in France.In the summer of 1918, fresh American troops under the command of General John J. Pershing played a decisive role in stopping a last-ditch German offensive. That fall, Americans were key participants in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, which cracked Germany’s vaunted Hindenburg Line.President Wilson contributed greatly to an early end to the war by defining American war aims that characterized the struggle as being waged not against the German people but against their?autocratic?government. His Fourteen Points, submitted to the Senate in January 1918, called for: abandonment of secret international agreements; freedom of the seas; free trade between nations; reductions in national armaments; an adjustment of colonial claims in the interests of the inhabitants affected; self-rule for subjugated?European nationalities; and, most importantly, the establishment of an association of nations to afford “mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”Soldiers reach to hold lines attached to a military biplane in a field. The plane, which had been nose first into the ground, is being pulled upright by the soldiers.In October 1918, the German government, facing certain defeat, appealed to Wilson to negotiate on the basis of the Fourteen Points. After a month of secret negotiations that gave Germany no firm guarantees, an armistice (technically a truce, but actually a surrender) was concluded on November 11.The League of NationsIt was Wilson’s hope that the final treaty, drafted by the victors, would be even-handed, but the passion and material sacrifice of more than four years of war caused the European Allies to make severe demands. Persuaded that his greatest hope for peace, a League of Nations, would never be realized unless he made?concessions, Wilson compromised somewhat on the issues of self-determination, open diplomacy, and other specifics. He successfully resisted French demands for the entire Rhineland, and somewhat moderated that country’s insistence upon charging Germany the whole cost of the war. The final agreement (the Treaty of Versailles), however, provided for French occupation of the coal and iron rich Saar Basin, and a very heavy burden of?reparations?upon Germany.In the end, there was little left of Wilson’s proposals for a generous and lasting peace but the League of Nations itself, which he had made an integral part of the treaty. Displaying poor judgment, however, the president had failed to involve leading Republicans in the treaty negotiations. Returning with a partisan document, he then refused to make concessions necessary to satisfy Republican concerns about protecting American sovereignty.With the treaty stalled in a Senate committee, Wilson began a national tour to appeal for support. On September 25, 1919, physically ravaged by the rigors of peacemaking and the pressures of the wartime presidency, he suffered a crippling stroke. Critically ill for weeks, he never fully recovered. In two separate votes – November 1919 and March 1920 – the Senate once again rejected the Versailles Treaty and with it the League of Nations.The League of Nations would never be capable of maintaining world order. Wilson’s defeat showed that the American people were not yet ready to play a commanding role in world affairs. His utopian vision had briefly inspired the nation, but its collision with reality quickly led to widespread disillusion with world affairs. America reverted to its instinctive isolationism.Postwar unrestThe transition from war to peace was tumultuous. A postwar economic boom coexisted with rapid increases in consumer prices. Labor unions that had refrained from striking during the war engaged in several major job actions. During the summer of 1919, race riots occurred, reflecting apprehension over the emergence of a “New Negro” who had seen military service or gone north to work in war industry.Reaction to these events merged with a widespread national fear of a new international revolutionary movement. In 1917, the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia; after the war, they attempted revolutions in Germany and Hungary. By 1919, it seemed they had come to America. Excited by the?Bolshevik?example, large numbers of militants split from the Socialist Party to found what would become the Communist Party of the United States. In April 1919, the postal service intercepted nearly 40 bombs addressed to prominent citizens. