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Purpose: The purpose of this assignment is to analyze the Populist platform as a reform agenda and ascertain when some of its proposals were later adopted (at the state or national level). Doing so will help you practice skills that are essential to your success in this course and in professional life beyond school, such as chronological reasoning and contextualization. You will also become more knowledgeable about Populism as a reform movement and how reform movements create change. Task: · First, skim the · Second, find in the document the following elements of the Populist platform, and note their location in the platform (e.g., “Transportation”): · Graduated income tax · Guarantee of safe deposit of money in banks. · Adoption of secret ballot. · Initiative and referendum. · Limit President to one term · Direct election of Senators to U.S. Congress · Immigration restriction · Public ownership of railroads, telephone, telegraph. · Third, using an internet search, identify when and where these proposals were adopted in American history. Some were adopted at the national level; some were adopted by some but not all states. · Remember, · Fourth, create a timeline illustrating when and where these proposals were adopted. You can use · the location of the idea in the Omaha Platform (e.g., Finance, #3; or Expression of Sentiments #4) and · where and when it was adopted (e.g., 20th Constitutional Amendment; or Wisconsin state government). · If you used a free timeline maker, copy the URL or a screenshot of your timeline into a Word document. Post your timeline document to the assignment dropbox. File submissions: Please submit your file as a DOC.X with a link and/or a screenshot of your timeline. Criteria: You will be successful in this assignment if you: 1. successfully identify where these ideas are expressed in the Omaha Platform; 2. explain the importance of the 8 points of the Omaha Platform; 3. include the location in the platform for all 8 items in your timeline; 4. successfully identify when and where these proposals were adopted in American history; and 5. create a timeline showing when and where these proposals were adopted in American history. This activity may use a different grading rubric than what was used in past activities. Be sure to check the grading rubric before starting. |
Inman Park, Atlanta.html
Characters and Key Terms for Urbanization Growing Pains.html
Unit 1: Reconstruction
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Characters and Key Terms for Growing Pains of Urbanization
Characters
Keep this list of major characters in mind in order to follow the action more easily. Click on each person or Key Term to see his/her/its corresponding description and/or definition. You can also click the “Show All” button to expand all characters and descriptions at once. Jacob Riis, a poor Danish immigrant, arrived in the U.S. in 1870 at age 21. After a period of dire economic circumstances, he became a reporter in New York City. Frustrated by his inability to reach people through words, he turned to photography to convey the poverty and crime faced by the urban poor. How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890) was an effective piece of progressive “muckraking” and an early example of photojournalism. Jane Addams, founder of Hull House in Chicago in 1889, was the best-known figure in the American settlement house movement (see below). She also advocated for woman suffrage and supported the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. Kate Chopin was a realist writer whose attention to women’s issues drew contemporary criticism. Her proto-feminist work, The Awakening (1899), focuses on a woman’s struggles with marriage and sexual desire. Edward Bellamy, in response to the plight of the urban poor, wrote the best-selling Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) with a vision of a utopian socialist future, in which a strong, central entity guided production and distribution of goods. All workers and professions were valued. Hugely popular, the books spawned dozens of “Bellamy” or “Nationalist” clubs. Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879) criticized wealth inequality and proposed a “single land tax” as a solution. In this arrangement, the government would receive all rent from land (but not its improvements). Without wealth through landownership, wealth inequality would decrease. Thorstein Veblen, economist and sociologist, criticized the growing gap between the rich and the poor in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Coining the phrase “conspicuous consumption,” Veblen called out the banal materialism of the wealthy as well as their exploitation of the working classes.
Key Terms
The electric elevator and technological advancements in steel allowed cities to be built upward as they became more crowded. Louis Sullivan and the Chicago school of architecture paved the way, but New York took the lead after the mid-1890s. Andrew Carnegie’s adaption of social Darwinism. He celebrated competition, but argued that the most successful in society should live modest lives and use their wealth for the broader good. Because the wealthy were the “fittest,” they could use their money and power to bring order to the chaos of rapid industrialization. a progressive-era reform movement focused on bettering the lives of the urban poor, especially immigrants. Practitioners tended to be middle-class, white women who focused on health, hygiene, and cultural education in crowded immigrant neighborhoods. the first mass movement, ca. 1916 to 1930, of African Americans out of the rural South to the urban Northeast. Pushed by racism, violence, and poverty, they were also pulled by the promise of better jobs and housing. Redlining was an illegal practice in which banks and insurance companies refused to offer or insure home mortgages in certain areas, thereby maintaining segregation in the suburbs and reducing opportunities for black homeownership. Ellis Island opened in 1892 and became the busiest entry point for immigration into the U.S. It was the first federal immigration station and processed over 12 million immigrants before it closed in 1954. established in 1887 by Protestants, was one of many nativist groups of the era that worried that the new waves of non-protestant, namely Catholic and Jewish, immigrants coming from eastern and southern Europe would not assimilate into American society and thus degrade it. Tammany Hall of New York City was the most famous nineteenth-century political machine. Run by Boss William Tweed in the 1860s, Tammany’s corruption was legendary. As cities grew, local government expanded in power and numbers. Traditional elites bowed out of local politics, replaced by city bosses. Although built on corruption and graft, political machines provided needed social services for the urban poor, including immigrants.Coney Island, accessible by a short train ride from New York City, housed amusement parks, an example of new industrialized forms of entertainment that reflected or mimicked industrial society. It showed the growing specialization and centralization of entertainments and provided an outlet for millions of workers and their families who were crammed into the crowded streets and tenements of Manhattan. Social Register began publication in 1887. In an era in which lots of “new money” was being made in a dynamic industrial society, the Social Register validated those who, according to elites, truly belonged to the upper echelons of society. This typically excluded the newly rich and Jews.Ladies Home Journal, first published in 1883, was one of several new magazines targeting middle-class women. Under separate-sphere ideology, women’s roles were confined to the home, but rising wealth put pressure on women to present perfect homes and exert proper moral and spiritual influence on their families.Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890: granted land (and later cash) to states to facilitate public higher education. The goal was to broaden educational opportunities and foster technical and scientific expertise. The 1890 amendments targeted southern states and required them to show non-discrimination based on race or establish separate land-grant institutions for people of color.a response to health and pollution issues of urban industrialization in the late nineteenth century. Reformers advocated for more and better urban park spaces. Although Charles Darwin intended his theories to be applied solely to plants and animals, English philosopher Herbert Spencer applied them to human society. Spencer believed human progress resulted from relentless competition, and any interference in economic structures – including aid to the poor – would slow positive social evolution.Instrumentalism, championed by educational philosophy John Dewey, held that the value of scientific and philosophical theories was measured by the degree to which they helped solve real-world problems. best expressed in the U.S. through literary works, held that natural laws guided human society, just as they guided nature. One of the best-known examples of American literary naturalism is Jack London’s Call of the Wild (1903).An artistic and intellectual rebellion against the prevailing idealism of the nineteenth-century middle and upper classes. Realism focused on the details of everyday life, no matter how difficult or distasteful. It embraced representation of social problems previously snubbed by middle- and upper-class patrons.
Guided Reading Questions for The Growing Pains of Urbanization, 1870-1900.html
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Guided Reading Questions for Chapter 19: The Growing Pains of Urbanization
Guided Reading Questions
As you read through Chapter 19, use the following questions to guide your studies and prepare you for the Discussions and Quiz.
Describe how changes in transportation and communication affected urban growth.
How did progressive reformers respond to the challenges of urbanization?
What push and pull factors encouraged the Great Migration?
How and why did immigration to the U.S. change after 1880? What changes and problems emerged as a result of this immigration?
Describe developments in the era’s urban popular culture.
How did members of the upper class distinguish themselves from the growing middle class?
How did roles of middle-class women change in this period?
Describe the changes in American intellectual life around the turn of the twentieth century.
Easy Preparation and Additional Media
CHAPTER 19
The Growing Pains of Urbanization,
1870-1900
Figure 19.1 For the millions of immigrants arriving by ship in New York City’s harbor, the sight of the Statue of
Liberty, as in Unveiling the Statue of Liberty (1886) by Edward Moran, stood as a physical representation of the new
freedoms and economic opportunities they hoped to find.
Chapter Outline
19.1 Urbanization and Its Challenges
19.2 The African American “Great Migration” and New European
Immigration
19.3 Relief from the Chaos of Urban Life
19.4 Change Reflected in Thought and Writing
Introduction
“We saw the big woman with spikes on her head.” So begins Sadie Frowne’s first memory of arriving in
the United States. Many Americans experienced in their new home what the thirteen-year-old Polish girl
had seen in the silhouette of the Statue of Liberty (Figure 19.1): a wondrous world of new opportunities
fraught with dangers. Sadie and her mother, for instance, had left Poland after her father’s death. Her
mother died shortly thereafter, and Sadie had to find her own way in New York, working in factories and
slowly assimilating to life in a vast multinational metropolis. Her story is similar to millions of others, as
people came to the United States seeking a better future than the one they had at home.
The future they found, however, was often grim. While many believed in the land of opportunity,
the reality of urban life in the United States was more chaotic and difficult than people expected. In
addition to the challenges of language, class, race, and ethnicity, these new arrivals dealt with low wages,
overcrowded buildings, poor sanitation, and widespread disease. The land of opportunity, it seemed, did
not always deliver on its promises.
Chapter 19 | The Growing Pains of Urbanization, 1870-1900 539
19.1 Urbanization and Its Challenges
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
• Explain the growth of American cities in
the late nineteenth century
• Identify the key challenges that Americans faced due to urbanization, as well as some
of the possible solutions to those challenges
Urbanization occurred rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century in the United States for a
number of reasons. The new technologies of the time led to a massive leap in industrialization, requiring
large numbers of workers. New electric lights and powerful machinery allowed factories to run twenty-
four hours a day, seven days a week. Workers were forced into grueling twelve-hour shifts, requiring them
to live close to the factories.
While the work was dangerous and difficult, many Americans were willing to leave behind the declining
prospects of preindustrial agriculture in the hope of better wages in industrial labor. Furthermore,
problems ranging from famine to religious persecution led a new wave of immigrants to arrive from
central, eastern, and southern Europe, many of whom settled and found work near the cities where they
first arrived. Immigrants sought solace and comfort among others who shared the same language and
customs, and the nation’s cities became an invaluable economic and cultural resource.