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s residence in Washington was bombed. Palmer, in turn, authorized federal roundups of radicals and deported many who were not citizens. Major strikes were often blamed on radicals and depicted as the opening shots of a revolution.Palmer’s dire warnings fueled a “Red Scare” that subsided by mid-1920. Even a murderous bombing in Wall Street in September failed to reawaken it. From 1919 on, however, a current of militant hostility toward revolutionary communism would simmer not far beneath the surface of American life.Propaganda and public opinion in the First World War?Every nation involved in World War I published posters that justified the war to its citizens and encouraged them to help with the war effort. The United States, which was in the war for only a year and a half, produced more of these?propaganda?posters than any other nation.The posters all used vivid images and patriotic slogans to inspire or, sometimes, to scare Americans. Some posters explained why America had to fight — for liberty or for “civilization.” Others encouraged men to join the army and navy and women to become nurses. Many posters asked Americans to buy Liberty Bonds — government loans that paid for the war. Even children were asked to help. The posters give a picture of the war, how it was fought, and what American society was like in 1918."Over there"George M. Cohan’s patriotic song “Over There,” written in 1917, was quickly published and was recorded several times during the war.George M. Cohan claimed throughout his life to have been born on the Fourth of July, though his birth certificate said July 3, 1878. As a child, he starred with his family in?vaudeville?theater productions, and he grew up to write, direct, and star in musical theater productions. Shortly after the United States entered World War I, Cohan wrote the words and music to “Over There,” which quickly became the anthem of American soldiers. The song did so much to boost morale that years later, in 1940, Cohan would be given the Congressional Medal of Honor for his patriotic music.LyricsJohnnie, get your gun,Get your gun, get your gun,Take it on the run,On the run, on the run.Hear them calling, you and me,Every son of liberty.Hurry right away,No delay, go today,Make your daddy gladTo have had such a lad.Tell your sweetheart not to pine,To be proud her boy’s in line.Chorus:Over there, over there,Send the word, send the word over there -That the Yanks are coming,The Yanks are coming,The drums rum-tummingEv’rywhere.So prepare, say a pray’r,Send the word, send the word to beware.We’ll be over, we’re coming over,And we won’t come back till it’s overOver there.(Chorus repeats)Johnnie, get your gun,Get your gun, get your gun,Johnnie show the?HunWho’s a son of a gun.Hoist the flag and let her fly,Yankee Doodle do or die.Pack your little kit,Show your grit, do your bit.Yankee to the ranks,From the towns and the tanks.Make your mother proud of you,And the old Red, White and Blue.(Chorus repeats twice)The War and German AmericansThe U.S Government’s propaganda posters portrayed Germans as brutes and barbarians.Before the U.S. declared war on Germany in April 1917, many German-Americans — especially those that had been born in Germany — openly supported the Germans in the war against Britain, France, and Russia. Once the U.S. entered the war, though, the vast majority of German-Americans supported the American war effort.Every war the U.S. has fought has been vocally opposed by a minority of Americans, and World War I was no different. But it was quickly assumed by many Americans that all German-Americans were loyal to the Kaiser. People with German-sounding last names were persecuted. German-owned businesses faced boycotts. In towns founded by German immigrants, German street names were changed. A Minnesota man was tarred and feathered when he was heard praying in German with a dying woman. At least one man was hanged merely because he was believed to be of German descent. High schools dropped German classes, and schools in majority-German areas were required to teach only in English. In Iowa, a 1918 law prohibited speaking any language other than English in public.Woodrow Wilson’s administration was directly responsible for this anti-German-American hysteria. The government’s?posters portrayed Germans as brutes and barbarians (”the?Hun”), encouraging Americans to?dehumanize?the enemy — to think of Germans as less than human.In November 1917, former U.S. ambassador to Germany James W. Gerard made a speech in which he openly questioned the loyalty of German-Americans. Speaking to the Ladies Aid Society of St. Mary’s Hospital in New York, he demanded the complete devotion of all Americans to the war effort and threatened to hang German-American spies from lamp-posts. Twenty years earlier, Gerard’s speech would likely have been forgotten. But by 1917, the speech could be recorded, pressed onto records, and distributed. Gerard’s references to lynching were heard across the country.Read James W. Gerard’s speech.TranscriptI know that it is hard for Americans to realize the magnitude of the war in which we are involved. We have problems in this war no other nations have. Fortunately, the great majority of American citizens of German descent have, in this great crisis of our history, shown themselves splendidly loyal to our flag.Everyone had a right to sympathize with any warring nation. But