Although cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York sprang up from the initial days of colonial
settlement, the explosion in urban population growth did not occur until the mid-nineteenth century
(Figure 19.3). At this time, the attractions of city life, and in particular, employment opportunities,
grew exponentially due to rapid changes in industrialization. Before the mid-1800s, factories, such as the
early textile mills, had to be located near rivers and seaports, both for the transport of goods and the
necessary water power. Production became dependent upon seasonal water flow, with cold, icy winters
all but stopping river transportation entirely. The development of the steam engine transformed this need,
allowing businesses to locate their factories near urban centers. These factories encouraged more and more
people to move to urban areas where jobs were plentiful, but hourly wages were often low and the work
Figure 19.2
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was routine and grindingly monotonous.
Figure 19.3 As these panels illustrate, the population of the United States grew rapidly in the late 1800s (a). Much of
this new growth took place in urban areas (defined by the census as twenty-five hundred people or more), and this
urban population, particularly that of major cities (b), dealt with challenges and opportunities that were unknown in
previous generations.
Eventually, cities developed their own unique characters based on the core industry that spurred their
growth. In Pittsburgh, it was steel; in Chicago, it was meat packing; in New York, the garment and
financial industries dominated; and Detroit, by the mid-twentieth century, was defined by the automobiles
it built. But all cities at this time, regardless of their industry, suffered from the universal problems that
rapid expansion brought with it, including concerns over housing and living conditions, transportation,
and communication. These issues were almost always rooted in deep class inequalities, shaped by racial
divisions, religious differences, and ethnic strife, and distorted by corrupt local politics.
This 1884 Bureau of Labor Statistics report (http://openstaxcollege.org/l/
clothingfact) from Boston looks in detail at the wages, living conditions, and moral
code of the girls who worked in the clothing factories there.
THE KEYS TO SUCCESSFUL URBANIZATION
As the country grew, certain elements led some towns to morph into large urban centers, while others
did not. The following four innovations proved critical in shaping urbanization at the turn of the century:
electric lighting, communication improvements, intracity transportation, and the rise of skyscrapers. As
people migrated for the new jobs, they often struggled with the absence of basic urban infrastructures,
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http://openstaxcollege.org/l/clothingfact
such as better transportation, adequate housing, means of communication, and efficient sources of light
and energy. Even the basic necessities, such as fresh water and proper sanitation—often taken for granted
in the countryside—presented a greater challenge in urban life.
Electric Lighting
Thomas Edison patented the incandescent light bulb in 1879. This development quickly became common
in homes as well as factories, transforming how even lower- and middle-class Americans lived. Although
slow to arrive in rural areas of the country, electric power became readily available in cities when the
first commercial power plants began to open in 1882. When Nikola Tesla subsequently developed the AC
(alternating current) system for the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, power supplies for
lights and other factory equipment could extend for miles from the power source. AC power transformed
the use of electricity, allowing urban centers to physically cover greater areas. In the factories, electric
lights permitted operations to run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. This increase in production
required additional workers, and this demand brought more people to cities.
Gradually, cities began to illuminate the streets with electric lamps to allow the city to remain alight
throughout the night. No longer did the pace of life and economic activity slow substantially at sunset, the
way it had in smaller towns. The cities, following the factories that drew people there, stayed open all the
time.
Communications Improvements
The telephone, patented in 1876, greatly transformed communication both regionally and nationally. The
telephone rapidly supplanted the telegraph as the preferred form of communication; by 1900, over 1.5
million telephones were in use around the nation, whether as private lines in the homes of some middle-
and upper-class Americans, or as jointly used “party lines” in many rural areas. By allowing instant
communication over larger distances at any given time, growing telephone networks made urban sprawl
possible.
In the same way that electric lights spurred greater factory production and economic growth, the telephone
increased business through the more rapid pace of demand. Now, orders could come constantly via
telephone, rather than via mail-order. More orders generated greater production, which in turn required
still more workers. This demand for additional labor played a key role in urban growth, as expanding
companies sought workers to handle the increasing consumer demand for their products.
Intracity Transportation
As cities grew and sprawled outward, a major challenge was efficient travel within the city—from home
to factories or shops, and then back again. Most transportation infrastructure was used to connect cities to
each other, typically by rail or canal. Prior to the 1880s, the most common form of transportation within
cities was the omnibus. This was a large, horse-drawn carriage, often placed on iron or steel tracks to
provide a smoother ride. While omnibuses worked adequately in smaller, less congested cities, they were
not equipped to handle the larger crowds that developed at the close of the century. The horses had to stop
and rest, and horse manure became an ongoing problem.
In 1887, Frank Sprague invented the electric trolley, which worked along the same concept as the omnibus,
with a large wagon on tracks, but was powered by electricity rather than horses. The electric trolley
could run throughout the day and night, like the factories and the workers who fueled them. But it also
modernized less important industrial centers, such as the southern city of Richmond, Virginia. As early as
1873, San Francisco engineers adopted pulley technology from the mining industry to introduce cable cars
and turn the city’s steep hills into elegant middle-class communities. However, as crowds continued to
grow in the largest cities, such as Chicago and New York, trolleys were unable to move efficiently through
the crowds of pedestrians (Figure 19.4). To avoid this challenge, city planners elevated the trolley lines
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above the streets, creating elevated trains, or L-trains, as early as 1868 in New York City, and quickly
spreading to Boston in 1887 and Chicago in 1892. Finally, as skyscrapers began to dominate the air,
transportation evolved one step further to move underground as subways. Boston’s subway system began
operating in 1897, and was quickly followed by New York and other cities.
Figure 19.4 Although trolleys were far more efficient than horse-drawn carriages, populous cities such as New York
experienced frequent accidents, as depicted in this 1895 illustration from Leslie’s Weekly (a). To avoid overcrowded
streets, trolleys soon went underground, as at the Public Gardens Portal in Boston (b), where three different lines met
to enter the Tremont Street Subway, the oldest subway tunnel in the United States, opening on September 1, 1897.
The Rise of Skyscrapers
The last limitation that large cities had to overcome was the ever-increasing need for space. Eastern cities,
unlike their midwestern counterparts, could not continue to grow outward, as the land surrounding them
was already settled. Geographic limitations such as rivers or the coast also hampered sprawl. And in all
cities, citizens needed to be close enough to urban centers to conveniently access work, shops, and other
core institutions of urban life. The increasing cost of real estate made upward growth attractive, and so
did the prestige that towering buildings carried for the businesses that occupied them. Workers completed
the first skyscraper in Chicago, the ten-story Home Insurance Building, in 1885 (Figure 19.5). Although
engineers had the capability to go higher, thanks to new steel construction techniques, they required
another vital invention in order to make taller buildings viable: the elevator. In 1889, the Otis Elevator
Company, led by inventor James Otis, installed the first electric elevator. This began the skyscraper craze,
allowing developers in eastern cities to build and market prestigious real estate in the hearts of crowded
eastern metropoles.
Chapter 19 | The Growing Pains of Urbanization, 1870-1900 543
Figure 19.5 While the technology existed to engineer tall buildings, it was not until the invention of the electric
elevator in 1889 that skyscrapers began to take over the urban landscape. Shown here is the Home Insurance
Building in Chicago, considered the first modern skyscraper.
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DEFINING “AMERICAN”
Jacob Riis and the Window into “How the Other Half Lives”
Jacob Riis was a Danish immigrant who moved to New York in the late nineteenth century and, after
experiencing poverty and joblessness first-hand, ultimately built a career as a police reporter. In the
course of his work, he spent much of his time in the slums and tenements of New York’s working poor.
Appalled by what he found there, Riis began documenting these scenes of squalor and sharing them
through lectures and ultimately through the publication of his book, How the Other Half Lives, in 1890
(Figure 19.6).
Figure 19.6 In photographs such as Bandit’s Roost (1888), taken on Mulberry Street in the infamous
Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Jacob Riis documented the plight of New
York City slums in the late nineteenth century.
By most contemporary accounts, Riis was an effective storyteller, using drama and racial stereotypes
to tell his stories of the ethnic slums he encountered. But while his racial thinking was very much a
product of his time, he was also a reformer; he felt strongly that upper and middle-class Americans could
and should care about the living conditions of the poor. In his book and lectures, he argued against the
immoral landlords and useless laws that allowed dangerous living conditions and high rents. He also
suggested remodeling existing tenements or building new ones. He was not alone in his concern for the
plight of the poor; other reporters and activists had already brought the issue into the public eye, and
Riis’s photographs added a new element to the story.
To tell his stories, Riis used a series of deeply compelling photographs. Riis and his group of amateur
photographers moved through the various slums of New York, laboriously setting up their tripods and
explosive chemicals to create enough light to take the photographs. His photos and writings shocked
the public, made Riis a well-known figure both in his day and beyond, and eventually led to new state
legislation curbing abuses in tenements.
Chapter 19 | The Growing Pains of Urbanization, 1870-1900 545
THE IMMEDIATE CHALLENGES OF URBAN LIFE
Congestion, pollution, crime, and disease were prevalent problems in all urban centers; city planners and
inhabitants alike sought new solutions to the problems caused by rapid urban growth. Living conditions
for most working-class urban dwellers were atrocious. They lived in crowded tenement houses and
cramped apartments with terrible ventilation and substandard plumbing and sanitation. As a result,
disease ran rampant, with typhoid and cholera common. Memphis, Tennessee, experienced waves of
cholera (1873) followed by yellow fever (1878 and 1879) that resulted in the loss of over ten thousand
lives. By the late 1880s, New York City, Baltimore, Chicago, and New Orleans had all introduced sewage
pumping systems to provide efficient waste management. Many cities were also serious fire hazards.
An average working-class family of six, with two adults and four children, had at best a two-bedroom
tenement. By one 1900 estimate, in the New York City borough of Manhattan alone, there were nearly fifty
thousand tenement houses. The photographs of these tenement houses are seen in Jacob Riis’s book, How
the Other Half Lives, discussed in the feature above. Citing a study by the New York State Assembly at
this time, Riis found New York to be the most densely populated city in the world, with as many as eight
hundred residents per square acre in the Lower East Side working-class slums, comprising the Eleventh
and Thirteenth Wards.
Visit New York City, Tenement Life (http://openstaxcollege.org/l/tenement) to get
an impression of the everyday life of tenement dwellers on Manhattan’s Lower East
Side.
Churches and civic organizations provided some relief to the challenges of working-class city life.
Churches were moved to intervene through their belief in the concept of the social gospel. This philosophy
stated that all Christians, whether they were church leaders or social reformers, should be as concerned
about the conditions of life in the secular world as the afterlife, and the Reverend Washington Gladden
was a major advocate. Rather than preaching sermons on heaven and hell, Gladden talked about social
changes of the time, urging other preachers to follow his lead. He advocated for improvements in daily
life and encouraged Americans of all classes to work together for the betterment of society. His sermons
included the message to “love thy neighbor” and held that all Americans had to work together to help the
masses. As a result of his influence, churches began to include gymnasiums and libraries as well as offer
evening classes on hygiene and health care. Other religious organizations like the Salvation Army and the
Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) expanded their reach in American cities at this time as well.
Beginning in the 1870s, these organizations began providing community services and other benefits to the
urban poor.
In the secular sphere, the settlement house movement of the 1890s provided additional relief. Pioneering
women such as Jane Addams in Chicago and Lillian Wald in New York led this early progressive reform
movement in the United States, building upon ideas originally fashioned by social reformers in England.
With no particular religious bent, they worked to create settlement houses in urban centers where they
could help the working class, and in particular, working-class women, find aid. Their help included child
daycare, evening classes, libraries, gym facilities, and free health care. Addams opened her now-famous
Hull House (Figure 19.7) in Chicago in 1889, and Wald’s Henry Street Settlement opened in New York six
years later. The movement spread quickly to other cities, where they not only provided relief to working-
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class women but also offered employment opportunities for women graduating college in the growing
field of social work. Oftentimes, living in the settlement houses among the women they helped, these
college graduates experienced the equivalent of living social classrooms in which to practice their skills,
which also frequently caused friction with immigrant women who had their own ideas of reform and self-
improvement.
Figure 19.7 Jane Addams opened Hull House in Chicago in 1889, offering services and support to the city’s working
poor.
The success of the settlement house movement later became the basis of a political agenda that included
pressure for housing laws, child labor laws, and worker’s compensation laws, among others. Florence
Kelley, who originally worked with Addams in Chicago, later joined Wald’s efforts in New York; together,
they created the National Child Labor Committee and advocated for the subsequent creation of the
Children’s Bureau in the U.S. Department of Labor in 1912. Julia Lathrop—herself a former resident of Hull
House—became the first woman to head a federal government agency, when President William Howard
Taft appointed her to run the bureau. Settlement house workers also became influential leaders in the
women’s suffrage movement as well as the antiwar movement during World War I.
Chapter 19 | The Growing Pains of Urbanization, 1870-1900 547
MY STORY
Jane Addams Reflects on the Settlement House Movement
Jane Addams was a social activist whose work took many forms. She is perhaps best known as the
founder of Hull House in Chicago, which later became a model for settlement houses throughout the
country. Here, she reflects on the role that the settlement played.
Life in the Settlement discovers above all what has been called ‘the extraordinary pliability
of human nature,’ and it seems impossible to set any bounds to the moral capabilities
which might unfold under ideal civic and educational conditions. But in order to obtain these
conditions, the Settlement recognizes the need of cooperation, both with the radical and the
conservative, and from the very nature of the case the Settlement cannot limit its friends to
any one political party or economic school.
The Settlement casts side none of those things which cultivated men have come to consider
reasonable and goodly, but it insists that those belong as well to that great body of people
who, because of toilsome and underpaid labor, are unable to procure them for themselves.
Added to this is a profound conviction that the common stock of intellectual enjoyment should
not be difficult of access because of the economic position of him who would approach it, that
those ‘best results of civilization’ upon which depend the finer and freer aspects of living must
be incorporated into our common life and have free mobility through all elements of society if
we would have our democracy endure.
The educational activities of a Settlement, as well its philanthropic, civic, and social
undertakings, are but differing manifestations of the attempt to socialize democracy, as is the
very existence of the Settlement itself.
In addition to her pioneering work in the settlement house movement, Addams also was active in the
women’s suffrage movement as well as an outspoken proponent for international peace efforts. She was
instrumental in the relief effort after World War I, a commitment that led to her winning the Nobel Peace
Prize in 1931.
19.2 The African American “Great Migration” and New European
Immigration
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
• Identify the factors that prompted African American and European immigration to
American cities in the late nineteenth century
• Explain the discrimination and anti-immigration legislation that immigrants faced in
the late nineteenth century
New cities were populated with diverse waves of new arrivals, who came to the cities to seek work in
the businesses and factories there. While a small percentage of these newcomers were white
Americans
seeking jobs, most were made up of two groups that had not previously been factors in the urbanization
movement: African Americans fleeing the racism of the farms and former plantations in the South, and
southern and eastern European immigrants. These new immigrants supplanted the previous waves of
northern and western European immigrants, who had tended to move west to purchase land. Unlike
their predecessors, the newer immigrants lacked the funds to strike out to the western lands and instead
remained in the urban centers where they arrived, seeking any work that would keep them alive.
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THE AFRICAN AMERICAN “GREAT MIGRATION”
Between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Great Depression, nearly two million African
Americans fled the rural South to seek new opportunities elsewhere. While some moved west, the vast
majority of this Great Migration, as the large exodus of African Americans leaving the South in the
early twentieth century was called, traveled to the Northeast and Upper Midwest. The following cities
were the primary destinations for these African Americans: New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis,
Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Indianapolis. These eight cities accounted for over two-thirds of the
total population of the African American migration.
A combination of both “push” and “pull” factors played a role in this movement. Despite the end of
the Civil War and the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S.
Constitution (ensuring freedom, the right to vote regardless of race, and equal protection under the law,
respectively), African Americans were still subjected to intense racial hatred. The rise of the Ku Klux
Klan in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War led to increased death threats, violence, and a wave
of lynchings. Even after the formal dismantling of the Klan in the late 1870s, racially motivated violence
continued. According to researchers at the Tuskegee Institute, there were thirty-five hundred racially
motivated lynchings and other murders committed in the South between 1865 and 1900. For African
Americans fleeing this culture of violence, northern and midwestern cities offered an opportunity to
escape the dangers of the South.
In addition to this “push” out of the South, African Americans were also “pulled” to the cities by factors
that attracted them, including job opportunities, where they could earn a wage rather than be tied to a
landlord, and the chance to vote (for men, at least), supposedly free from the threat of violence. Although
many lacked the funds to move themselves north, factory owners and other businesses that sought cheap
labor assisted the migration. Often, the men moved first then sent for their families once they were
ensconced in their new city life. Racism and a lack of formal education relegated these African American
workers to many of the lower-paying unskilled or semi-skilled occupations. More than 80 percent of
African American men worked menial jobs in steel mills, mines, construction, and meat packing. In the
railroad industry, they were often employed as porters or servants (Figure 19.8). In other businesses, they
worked as janitors, waiters, or cooks. African American women, who faced discrimination due to both
their race and gender, found a few job opportunities in the garment industry or laundries, but were more
often employed as maids and domestic servants. Regardless of the status of their jobs, however, African
Americans earned higher wages in the North than they did for the same occupations in the South, and
typically found housing to be more available.
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Figure 19.8 African American men who moved north as part of the Great Migration were often consigned to menial
employment, such as working in construction or as porters on the railways (a), such as in the celebrated Pullman
dining and sleeping cars (b).
However, such economic gains were offset by the higher cost of living in the North, especially in terms
of rent, food costs, and other essentials. As a result, African Americans often found themselves living
in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions, much like the tenement slums in which European immigrants
lived in the cities. For newly arrived African Americans, even those who sought out the cities for the
opportunities they provided, life in these urban centers was exceedingly difficult. They quickly learned
that racial discrimination did not end at the Mason-Dixon Line, but continued to flourish in the North as
well as the South. European immigrants, also seeking a better life in the cities of the United States, resented
the arrival of the African Americans, whom they feared would compete for the same jobs or offer to work
at lower wages. Landlords frequently discriminated against them; their rapid influx into the cities created
severe housing shortages and even more overcrowded tenements. Homeowners in traditionally white
neighborhoods later entered into covenants in which they agreed not to sell to African American buyers;
they also often fled neighborhoods into which African Americans had gained successful entry. In addition,
some bankers practiced mortgage discrimination, later known as “redlining,” in order to deny home loans
to qualified buyers. Such pervasive discrimination led to a concentration of African Americans in some of
the worst slum areas of most major metropolitan cities, a problem that remained ongoing throughout most
of the twentieth century.
So why move to the North, given that the economic challenges they faced were similar to those that
African Americans encountered in the South? The answer lies in noneconomic gains. Greater educational
opportunities and more expansive personal freedoms mattered greatly to the African Americans who
made the trek northward during the Great Migration. State legislatures and local school districts allocated
more funds for the education of both blacks and whites in the North, and also enforced compulsory
school attendance laws more rigorously. Similarly, unlike the South where a simple gesture (or lack of a
deferential one) could result in physical harm to the African American who committed it, life in larger,
crowded northern urban centers permitted a degree of anonymity—and with it, personal freedom—that
enabled African Americans to move, work, and speak without deferring to every white person with whom
they crossed paths. Psychologically, these gains more than offset the continued economic challenges that
black migrants faced.
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THE CHANGING NATURE OF EUROPEAN IMMIGRATION
Immigrants also shifted the demographics of the rapidly growing cities. Although immigration had always
been a force of change in the United States, it took on a new character in the late nineteenth century.
Beginning in the 1880s, the arrival of immigrants from mostly southern and eastern European countries
rapidly increased while the flow from northern and western Europe remained relatively constant (Table
19.1).
Table 19.1 Cumulative Total of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States,
1870–1910 (by major country of birth and European region)
Region Country 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910
Northern and Western Europe 4,845,679 5,499,889 7,288,917 7,204,649 7,306,325
Germany 1,690,533 1,966,742 2,784,894 2,663,418 2,311,237
Ireland 1,855,827 1,854,571 1,871,509 1,615,459 1,352,251
England 550,924 662,676 908,141 840,513 877,719
Sweden 97,332 194,337 478,041 582,014 665,207
Austria 30,508 38,663 123,271 275,907 626,341
Norway 114,246 181,729 322,665 336,388 403,877
Scotland 140,835 170,136 242,231 233,524 261,076
Southern and Eastern Europe 93,824 248,620 728,851 1,674,648 4,500,932
Italy 17,157 44,230 182,580 484,027 1,343,125
Russia 4,644 35,722 182,644 423,726 1,184,412
Poland 14,436 48,557 147,440 383,407 937,884
Hungary 3,737 11,526 62,435 145,714 495,609
Czechoslovakia 40,289 85,361 118,106 156,891 219,214
The previous waves of immigrants from northern and western Europe, particularly Germany, Great
Britain, and the Nordic countries, were relatively well off, arriving in the country with some funds and
often moving to the newly settled western territories. In contrast, the newer immigrants from southern and
eastern European countries, including Italy, Greece, and several Slavic countries including Russia, came
over due to “push” and “pull” factors similar to those that influenced the African Americans arriving from
the South. Many were “pushed” from their countries by a series of ongoing famines, by the need to escape
religious, political, or racial persecution, or by the desire to avoid compulsory military service. They were
also “pulled” by the promise of consistent, wage-earning work.