now that we are in the war there are only two sides, and the time has come when every citizen must declare himself American — or traitor!We must disappoint the Germans who have always believed that the German-Americans here would risk their property, their children’s future, and their own neck, and take up arms for the Kaiser. The Foreign Minister of Germany once said to me “your country does not dare do anything against Germany, because we have in your country 500,000 German reservists who will rise in arms against your government if you dare to make a move against Germany.”Well, I told him that that might be so, but that we had 500,001 lamp posts in this country, and that that was where the reservists would be hanging the day after they tried to rise. And if there are any German-Americans here who are so ungrateful for all the benefits they have received that they are still for the Kaiser, there is only one thing to do with them. And that is to hog-tie them, give them back the wooden shoes and the rags they landed in, and ship them back to the Fatherland.I have travelled this year over all the United States. Through the Alleghenies, the White Mountains, and the Catskills, the Rockies and the Bitterroot Mountains, the Cascades, the Coast Range, and the Sierras. And in all these mountains, there is no animal that bites and kicks and squeals and scratches, that would bite and squeal and scratch equal to a fat German-American, if you commenced to tie him up and told him that he was on his way back to the Kaiser.The increasing power of destruction: Military technology in World War IIn a World War I battle, a French tank advances while a line of infantry follows. This and the other photographs on this page are from The War of Nations, a collection of wartime photographs published by the New York Times in 1919.? A “monster Austrian 30.5 centimeter gun” in firing position.? World War I was less than one year old when British writer H. G. Wells lamented?the fate of humanity at the hands of “man’s increasing power of destruction.”1?Although considered a father of science fiction, Wells was observing something all too real — technology had changed the face of combat in World War I and ultimately accounted for an unprecedented loss of human life.Infantry warfare had depended upon hand-to-hand combat. World War I popularized the use of the machine gun — capable of bringing down row after row of soldiers from a distance on the battlefield. This weapon, along with barbed wire and mines, made movement across open land both difficult and dangerous. Thus trench warfare was born. The British introduced tanks in 1916; they were used with airplanes and?artillery?to advance the front. The?advent?of chemical warfare added to the soldier’s perils.Sea and airborne weapons made killing from a distance more effective as well. Guns mounted on ships were able to strike targets up to twenty miles inland. The?stealth?and speed of German submarines gave Germany a considerable advantage in its dominance of the North Sea. Although airplanes were technologically crude, they offered a psychological advantage. Fighter pilot aces such as Manfred von Richthofen, Germany’s “Red Baron,” became celebrities and heroes, capturing the world’s imagination with their daring and thrilling mid-air maneuvers.“The Insidious and Deadly Gas That Creeps Noiselessly Down Toward the Foe.”? Newspapers charted the public’s reaction — horror and vengeance — to these technological advancements. A few weeks after the Germans first used poison gas in Ypres, Belgium, on April 22, 1915, a London newswire to the New York Times described the brutal details of the attack and the immediate effects on the soldiers, concluding: “It is without doubt the most awful form of scientific torture.” Yet a Daily Chronicle [London] editorial urged Britain to retaliate with poison gas use of its own.2?In fact, Germany claimed that the Allies were already using mines charged with poison gas. So horrified were people by chemical warfare that the use of poison gases was banned for future wars, although not until 1925.When Germany’s plan for a swift military victory, a blitzkrieg, went unrealized, the pace of war bogged down. Both sides tried to break this stalemate through the use of force. In previous wars, victory was achieved through territorial supremacy; in World War I it was accomplished by simply outlasting the opponent — a “war of?attrition.” Initially described at the onset of the fighting in April 1914 as a “splendid little war” that would be over by Christmas, the conflict lasted for more than four years and scarred an entire generation with its unprecedented brutality.Diary of a doughboyDiary of Willard Newton, July 24–28, 1918, published in the?Charlotte Observer, September 19, 1920.This photograph, taken by German soldiers, shows an abandoned British trench that had been captured by the Germans. In the background, German soldiers on horseback view the scene. This page has comments.?Move your mouse over the?highlighted text?or marked image.July 24, 1918I am glad when day breaks for?Fritz?quits shelling. We are on guard all the morning, being relieved in the afternoon by men from the first?battalion, who are moving in and taking our?billets. We leave these billets late in the afternoon and move a few kilometers nearer the lines (where friend and foe face each other all the time) and are billeted in small dug-outs, 12 men being assigned to each. The dug-outs having iron frames covered with sheet iron, the sheet iron being covered with dirt and camouflaged with dead bushes.To kill or to wound any one?