Whatever the reason, these immigrants arrived without the education and finances of the earlier waves
of immigrants, and settled more readily in the port towns where they arrived, rather than setting out to
seek their fortunes in the West. By 1890, over 80 percent of the population of New York would be either
foreign-born or children of foreign-born parentage. Other cities saw huge spikes in foreign populations as
well, though not to the same degree, due in large part to Ellis Island in New York City being the primary
port of entry for most European immigrants arriving in the United States.
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The number of immigrants peaked between 1900 and 1910, when over nine million people arrived in the
United States. To assist in the processing and management of this massive wave of immigrants, the Bureau
of Immigration in New York City, which had become the official port of entry, opened Ellis Island in 1892.
Today, nearly half of all Americans have ancestors who, at some point in time, entered the country through
the portal at Ellis Island. Doctors or nurses inspected the immigrants upon arrival, looking for any signs
of infectious diseases (Figure 19.9). Most immigrants were admitted to the country with only a cursory
glance at any other paperwork. Roughly 2 percent of the arriving immigrants were denied entry due to a
medical condition or criminal history. The rest would enter the country by way of the streets of New York,
many unable to speak English and totally reliant on finding those who spoke their native tongue.
Figure 19.9 This photo shows newly arrived immigrants at Ellis Island in New York. Inspectors are examining them
for contagious health problems, which could require them to be sent back. (credit: NIAID)
Seeking comfort in a strange land, as well as a common language, many immigrants sought out relatives,
friends, former neighbors, townspeople, and countrymen who had already settled in American cities. This
led to a rise in ethnic enclaves within the larger city. Little Italy, Chinatown, and many other communities
developed in which immigrant groups could find everything to remind them of home, from local language
newspapers to ethnic food stores. While these enclaves provided a sense of community to their members,
they added to the problems of urban congestion, particularly in the poorest slums where immigrants could
afford housing.
This Library of Congress exhibit on the history of Jewish immigration
(http://openstaxcollege.org/l/jewishimmig) to the United States illustrates the
ongoing challenge immigrants felt between the ties to their old land and a love for
America.
The demographic shift at the turn of the century was later confirmed by the Dillingham Commission,
created by Congress in 1907 to report on the nature of immigration in America; the commission reinforced
this ethnic identification of immigrants and their simultaneous discrimination. The report put it simply:
These newer immigrants looked and acted differently. They had darker skin tone, spoke languages with
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which most Americans were unfamiliar, and practiced unfamiliar religions, specifically Judaism and
Catholicism. Even the foods they sought out at butchers and grocery stores set immigrants apart. Because
of these easily identifiable differences, new immigrants became easy targets for hatred and discrimination.
If jobs were hard to find, or if housing was overcrowded, it became easy to blame the immigrants. Like
African Americans, immigrants in cities were blamed for the problems of the day.
Growing numbers of Americans resented the waves of new immigrants, resulting in a backlash. The
Reverend Josiah Strong fueled the hatred and discrimination in his bestselling book, Our Country: Its
Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, published in 1885. In a revised edition that reflected the 1890 census
records, he clearly identified undesirable immigrants—those from southern and eastern European
countries—as a key threat to the moral fiber of the country, and urged all good Americans to face the
challenge. Several thousand Americans answered his call by forming the American Protective Association,
the chief political activist group to promote legislation curbing immigration into the United States. The
group successfully lobbied Congress to adopt both an English language literacy test for immigrants, which
eventually passed in 1917, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (discussed in a previous chapter). The group’s
political lobbying also laid the groundwork for the subsequent Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the
Immigration Act of 1924, as well as the National Origins Act.
The global timeline of immigration (http://openstaxcollege.org/l/immig1) at the
Library of Congress offers a summary of immigration policies and the groups affected
by it, as well as a compelling overview of different ethnic groups’ immigration stories.
Browse through to see how different ethnic groups made their way in the United
States.
19.3 Relief from the Chaos of Urban Life
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
• Identify how each class of Americans—working class, middle class, and upper
class—responded to the challenges associated with urban life
• Explain the process of machine politics and how it brought relief to working-class
Americans
Settlement houses and religious and civic organizations attempted to provide some support to working-
class city dwellers through free health care, education, and leisure opportunities. Still, for urban citizens,
life in the city was chaotic and challenging. But how that chaos manifested and how relief was sought
differed greatly, depending on where people were in the social caste—the working class, the upper
class, or the newly emerging professional middle class—in addition to the aforementioned issues of
race and ethnicity. While many communities found life in the largest American cities disorganized and
overwhelming, the ways they answered these challenges were as diverse as the people who lived there.
Broad solutions emerged that were typically class specific: The rise of machine politics and popular culture
provided relief to the working class, higher education opportunities and suburbanization benefitted
the professional middle class, and reminders of their elite status gave comfort to the upper class. And
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everyone, no matter where they fell in the class system, benefited from the efforts to improve the physical
landscapes of the fast-growing urban environment.
THE LIFE AND STRUGGLES OF THE URBAN WORKING CLASS
For the working-class residents of America’s cities, one practical way of coping with the challenges of
urban life was to take advantage of the system of machine politics, while another was to seek relief in the
variety of popular culture and entertainment found in and around cities. Although neither of these forms
of relief was restricted to the working class, they were the ones who relied most heavily on them.
Machine Politics
The primary form of relief for working-class urban Americans, and particularly immigrants, came in the
form of machine politics. This phrase referred to the process by which every citizen of the city, no matter
their ethnicity or race, was a ward resident with an alderman who spoke on their behalf at city hall. When
everyday challenges arose, whether sanitation problems or the need for a sidewalk along a muddy road,
citizens would approach their alderman to find a solution. The aldermen knew that, rather than work
through the long bureaucratic process associated with city hall, they could work within the “machine” of
local politics to find a speedy, mutually beneficial solution. In machine politics, favors were exchanged for
votes, votes were given in exchange for fast solutions, and the price of the solutions included a kickback
to the boss. In the short term, everyone got what they needed, but the process was neither transparent nor
democratic, and it was an inefficient way of conducting the city’s business.
One example of a machine political system was the Democratic political machine Tammany Hall in New
York, run by machine boss William Tweed with assistance from George Washington Plunkitt (Figure
19.10). There, citizens knew their immediate problems would be addressed in return for their promise
of political support in future elections. In this way, machines provided timely solutions for citizens and
votes for the politicians. For example, if in Little Italy there was a desperate need for sidewalks in order
to improve traffic to the stores on a particular street, the request would likely get bogged down in the
bureaucratic red tape at city hall. Instead, store owners would approach the machine. A district captain
would approach the “boss” and make him aware of the problem. The boss would contact city politicians
and strongly urge them to appropriate the needed funds for the sidewalk in exchange for the promise that
the boss would direct votes in their favor in the upcoming election. The boss then used the funds to pay one
of his friends for the sidewalk construction, typically at an exorbitant cost, with a financial kickback to the
boss, which was known as graft. The sidewalk was built more quickly than anyone hoped, in exchange for
the citizens’ promises to vote for machine-supported candidates in the next elections. Despite its corrupt
nature, Tammany Hall essentially ran New York politics from the 1850s until the 1930s. Other large cities,
including Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Kansas City, made use of political machines as
well.
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Figure 19.10 This political cartoon depicts the control of Boss Tweed, of Tammany Hall, over the election process in
New York. Why were people willing to accept the corruption involved in machine politics?
Popular Culture and Entertainment
Working-class residents also found relief in the diverse and omnipresent offerings of popular culture
and entertainment in and around cities. These offerings provided an immediate escape from the squalor
and difficulties of everyday life. As improved means of internal transportation developed, working-class
residents could escape the city and experience one of the popular new forms of entertainment—the
amusement park. For example, Coney Island on the Brooklyn shoreline consisted of several different
amusement parks, the first of which opened in 1895 (Figure 19.11). At these parks, New Yorkers enjoyed
wild rides, animal attractions, and large stage productions designed to help them forget the struggles of
their working-day lives. Freak “side” shows fed the public’s curiosity about physical deviance. For a mere
ten cents, spectators could watch a high-diving horse, take a ride to the moon to watch moon maidens eat
green cheese, or witness the electrocution of an elephant, a spectacle that fascinated the public both with
technological marvels and exotic wildlife. The treatment of animals in many acts at Coney Island and other
public amusement parks drew the attention of middle-class reformers such as the American Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Despite questions regarding the propriety of many of the acts, other
cities quickly followed New York’s lead with similar, if smaller, versions of Coney Island’s attractions.
Chapter 19 | The Growing Pains of Urbanization, 1870-1900 555
Figure 19.11 The Dreamland Amusement Park tower was just one of Coney Island’s amusements.
The Coney Island History Project (http://www.coneyislandhistory.org/collection)
shows a photographic history of Coney Island. Look to see what elements of American
culture, from the hot dog to the roller coaster, debuted there.
Another common form of popular entertainment was vaudeville—large stage variety shows that included
everything from singing, dancing, and comedy acts to live animals and magic. The vaudeville circuit
gave rise to several prominent performers, including magician Harry Houdini, who began his career in
these variety shows before his fame propelled him to solo acts. In addition to live theater shows, it was
primarily working-class citizens who enjoyed the advent of the nickelodeon, a forerunner to the movie
theater. The first nickelodeon opened in Pittsburgh in 1905, where nearly one hundred visitors packed into
a storefront theater to see a traditional vaudeville show interspersed with one-minute film clips. Several
theaters initially used the films as “chasers” to indicate the end of the show to the live audience so they
would clear the auditorium. However, a vaudeville performers’ strike generated even greater interest in
the films, eventually resulting in the rise of modern movie theaters by 1910.
One other major form of entertainment for the working class was professional baseball (Figure 19.12).
Club teams transformed into professional baseball teams with the Cincinnati Red Stockings, now the
Cincinnati Reds, in 1869. Soon, professional teams sprang up in several major American cities. Baseball
games provided an inexpensive form of entertainment, where for less than a dollar, a person could
enjoy a double-header, two hot dogs, and a beer. But more importantly, the teams became a way for
newly relocated Americans and immigrants of diverse backgrounds to develop a unified civic identity, all
cheering for one team. By 1876, the National League had formed, and soon after, cathedral-style ballparks
began to spring up in many cities. Fenway Park in Boston (1912), Forbes Field in Pittsburgh (1909), and the
Polo Grounds in New York (1890) all became touch points where working-class Americans came together
to support a common cause.
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Figure 19.12 Boston’s Fenway Park opened in 1912 and was a popular site for working-class Bostonians to spend
their leisure time. The “Green Monster,” the iconic, left field wall, makes it one of the most recognizable stadiums in
baseball today.
Other popular sports included prize-fighting, which attracted a predominantly male, working- and
middle-class audience who lived vicariously through the triumphs of the boxers during a time where
opportunities for individual success were rapidly shrinking, and college football, which paralleled a
modern corporation in its team hierarchy, divisions of duties, and emphasis on time management.
THE UPPER CLASS IN THE CITIES
The American financial elite did not need to crowd into cities to find work, like their working-class
counterparts. But as urban centers were vital business cores, where multi-million-dollar financial deals
were made daily, those who worked in that world wished to remain close to the action. The rich chose to
be in the midst of the chaos of the cities, but they were also able to provide significant measures of comfort,
convenience, and luxury for themselves.
Wealthy citizens seldom attended what they considered the crass entertainment of the working class.
Instead of amusement parks and baseball games, urban elites sought out more refined pastimes that
underscored their knowledge of art and culture, preferring classical music concerts, fine art collections,
and social gatherings with their peers. In New York, Andrew Carnegie built Carnegie Hall in 1891,
which quickly became the center of classical music performances in the country. Nearby, the Metropolitan
Museum of Art opened its doors in 1872 and still remains one of the largest collections of fine art in the
world. Other cities followed suit, and these cultural pursuits became a way for the upper class to remind
themselves of their elevated place amid urban squalor.
As new opportunities for the middle class threatened the austerity of upper-class citizens, including the
newer forms of transportation that allowed middle-class Americans to travel with greater ease, wealthier
Americans sought unique ways to further set themselves apart in society. These included more expensive
excursions, such as vacations in Newport, Rhode Island, winter relocation to sunny Florida, and frequent
trips aboard steamships to Europe. For those who were not of the highly respected “old money,” but only
recently obtained their riches through business ventures, the relief they sought came in the form of one
book—the annual Social Register. First published in 1886 by Louis Keller in New York City, the register
became a directory of the wealthy socialites who populated the city. Keller updated it annually, and people
would watch with varying degrees of anxiety or complacency to see their names appear in print. Also
called the Blue Book, the register was instrumental in the planning of society dinners, balls, and other
social events. For those of newer wealth, there was relief found simply in the notion that they and others
witnessed their wealth through the publication of their names in the register.
A NEW MIDDLE CLASS
While the working class were confined to tenement houses in the cities by their need to be close to their
work and the lack of funds to find anyplace better, and the wealthy class chose to remain in the cities
to stay close to the action of big business transactions, the emerging middle class responded to urban
Chapter 19 | The Growing Pains of Urbanization, 1870-1900 557
challenges with their own solutions. This group included the managers, salesmen, engineers, doctors,
accountants, and other salaried professionals who still worked for a living, but were significantly better
educated and compensated than the working-class poor. For this new middle class, relief from the trials of
the cities came through education and suburbanization.
In large part, the middle class responded to the challenges of the city by physically escaping it. As
transportation improved and outlying communities connected to urban centers, the middle class embraced
a new type of community—the suburbs. It became possible for those with adequate means to work in the
city and escape each evening, by way of a train or trolley, to a house in the suburbs. As the number of
people moving to the suburbs grew, there also grew a perception among the middle class that the farther
one lived from the city and the more amenities one had, the more affluence one had achieved.
Although a few suburbs existed in the United States prior to the 1880s (such as Llewellyn Park, New
Jersey), the introduction of the electric railway generated greater interest and growth during the last
decade of the century. The ability to travel from home to work on a relatively quick and cheap mode of
transportation encouraged more Americans of modest means to consider living away from the chaos of
the city. Eventually, Henry Ford’s popularization of the automobile, specifically in terms of a lower price,
permitted more families to own cars and thus consider suburban life. Later in the twentieth century, both
the advent of the interstate highway system, along with federal legislation designed to allow families to
construct homes with low-interest loans, further sparked the suburban phenomenon.
New Roles for Middle-Class Women
Social norms of the day encouraged middle-class women to take great pride in creating a positive home
environment for their working husbands and school-age children, which reinforced the business and
educational principles that they practiced on the job or in school. It was at this time that the magazines
Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping began distribution, to tremendous popularity (Figure 19.13).
Figure 19.13 The middle-class family of the late nineteenth century largely embraced a separation of gendered
spheres that had first emerged during the market revolution of the antebellum years. Whereas the husband earned
money for the family outside the home, the wife oversaw domestic chores, raised the children, and tended to the
family’s spiritual, social, and cultural needs. The magazine Good Housekeeping, launched in 1885, capitalized on the
middle-class woman’s focus on maintaining a pride-worthy home.
While the vast majority of middle-class women took on the expected role of housewife and homemaker,
some women were finding paths to college. A small number of men’s colleges began to open their doors to
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women in the mid-1800s, and co-education became an option. Some of the most elite universities created
affiliated women’s colleges, such as Radcliffe College with Harvard, and Pembroke College with Brown
University. But more importantly, the first women’s colleges opened at this time. Mount Holyoke, Vassar,
Smith, and Wellesley Colleges, still some of the best known women’s schools, opened their doors between
1865 and 1880, and, although enrollment was low (initial class sizes ranged from sixty-one students at
Vassar to seventy at Wellesley, seventy-one at Smith, and up to eighty-eight at Mount Holyoke), the
opportunity for a higher education, and even a career, began to emerge for young women. These schools
offered a unique, all-women environment in which professors and a community of education-seeking
young women came together. While most college-educated young women still married, their education
offered them new opportunities to work outside the home, most frequently as teachers, professors, or in
the aforementioned settlement house environments created by Jane Addams and others.
Education and the Middle Class
Since the children of the professional class did not have to leave school and find work to support their
families, they had opportunities for education and advancement that would solidify their position in
the middle class. They also benefited from the presence of stay-at-home mothers, unlike working-class
children, whose mothers typically worked the same long hours as their fathers. Public school enrollment
exploded at this time, with the number of students attending public school tripling from seven million in
1870 to twenty-one million in 1920. Unlike the old-fashioned one-room schoolhouses, larger schools slowly
began the practice of employing different teachers for each grade, and some even began hiring discipline-
specific instructors. High schools also grew at this time, from one hundred high schools nationally in 1860
to over six thousand by 1900.
The federal government supported the growth of higher education with the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890.
These laws set aside public land and federal funds to create land-grant colleges that were affordable to
middle-class families, offering courses and degrees useful in the professions, but also in trade, commerce,
industry, and agriculture (Figure 19.14). Land-grant colleges stood in contrast to the expensive, private
Ivy League universities such as Harvard and Yale, which still catered to the elite. Iowa became the first
state to accept the provisions of the original Morrill Act, creating what later became Iowa State University.
Other states soon followed suit, and the availability of an affordable college education encouraged a boost
in enrollment, from 50,000 students nationwide in 1870 to over 600,000 students by 1920.
Figure 19.14 This rendering of Kansas State University in 1878 shows an early land-grant college, created by the
Morrill Act. These newly created schools allowed many more students to attend college than the elite Ivy League
system, and focused more on preparing them for professional careers in business, medicine, and law, as well as
business, agriculture, and other trades.
College curricula also changed at this time. Students grew less likely to take traditional liberal arts
classes in rhetoric, philosophy, and foreign language, and instead focused on preparing for the modern
work world. Professional schools for the study of medicine, law, and business also developed. In short,
Chapter 19 | The Growing Pains of Urbanization, 1870-1900 559
education for the children of middle-class parents catered to class-specific interests and helped ensure that
parents could establish their children comfortably in the middle class as well.
“CITY BEAUTIFUL”
While the working poor lived in the worst of it and the wealthy elite sought to avoid it, all city dwellers
at the time had to deal with the harsh realities of urban sprawl. Skyscrapers rose and filled the air, streets
were crowded with pedestrians of all sorts, and, as developers worked to meet the always-increasing
demand for space, the few remaining green spaces in the city quickly disappeared. As the U.S. population
became increasingly centered in urban areas while the century drew to a close, questions about the
quality of city life—particularly with regard to issues of aesthetics, crime, and poverty—quickly consumed
many reformers’ minds. Those middle-class and wealthier urbanites who enjoyed the costlier amenities
presented by city life—including theaters, restaurants, and shopping—were free to escape to the suburbs,
leaving behind the poorer working classes living in squalor and unsanitary conditions. Through the City
Beautiful movement, leaders such as Frederick Law Olmsted and Daniel Burnham sought to champion
middle- and upper-class progressive reforms. They improved the quality of life for city dwellers, but also
cultivated middle-class-dominated urban spaces in which Americans of different ethnicities, racial origins,
and classes worked and lived.
Olmsted, one of the earliest and most influential designers of urban green space, and the original designer
of Central Park in New York, worked with Burnham to introduce the idea of the City Beautiful movement
at the Columbian Exposition in 1893. There, they helped to design and construct the “White City”—so
named for the plaster of Paris construction of several buildings that were subsequently painted a bright
white—an example of landscaping and architecture that shone as an example of perfect city planning.
From wide-open green spaces to brightly painted white buildings, connected with modern transportation
services and appropriate sanitation, the “White City” set the stage for American urban city planning for
the next generation, beginning in 1901 with the modernization of Washington, DC. This model encouraged
city planners to consider three principal tenets: First, create larger park areas inside cities; second, build
wider boulevards to decrease traffic congestion and allow for lines of trees and other greenery between
lanes; and third, add more suburbs in order to mitigate congested living in the city itself (Figure 19.15).
As each city adapted these principles in various ways, the City Beautiful movement became a cornerstone
of urban development well into the twentieth century.