[sic]?a shell must hit directly on one of these dug-outs as they are under the level of the ground.?Batteries?of artillery, heavy and light, are stationed all around us, some of them firing all the time. Like the dug-outs they are concealed to keep them hid from view of enemy ‘planes that come over any chance they get. The third and second platoons?are stationed a few hundred yards from us, the third being assigned to billets, while the second platoon has to “dig in” (each man had to dig a hole in the ground large and deep enough to lay his body in) and put up their “pup” tents. The first platoon returns to Proven and camps in an old pasture.July 25, 1918A section of the fourth platoon goes up to within a few hundred yards of the front line trenches and spends the morning putting up barbed wire entanglements. The rest of the platoon goes up at night and works in the trenches where the infantry is, repairing damage recently done by German shells. I do not go on either one of these details, but remain in all day. I go over to where there are some Scotch soldiers, known as the Highlanders and talk awhile with them. They are stationed only a short distance from us in tin billets. The Highlander always wears a kilt, whether in battle or on leave. I receive two letters in the afternoon from the States. The guns continue their regular firing on the German lines.July 26, 1918The platoon sergeant puts me on the kitchen police for the day. The section work at their same jobs in and near the trenches. The sergeant in charge of our dug-out receives a roll of Charlotte papers from the States and they are eagerly ready by all, especially the Charlotte boys. About 11 p. m., Fritz begins shelling the light railway that is only a few hundred yards to our rear. Some of the shells burst pretty close to our dug-outs, but Fritz hasn’t got our numbers yet. After he ceases firing the British artillery opens up and fires the rest of the night.July 27, 1918I go up with the section of the platoon that is putting up barbed wire entanglements. We start for the job at 5 a. m., riding nearly?kilometers on a light railway train. We are supposed to work until 11:45 a. m., but Fritz starts shelling a battery of guns stationed in and near the field where we are working at 10 a.m., and we leave the field and take shelter in an old shell-wrecked?chateaux. We remain here until stopping time and then start back to our billets. We are all wet and muddy from falling on the west ground and jumping in shell holes when the shells fell close, to keep from being hit by pieces of shells. Reaching camp we are excused for the remainder of the day.July 28, 1918The hand-written caption on this photograph says that it is “No Man’s Land — once a a forest in ‘Flander’s Fields.’” “In Flanders Fields” was a poem written in in 1915 by a Canadian colonel about the death of a friend. (Flanders is a region of Belgium.)? We get up at 4 a. m. and get ready for our day’s work. After eating breakfast we march to Toronto Junction, the place we get on the light railway train, and get our morning train for the chateaux. We ride to within 200 yards of this building and get off but instead of going to our old job we march past it and cut across a large field to another railroad track which we follow for several hundred yards, finally going into a sunken bottom. I soon notice fellows asleep in holes dug back into the bank, while others are on guard. We are hailed, at a small bridge that crosses over the branch that runs through the sunken bottom by a?sentinel, who says that only one man must pass over at the time and that he must stoop over as he crosses to keep from being seen by the Germans. Crossing we follow a trench that leads into another trench that is filled with English and?doughboys?from our own division, most of them laying under the ground in holes they have dug asleep. We come to another low place in the trench and again we have to stoop when crossing. Continuing on up the same trench we come to where the other section of the platoon is working and we begin working with them, throwing mud out of the trenches and putting in?duck-boards?for the doughboys to walk on. Anxious to say I have seen No Man’s Land, I step on a firing base and take a look. Borrowing a pair of field glasses from an English sentinel I look over at the German trenches. Not a human being can be seen though as the Fritzies do not dare to peep over the top. Scores of British ‘planes fly about over No Man’s Land observing and occasionally diving on the German trenches pouring hundreds of machine gun bullets into them and rising again while the Germans use machine and anti-aircraft guns in an effort to shoot them down. The lieutenant warns us against looking upward while the Germans are shelling the British planes as there is danger of getting hit in the face and eyes by pieces of falling?shrapnel. But the fellows seem to pay no attention to his warning, for every time a ‘plane would draw fire they would look up at it. We do not work from 1 to 4 p. m., but are instead given that time as a rest period. We stop work for the day at 8 p. m. and start for camp. We stop at the ammunition dump where the train is supposed to meet us, and here we wait for 75 minutes, but no train shows up. In the meantime Fritz has started to shelling the roads and gradually begins shelling near this dump. Our lieutenant seeing that pretty soon Fritz will be shelling the dump gets his platoon started down the road. He was not any too soon in doing this for after we got a few hundred yards down the road shells began falling by twos and fours around this dump. We hike to camp, following the dirt road a while and then the rail track. We made a record hike, reaching camp at 11:30 p. m., sooner than we had expected to. We were all tired and hungry from the day’s work and the hike, but our cook was on the job and had a hot supper prepared for us. We did not take time to wash or put our rifles in our dugouts, but threw our rifles on the ground and lined up for “chow.” Each man received a mess kit full of mashed potatoes, beef steak and gravy, and hot cup of real coffee. Every one received a plenty and the cook was the talk of the platoon after supper.A letter home from the American Expeditionary ForceLetter from Robert March Hanes to Mildred Hanes, July 25, 1918, in the?Robert March Hanes Papers, Selected letters, 1917-1918.Envelope postmarked July 25, 1918. (Robert March Hanes Papers, Selected letters, 1917-1918(Electronic Edition).?July 25 1918SweetheartYou will have to handle this letter lightly as to comments on the writing or construction as I am writing it with a?gas mask on.?This doesn’t mean that I am in gas but that it is a part of our daily life to ware it now so that we shall be ready to use it when we get to the front. You should try one of them for an hour or so, hell, Germans or nothing has any terrors for you after wearing it.We have one more week of instruction here and then about one more to get everything ready to leave in and we are off to the big show. If the Allies keep going as they are now there wont be any show long. The news has been wonderful for the past few days. I don’t hope for too much but it is great the recent progress that has been made. The Germans have evidently been taken very much by surprise and are very hard pressed in their present positions. It would certainly be wonderful if we could get the whole thing finished up this summer.We had a very nice time Sunday afternoon at the?Red Cross?fète?we attended. It was at some Countess’ house or chateau in the country. It was a very pretty old place but nothing wonderful at all. The grounds were very pretty and they had two or three right attractive girls there. The whole scene was laid for a huge drunk which it finally turned out to be. Your husband got the fullest he has been in years, and by the way the sickest next day. Billy Joyner, Creighton and I went out together on horseback, a ride of about six or eight miles. We got a table and sat down, there was nothing to do but go to drinking, as the girls were waiting to serve you and you had to spend some money some way for the Red Cross. We went to it and about six o’clock in the afternoon we decided we had better mount and beat it before we got so we couldn’t mount. Some of the crowd who came back in trucks passed away completely. Frank Fuller got pretty tight and went up to the Colonel, who was standing in a crowd looking very dignified, cracked his heels together saluted and said, “Sir, I wish to report Major Pridgen is out in the field under a hay stack, fast asleep.” They say it was very comical altho’ very embarrassing to the Colonel. Major Pridgen is the Doctor we used to ride in sometimes, you know. I got my fill of wine on this trip, no more. I was too sick next day to bother it again soon.We have two boys in the?battery?who are pretty good musicians. One of my new lieutenants plays a?mandolin?so with the guitar and violin of the other two we have some great playing and singing in my room every night after supper. It helps out a lot after a hard day to forget it all and sing awhile.We have a very?congenial?crowd in my battery now and we get on famously together.Give