Figure 19.15 This blueprint shows Burnham’s vision for Chicago, an example of the City Beautiful movement. His
goal was to preserve much of the green space along the city’s lakefront, and to ensure that all city dwellers had
access to green space.
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19.4 Change Reflected in Thought and Writing
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
• Explain how American writers, both fiction and nonfiction, helped Americans to better
understand the changes they faced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
• Identify some of the influential women and African American writers of the era
In the late nineteenth century, Americans were living in a world characterized by rapid change. Western
expansion, dramatic new technologies, and the rise of big business drastically influenced society in a
matter of a few decades. For those living in the fast-growing urban areas, the pace of change was even
faster and harder to ignore. One result of this time of transformation was the emergence of a series
of notable authors, who, whether writing fiction or nonfiction, offered a lens through which to better
understand the shifts in American society.
UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL PROGRESS
One key idea of the nineteenth century that moved from the realm of science to the murkier ground of
social and economic success was Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin was a British naturalist
who, in his 1859 work On the Origin of Species, made the case that species develop and evolve through
natural selection, not through divine intervention. The idea quickly drew fire from the Anglican Church
(although a liberal branch of Anglicans embraced the notion of natural selection being part of God’s plan)
and later from many others, both in England and abroad, who felt that the theory directly contradicted the
role of God in the earth’s creation. Although biologists, botanists, and most of the scientific establishment
widely accepted the theory of evolution at the time of Darwin’s publication, which they felt synthesized
much of the previous work in the field, the theory remained controversial in the public realm for decades.
Political philosopher Herbert Spencer took Darwin’s theory of evolution further, coining the actual phrase
“survival of the fittest,” and later helping to popularize the phrase social Darwinism to posit that society
evolved much like a natural organism, wherein some individuals will succeed due to racially and
ethnically inherent traits, and their ability to adapt. This model allowed that a collection of traits and
skills, which could include intelligence, inherited wealth, and so on, mixed with the ability to adapt, would
let all Americans rise or fall of their own accord, so long as the road to success was accessible to all.
William Graham Sumner, a sociologist at Yale, became the most vocal proponent of social Darwinism.
Not surprisingly, this ideology, which Darwin himself would have rejected as a gross misreading of his
scientific discoveries, drew great praise from those who made their wealth at this time. They saw their
success as proof of biological fitness, although critics of this theory were quick to point out that those who
did not succeed often did not have the same opportunities or equal playing field that the ideology of social
Darwinism purported. Eventually, the concept fell into disrepute in the 1930s and 1940s, as eugenicists
began to utilize it in conjunction with their racial theories of genetic superiority.
Other thinkers of the day took Charles Darwin’s theories in a more nuanced direction, focusing on
different theories of realism that sought to understand the truth underlying the changes in the United
States. These thinkers believed that ideas and social constructs must be proven to work before they could
be accepted. Philosopher William James was one of the key proponents of the closely related concept
of pragmatism, which held that Americans needed to experiment with different ideas and perspectives
to find the truth about American society, rather than assuming that there was truth in old, previously
accepted models. Only by tying ideas, thoughts, and statements to actual objects and occurrences could
one begin to identify a coherent truth, according to James. His work strongly influenced the subsequent
avant-garde and modernist movements in literature and art, especially in understanding the role of the
observer, artist, or writer in shaping the society they attempted to observe. John Dewey built on the idea of
pragmatism to create a theory of instrumentalism, which advocated the use of education in the search for
Chapter 19 | The Growing Pains of Urbanization, 1870-1900 561
truth. Dewey believed that education, specifically observation and change through the scientific method,
was the best tool by which to reform and improve American society as it continued to grow ever more
complex. To that end, Dewey strongly encouraged educational reforms designed to create an informed
American citizenry that could then form the basis for other, much-needed progressive reforms in society.
In addition to the new medium of photography, popularized by Riis, novelists and other artists also
embraced realism in their work. They sought to portray vignettes from real life in their stories, partly
in response to the more sentimental works of their predecessors. Visual artists such as George Bellows,
Edward Hopper, and Robert Henri, among others, formed the Ashcan School of Art, which was interested
primarily in depicting the urban lifestyle that was quickly gripping the United States at the turn of
the century. Their works typically focused on working-class city life, including the slums and tenement
houses, as well as working-class forms of leisure and entertainment (Figure 19.16).
Figure 19.16 Like most examples of works by Ashcan artists, The Cliff Dwellers, by George Wesley Bellows, depicts
the crowd of urban life realistically. (credit: Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
Novelists and journalists also popularized realism in literary works. Authors such as Stephen Crane, who
wrote stark stories about life in the slums or during the Civil War, and Rebecca Harding Davis, who in
1861 published Life in the Iron Mills, embodied this popular style. Mark Twain also sought realism in his
books, whether it was the reality of the pioneer spirit, seen in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published
in 1884, or the issue of corruption in The Gilded Age, co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner in 1873.
The narratives and visual arts of these realists could nonetheless be highly stylized, crafted, and even
fabricated, since their goal was the effective portrayal of social realities they thought required reform.
Some authors, such as Jack London, who wrote The Call of the Wild, embraced a school of thought called
naturalism, which concluded that the laws of nature and the natural world were the only truly relevant
laws governing humanity (Figure 19.17).
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Figure 19.17 Jack London poses with his dog Rollo in 1885 (a). The cover of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (b)
shows the dogs in the brutal environment of the Klondike. The book tells the story of Buck, a dog living happily in
California until he is sold to be a sled dog in Canada. There, he must survive harsh conditions and brutal behavior,
but his innate animal nature takes over and he prevails. The story clarifies the struggle between humanity’s nature
versus the nurturing forces of society.
Kate Chopin, widely regarded as the foremost woman short story writer and novelist of her day, sought
to portray a realistic view of women’s lives in late nineteenth-century America, thus paving the way
for more explicit feminist literature in generations to come. Although Chopin never described herself as
a feminist per se, her reflective works on her experiences as a southern woman introduced a form of
creative nonfiction that captured the struggles of women in the United States through their own individual
experiences. She also was among the first authors to openly address the race issue of miscegenation. In her
work Desiree’s Baby, Chopin specifically explores the Creole community of her native Louisiana in depths
that exposed the reality of racism in a manner seldom seen in literature of the time.
African American poet, playwright, and novelist of the realist period, Paul Laurence Dunbar dealt with
issues of race at a time when most reform-minded Americans preferred to focus on other issues. Through
his combination of writing in both standard English and black dialect, Dunbar delighted readers with his
rich portrayals of the successes and struggles associated with African American life. Although he initially
struggled to find the patronage and financial support required to develop a full-time literary career,
Dunbar’s subsequent professional relationship with literary critic and Atlantic Monthly editor William
Dean Howells helped to firmly cement his literary credentials as the foremost African American writer
of his generation. As with Chopin and Harding, Dunbar’s writing highlighted parts of the American
experience that were not well understood by the dominant demographic of the country. In their work,
these authors provided readers with insights into a world that was not necessarily familiar to them and
also gave hidden communities—be it iron mill workers, southern women, or African American men—a
sense of voice.
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Mark Twain’s lampoon of author Horatio Alger (http://openstaxcollege.org/l/
twain1) demonstrates Twain’s commitment to realism by mocking the myth set out by
Alger, whose stories followed a common theme in which a poor but honest boy goes
from rags to riches through a combination of “luck and pluck.” See how Twain twists
Alger’s hugely popular storyline in this piece of satire.
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http://openstaxcollege.org/l/twain1
DEFINING “AMERICAN”
Kate Chopin: An Awakening in an Unpopular Time
Author Kate Chopin grew up in the American South and later moved to St. Louis, where she began
writing stories to make a living after the death of her husband. She published her works throughout the
late 1890s, with stories appearing in literary magazines and local papers. It was her second novel, The
Awakening, which gained her notoriety and criticism in her lifetime, and ongoing literary fame after her
death (Figure 19.18).
Figure 19.18 Critics railed against Kate Chopin, the author of the 1899 novel The Awakening,
criticizing its stark portrayal of a woman struggling with societal confines and her own desires. In the
twentieth century, scholars rediscovered Chopin’s work and The Awakening is now considered part of
the canon of American literature.
The Awakening, set in the New Orleans society that Chopin knew well, tells the story of a woman
struggling with the constraints of marriage who ultimately seeks her own fulfillment over the needs of her
family. The book deals far more openly than most novels of the day with questions of women’s sexual
desires. It also flouted nineteenth-century conventions by looking at the protagonist’s struggles with the
traditional role expected of women.
While a few contemporary reviewers saw merit in the book, most criticized it as immoral and unseemly.
It was censored, called “pure poison,” and critics railed against Chopin herself. While Chopin wrote
squarely in the tradition of realism that was popular at this time, her work covered ground that was
considered “too real” for comfort. After the negative reception of the novel, Chopin retreated from public
life and discontinued writing. She died five years after its publication. After her death, Chopin’s work was
largely ignored, until scholars rediscovered it in the late twentieth century, and her books and stories
came back into print. The Awakening in particular has been recognized as vital to the earliest edges of
the modern feminist movement.
Chapter 19 | The Growing Pains of Urbanization, 1870-1900 565
Excerpts from interviews (http://openstaxcollege.org/l/katechopin) with David
Chopin, Kate Chopin’s grandson, and a scholar who studies her work provide
interesting perspectives on the author and her views.
CRITICS OF MODERN AMERICA
While many Americans at this time, both everyday working people and theorists, felt the changes of the
era would lead to improvements and opportunities, there were critics of the emerging social shifts as well.
Although less popular than Twain and London, authors such as Edward Bellamy, Henry George, and
Thorstein Veblen were also influential in spreading critiques of the industrial age. While their critiques
were quite distinct from each other, all three believed that the industrial age was a step in the wrong
direction for the country.
In the 1888 novel Looking Backward, 2000-1887, Edward Bellamy portrays a utopian America in the year
2000, with the country living in peace and harmony after abandoning the capitalist model and moving to
a socialist state. In the book, Bellamy predicts the future advent of credit cards, cable entertainment, and
“super-store” cooperatives that resemble a modern day Wal-Mart. Looking Backward proved to be a popular
bestseller (third only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben Hur among late nineteenth-century publications) and
appealed to those who felt the industrial age of big business was sending the country in the wrong
direction. Eugene Debs, who led the national Pullman Railroad Strike in 1894, later commented on how
Bellamy’s work influenced him to adopt socialism as the answer to the exploitative industrial capitalist
model. In addition, Bellamy’s work spurred the publication of no fewer than thirty-six additional books
or articles by other writers, either supporting Bellamy’s outlook or directly criticizing it. In 1897, Bellamy
felt compelled to publish a sequel, entitled Equality, in which he further explained ideas he had previously
introduced concerning educational reform and women’s equality, as well as a world of vegetarians who
speak a universal language.
Another author whose work illustrated the criticisms of the day was nonfiction writer Henry George, an
economist best known for his 1879 work Progress and Poverty, which criticized the inequality found in
an industrial economy. He suggested that, while people should own that which they create, all land and
natural resources should belong to all equally, and should be taxed through a “single land tax” in order to
disincentivize private land ownership. His thoughts influenced many economic progressive reformers, as
well as led directly to the creation of the now-popular board game, Monopoly.
Another critique of late nineteenth-century American capitalism was Thorstein Veblen, who lamented
in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) that capitalism created a middle class more preoccupied with its
own comfort and consumption than with maximizing production. In coining the phrase “conspicuous
consumption,” Veblen identified the means by which one class of nonproducers exploited the working
class that produced the goods for their consumption. Such practices, including the creation of business
trusts, served only to create a greater divide between the haves and have-nots in American society, and
resulted in economic inefficiencies that required correction or reform.
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City Beautiful
graft
Great Migration
instrumentalism
machine politics
naturalism
pragmatism
realism
settlement house movement
social gospel
Social Register
Tammany Hall
Key Terms
a movement begun by Daniel Burnham and Fredrick Law Olmsted, who believed that
cities should be built with three core tenets in mind: the inclusion of parks within city
limits, the creation of wide boulevards, and the expansion of more suburbs
the financial kickback provided to city bosses in exchange for political favors
the name for the large wave of African Americans who left the South after the Civil
War, mostly moving to cities in the Northeast and Upper Midwest
a theory promoted by John Dewey, who believed that education was key to the search
for the truth about ideals and institutions
the process by which citizens of a city used their local ward alderman to work the
“machine” of local politics to meet local needs within a neighborhood
a theory of realism that states that the laws of nature and the natural world were the only
relevant laws governing humanity
a doctrine supported by philosopher William James, which held that Americans needed to
experiment and find the truth behind underlying institutions, religions, and ideas in
American life, rather than accepting them on faith
a collection of theories and ideas that sought to understand the underlying changes in the United
States during the late nineteenth century
an early progressive reform movement, largely spearheaded by women,
which sought to offer services such as childcare and free healthcare to help
the working poor
the belief that the church should be as concerned about the conditions of people in the
secular world as it was with their afterlife
a de facto directory of the wealthy socialites in each city, first published by Louis Keller
in 1886
a political machine in New York, run by machine boss William Tweed with assistance
from George Washington Plunkitt
Summary
19.1 Urbanization and Its Challenges
Urbanization spread rapidly in the mid-nineteenth century due to a confluence of factors. New
technologies, such as electricity and steam engines, transformed factory work, allowing factories to move
closer to urban centers and away from the rivers that had previously been vital sources of both water
power and transportation. The growth of factories—as well as innovations such as electric lighting, which
allowed them to run at all hours of the day and night—created a massive need for workers, who poured
in from both rural areas of the United States and from eastern and southern Europe. As cities grew, they
were unable to cope with this rapid influx of workers, and the living conditions for the working class
were terrible. Tight living quarters, with inadequate plumbing and sanitation, led to widespread illness.
Churches, civic organizations, and the secular settlement house movement all sought to provide some
relief to the urban working class, but conditions remained brutal for many new city dwellers.
Chapter 19 | The Growing Pains of Urbanization, 1870-1900 567
19.2 The African American “Great Migration” and New European Immigration
For both African Americans migrating from the postwar South and immigrants arriving from southeastern
Europe, a combination of “push” and “pull” factors influenced their migration to America’s urban centers.
African Americans moved away from the racial violence and limited opportunities that existed in the rural
South, seeking wages and steady work, as well as the opportunity to vote safely as free men; however,
they quickly learned that racial discrimination and violence were not limited to the South. For European
immigrants, famine and persecution led them to seek a new life in the United States, where, the stories
said, the streets were paved in gold. Of course, in northeastern and midwestern cities, both groups found
a more challenging welcome than they had anticipated. City residents blamed recent arrivals for the ills of
the cities, from overcrowding to a rise in crime. Activist groups pushed for anti-immigration legislation,
seeking to limit the waves of immigrants that sought a better future in the United States.
19.3 Relief from the Chaos of Urban Life
The burgeoning cities brought together both rich and poor, working class and upper class; however,
the realities of urban dwellers’ lives varied dramatically based on where they fell in the social chain.
Entertainment and leisure-time activities were heavily dependent on one’s status and wealth. For the
working poor, amusement parks and baseball games offered inexpensive entertainment and a brief break
from the squalor of the tenements. For the emerging middle class of salaried professionals, an escape to
the suburbs kept them removed from the city’s chaos outside of working hours. And for the wealthy,
immersion in arts and culture, as well as inclusion in the Social Register, allowed them to socialize
exclusively with those they felt were of the same social status. The City Beautiful movement benefitted all
city dwellers, with its emphasis on public green spaces, and more beautiful and practical city boulevards.
In all, these different opportunities for leisure and pleasure made city life manageable for the citizens who
lived there.
19.4 Change Reflected in Thought and Writing
Americans were overwhelmed by the rapid pace and scale of change at the close of the nineteenth century.
Authors and thinkers tried to assess the meaning of the country’s seismic shifts in culture and society
through their work. Fiction writers often used realism in an attempt to paint an accurate portrait of how
people were living at the time. Proponents of economic developments and cultural changes cited social
Darwinism as an acceptable model to explain why some people succeeded and others failed, whereas other
philosophers looked more closely at Darwin’s work and sought to apply a model of proof and pragmatism
to all ideas and institutions. Other sociologists and philosophers criticized the changes of the era, citing the
inequities found in the new industrial economy and its negative effects on workers.
Review Questions
1. Which of the following four elements was not
essential for creating massive urban growth in late
nineteenth-century America?
A. electric lighting
B. communication improvements
C. skyscrapers
D. settlement houses
2. Which of the following did the settlement
house movement offer as a means of relief for
working-class women?
A. childcare
B. job opportunities
C. political advocacy
D. relocation services
3. What technological and economic factors
combined to lead to the explosive growth of
American cities at this time?
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4. Why did African Americans consider moving
from the rural South to the urban North following
the Civil War?
A. to be able to buy land
B. to avoid slavery
C. to find wage-earning work
D. to further their education
5. Which of the following is true of late
nineteenth-century southern and eastern
European immigrants, as opposed to their western
and northern European predecessors?
A. Southern and eastern European immigrants
tended to be wealthier.
B. Southern and eastern European immigrants
were, on the whole, more skilled and able
to find better paying employment.
C. Many southern and eastern European
immigrants acquired land in the West,
while western and northern European
immigrants tended to remain in urban
centers.
D. Ellis Island was the first destination for
most southern and eastern Europeans.
6. What made recent European immigrants the
ready targets of more established city dwellers?
What was the result of this discrimination?
7. Which of the following was a popular pastime
for working-class urban dwellers?
A. football games
B. opera
C. museums
D. amusement parks
8. Which of the following was a disadvantage of
machine politics?
A. Immigrants did not have a voice.
B. Taxpayers ultimately paid higher city taxes
due to graft.
C. Only wealthy parts of the city received
timely responses.
D. Citizens who voiced complaints were at
risk for their safety.
9. In what way did education play a crucial role
in the emergence of the middle class?
10. Which of the following statements accurately
represents Thorstein Veblen’s argument in The
Theory of the Leisure Class?
A. All citizens of an industrial society would
rise or fall based on their own innate merits.
B. The tenets of naturalism were the only laws
through which society should be governed.
C. The middle class was overly focused on its
own comfort and consumption.
D. Land and natural resources should belong
equally to all citizens.
11. Which of the following was not an element of
realism?
A. social Darwinism
B. instrumentalism
C. naturalism
D. pragmatism
12. In what ways did writers, photographers, and
visual artists begin to embrace more realistic
subjects in their work? How were these responses
to the advent of the industrial age and the rise of
cities?
Critical Thinking Questions
13. What triumphs did the late nineteenth century witness in the realms of industrial growth,
urbanization, and technological innovation? What challenges did these developments pose for urban
dwellers, workers, and recent immigrants? How did city officials and everyday citizens respond to these
challenges?
14. What were the effects of urbanization on the working, middle, and elite classes of American society?
Conversely, how did the different social classes and their activities change the scope, character, and use of
urban spaces?
Chapter 19 | The Growing Pains of Urbanization, 1870-1900 569
15. How do you think that different classes of city dwellers would have viewed the City Beautiful
movement? What potential benefits and drawbacks of this new direction in urban planning might
members of each class have cited?
16. How was Darwin’s work on the evolution of species exploited by proponents of the industrial age?
Why might they have latched on to this idea in particular?
17. Historians often mine the arts for clues to the social, cultural, political, and intellectual shifts that
characterized a given era. How do the many works of visual art, literature, and social philosophy that
emerged from this period reflect the massive changes that were taking place? How were Americans—both
those who created these works and those who read or viewed them—struggling to understand the new
reality through art, literature, and scholarship?
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- Chapter 19. The Growing Pains of Urbanization, 1870-1900
19.1. Urbanization and Its Challenges*
19.2. The African American “Great Migration” and New European Immigration*
19.3. Relief from the Chaos of Urban Life*
19.4. Change Reflected in Thought and Writing*
Glossary
Unit 2 Tom Watson.html
Key Terms and Characters for Gilded Age Politics.html
Unit 2: Gilded age of politics
“” opacity=””>
Characters and Key Terms for Gilded Age Politics
Characters
Keep this list of major characters in mind in order to follow the action more easily. Click on each person or Key Term to see his/her/its corresponding description and/or definition. You can also click the “Show All” button to expand all characters and descriptions at once. Charles Guiteau, supposedly angered by not receiving a political appointment, shot President James Garfield in 1881; Garfield later died from complications from his wounds. The assassination was a catalyst for civil service reform. Chester Arthur became president in 1881 after James Garfield was assassinated. Despite having ties to the Stalwarts, he ushered in an era of civil service reform. Grover Cleveland was the only president to serve non-consecutive terms in American history, from 1885-1889 and 1893-1897. A Democrat, he supported civil service reform and lower tariffs. Benjamin Harrison, a Republican, served as president 1889-1893. He supported coinage of silver and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, but his policies were not very effective. He ran one of the first “front-porch” presidential campaigns in U.S. history. James Weaver of Iowa was the Populist Party presidential candidate in 1892. He carried four western states and 22 electoral votes.