my dearest love to all the family. I hope mother’s health is improving.All my love to you my precious you mean more than all the world to me, I truly hope I may soon be permitted to return to you.Devotedly RobThe Treaty of VersaillesAdapted from "The Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles," provided by the U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian.Europe in 1911, prior to the outbreak of World War I. Europe in 1919, with national boundaries redrawn by the Treaty of Versailles. World War I ended with an armistice signed November 11, 1918. The armistice was technically a truce between the warring nations, but in effect, it marked Germany’s surrender.Although the fighting had stopped, a formal treaty was still needed. The following January, the Paris Peace Conference was convened at Versailles, the former palace of the kings of France. Although nearly thirty nations participated, the representatives of Great Britain, France, the United States, and Italy — known as the “Big Four” — dominated the proceedings.Negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference were not always easy. Great Britain, France, and Italy fought together during the First World War as Allied Powers. The United States, entered the war in April 1917 as an Associated Power, and while it fought on the side of the Allies, it was not bound to honor pre-existing agreements between the Allied powers. These agreements tended to focus on postwar redistribution of territories. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson strongly opposed many of these arrangements. Wilson also wanted — and got — a League of Nations that would serve as an international forum and work to prevent future wars.Treaty negotiations were also weakened by the absence of other important nations. Russia had fought as one of the Allies until December 1917, when its new?Bolshevik?government, formed after the Russian Revolution, withdrew from the war. The Allied Powers refused to recognize the new Bolshevik government and thus did not invite its representatives to the Peace Conference. The Allies also excluded the defeated Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria).According to French and British wishes, Germany was subjected to strict punitive measures under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The new German government was required to surrender approximately 10 percent of its prewar territory in Europe and all of its overseas possessions. The harbor city of Danzig (now Gdansk) and the coal-rich Saarland were placed under the administration of the League of Nations, and France was allowed to exploit the economic resources of the Saarland until 1935. The German Army and Navy were limited in size.?Kaiser?Wilhelm II and a number of other high-ranking German officials were to be tried as war criminals. The Germans also accepted responsibility for the war and, as such, were required to pay financial?reparations?to the Allies — an amount eventually set at 132 billion gold Reichmarks, or $32 billion, which came on top of an initial $5 billion payment.While the Treaty of Versailles did not present a peace agreement that satisfied all parties concerned, by the time President Woodrow Wilson returned to the United States in July 1919, Americans overwhelmingly favored ratifying the treaty, including the Covenant of the League of Nations. Thirty-two state legislatures passed resolutions in support of the treaty. But there was intense opposition to it within the Senate, which had to?ratify?the treaty before it could become binding on the United States. The Treaty of Versailles fell seven votes short of?ratification, and the United States signed a separate treaty with Germany in 1921. The U.S. never joined the League of Nations.Many historians blame the Treaty of Versailles, in part, for the coming of World War II in Europe. Germans would grow to resent the harsh conditions imposed by the treaty. The reparations hurt the German economy and hastened the nation’s plunge into the Great Depression. Wounded pride and a disastrous economy paved the way for the rise of the Nazi Party in the 1920s. The League of Nations, meanwhile, was not strong enough to keep the peace in Europe. Had the Treaty of Versailles been more generous to Germany, the Nazis might never have taken over. Had the treaty been much harsher, Germany could never have threatened other nations. As it was, the unfinished business of the “Great War” would have to be finished by an even greater one.UNIT 3- “BOOM, BUST AND WORLD POWER”1920’S1930’SWWIIUNIT 4- POSTWAR AMERICA (1945-1960)COLD WAR BEGINSPOSTWAR AMERICANEW FRONTIER AND GREAT SOCIETYVIETNAM WARUNIT 5- WE SHALL OVERCOME CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTA TIME FOR SOCIAL CHANGEUNIT 6- MODERN ERA INTO A NEW MILLENNIUM A SEARCH FOR ORDERA CONSERVATIVE ERAINTO THE 21ST CENTURY ................
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