Key Terms
Gilded Age is a phrase popularized by an 1873 book of the same title, co-authored by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. The novel portrayed the era as a time of flashy excess, new wealth, personal and political corruption, and westward expansion. Election of 1876 pitted Republican Rutherford B. Hayes against Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, both of whom promised an end to both political corruption and Reconstruction. Democrats suppressed Republican turnout in the South through violence and intimidation. Tilden appeared to win the popular vote, but electoral votes in several southern states were disputed. Behind closed doors, politicians agreed to what became known as the Compromise of 1877, in which Republicans promised to remove all remaining U.S. troops from the South in return for Hayes’s victory. The resulting end of Reconstruction allowed state Democrats to return to power throughout the South. the corruption of the era led reformers to call for changes in the civil service. Instead of a spoils system, in which civil service appointments served as rewards to political supporters, reformers want a merit-based system. After a disgruntled would-be diplomat assassinated President James Garfield, Congress passed the Pendleton Act (1883), which established a nonpartisan Civil Service Commission to fill federal jobs by examinations. tactic used primarily by Republicans, to remind voters of the bloodshed and hardships of the recent Civil War. Red Shirts, like the Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organization that used violence and intimidation to help the Democratic Party win elections in the Reconstruction-era South. The Election of 1876 turned on disputed electoral votes in several southern states. Behind closed doors, Republicans promised to remove all remaining U.S. troops from the South in return for Hayes’s victory. The resulting end of Reconstruction allowed state Democrats to return to power throughout the South. Spoils system is a practice whereby a victorious political party rewards its supporters with political patronage, including political offices and business contracts. The spoils system became very important in U.S. politics beginning with Andrew Jackson’s administration, 1829-1837. Stalwarts, led by Republican Senator Roscoe Conkling (NY), was a faction of the Republican Party that favored machine politics and the long-standing spoils system Half-Breeds, led by Republican Senator James Blaine (ME), was a faction of the Republican Party that sought limited civil service reform.Pendleton Civil Service Act, passed in the wake of Garfield’s assassination, created the Civil Service Commission, which oversaw civil service appointments based on examinations. Mugwumps was a Republican faction that wanted thorough civil service reform and ultimately supported the Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland in 1884.Passed in 1887 in response railroad policies that tended to favor big businesses over individuals and small farmers. This act created the Interstate Commerce Commission and required that railroads make their rates public, that rates must be “fair and just,” and that rebates be discontinued. It was an important first step, but the ICC lacked enforcement mechanisms.Sherman Anti-Trust Act was an early but largely ineffectual effort to check big business. It was vague and intended to restrain rather than break up big corporations. In its early days, the government more often used it against labor unions than corporations.Bimetallism was a monetary system that allowed free coinage of gold and silver and stood in contrast to the gold standard, in which the value of currency was defined by gold. Bimetallism tended to be inflationary, which would benefit farmers by increasing crop prices and making it easier for them to pay off their debts. The Grange, originally a social organization, became politicized, protesting farmers’ powerlessness in the face of railroads and big businesses. “Granger Laws” in Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota established maximum railroad and grain elevator rates.Farmers’ Alliances, along with the Grange and Populism, were part of an agrarian rebellion in the late nineteenth century, a response to falling crop prices and rising debt. Farmers’ Alliances proposed a subtreasury plan, under which farmers could store their crops in public warehouses, borrow against them, and wait for the market to improve before selling. Populist (or People’s) Party formed in July 1892, marking the agrarian revolt’s move into formal politics. Their Omaha Platform was quite radical for its day and represented the first comprehensive vision for reform in American history. They called for a more direct democracy, including popular election of senators, direct primaries, and the secret ballot. They also endorsed a graduated income tax, the free and unlimited coinage of silver, and government ownership of railroads, telegraph, and telephone.Depression of 1893: caused by overbuilding and poor finances in railroads. A panic caused a series of bank failures. The depression became the primary political issue of the mid-1890s and precipitated a major realignment of the political parties.Coxey’s Army: as the Depression of 1893 dragged on into 1894, unemployment remained high. Jobless marchers, led by Jacob Coxey, arrived in Washington, D.C. to demand relief. Democratic President Grover Cleveland ignored their pleas and forcibly broke up the protest, hurting his already poor public image. Election of 1896: This election signaled a major realignment of the political parties. The Democrats turned left and nominated William Jennings Bryan who supported bimetallism; this move effectively killed the Populist Party. Republicans ran William McKinley, standing on high tariffs, hard money, and prosperity. McKinley won fairly easily, building a coalition of corporate capitalists and urban workers, who were not well served by bimetallism and inflation.
Guided Reading Questions for Politics in the Gilded Age.html
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Guided Reading Questions for Chapter 20: Politics in the Gilded Age
Guided Reading Questions
As you read through Chapter 20, use the following questions to guide your studies and prepare you for the Discussions and Quiz.
Who coined the phrase “The Gilded Age,” and what did it mean?
Why was civil service reform an important issue at this time?
What issues divided Republicans in this period? What factions emerged?
Who tended to favor higher or lower tariffs in this period, and why?
Why did farmers revolt in this period?
How did the election of 1896 represent a shift in politics?
Easy Preparation and Additional Media
Prime yourself further for the reading with the Crash Course video below.
CHAPTER 20
Politics in the Gilded Age, 1870-1900
Figure 20.1 L. Frank Baum’s story of a Kansas girl and the magical land of Oz has become a classic of both film
and screen, but it may have originated in part as an allegory of late nineteenth-century politics and the rise of the
Populist movement.
Chapter Outline
20.1 Political Corruption in Postbellum America
20.2 The Key Political Issues: Patronage, Tariffs, and Gold
20.3 Farmers Revolt in the Populist Era
20.4 Social and Labor Unrest in the 1890s
Introduction
L. Frank Baum was a journalist who rose to prominence at the end of the nineteenth century. Baum’s most
famous story, The Wizard of Oz (Figure 20.1), was published in 1900, but “Oz” first came into being years
earlier, when he told a story to a group of schoolchildren visiting his newspaper office in South Dakota.
He made up a tale of a wonderful land, and, searching for a name, he allegedly glanced down at his file
cabinet, where the bottom drawer was labeled “O-Z.” Thus was born the world of Oz, where a girl from
struggling Kansas hoped to get help from a “wonderful wizard” who proved to be a fraud. Since then,
many have speculated that the story reflected Baum’s political sympathies for the Populist Party, which
galvanized midwestern and southern farmers’ demands for federal reform. Whether he intended the story
to act as an allegory for the plight of farmers and workers in late nineteenth-century America, or whether
he simply wanted to write an “American fairy tale” set in the heartland, Populists looked for answers
much like Dorothy did. And the government in Washington proved to be meek rather than magical.
Chapter 20 | Politics in the Gilded Age, 1870-1900 571
20.1 Political Corruption in Postbellum America
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
• Discuss the national political scene during the
Gilded Age
• Analyze why many critics considered the Gilded Age a period of ineffective national
leadership
The challenges Americans faced in the post-Civil War era extended far beyond the issue of Reconstruction
and the challenge of an economy without slavery. Political and social repair of the nation was paramount,
as was the correlative question of race relations in the wake of slavery. In addition, farmers faced the task
of cultivating arid western soils and selling crops in an increasingly global commodities market, while
workers in urban industries suffered long hours and hazardous conditions at stagnant wages.
Farmers, who still composed the largest percentage of the U.S. population, faced mounting debts as
agricultural prices spiraled downward. These lower prices were due in large part to the cultivation of more
acreage using more productive farming tools and machinery, global market competition, as well as price
manipulation by commodity traders, exorbitant railroad freight rates, and costly loans upon which farmers
depended. For many, their hard work resulted merely in a continuing decline in prices and even greater
debt. These farmers, and others who sought leaders to heal the wounds left from the Civil War, organized
in different states, and eventually into a national third-party challenge, only to find that, with the end of
Reconstruction, federal political power was stuck in a permanent partisan stalemate, and corruption was
widespread at both the state and federal levels.
As the Gilded Age unfolded, presidents had very little power, due in large part to highly contested
elections in which relative popular majorities were razor-thin. Two presidents won the Electoral College
without a popular majority. Further undermining their efficacy was a Congress comprising mostly
politicians operating on the principle of political patronage. Eventually, frustrated by the lack of leadership
in Washington, some Americans began to develop their own solutions, including the establishment of
new political parties and organizations to directly address the problems they faced. Out of the frustration
Figure 20.2
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wrought by war and presidential political impotence, as well as an overwhelming pace of industrial
change, farmers and workers formed a new grassroots reform movement that, at the end of the century,
was eclipsed by an even larger, mostly middle-class, Progressive movement. These reform efforts did bring
about change—but not without a fight.
THE GILDED AGE
Mark Twain coined the phrase “Gilded Age” in a book he co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner in
1873, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. The book satirized the corruption of post-Civil War society and
politics. Indeed, popular excitement over national growth and industrialization only thinly glossed over
the stark economic inequalities and various degrees of corruption of the era (Figure 20.3). Politicians of the
time largely catered to business interests in exchange for political support and wealth. Many participated
in graft and bribery, often justifying their actions with the excuse that corruption was too widespread for
a successful politician to resist. The machine politics of the cities, specifically Tammany Hall in New York,
illustrate the kind of corrupt, but effective, local and national politics that dominated the era.
Figure 20.3 Pages from Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age, published in 1873. The illustrations in this chapter reveal the
cost of doing business in Washington in this new age of materialism and corruption, with the cost of obtaining a
female lobbyist’s support set at $10,000, while that of a male lobbyist or a “high moral” senator can be had for $3,000.
Nationally, between 1872 and 1896, the lack of clear popular mandates made presidents reluctant to
venture beyond the interests of their traditional supporters. As a result, for nearly a quarter of a century,
presidents had a weak hold on power, and legislators were reluctant to tie their political agendas to such
weak leaders. On the contrary, weakened presidents were more susceptible to support various legislators’
and lobbyists’ agendas, as they owed tremendous favors to their political parties, as well as to key financial
contributors, who helped them garner just enough votes to squeak into office through the Electoral
College. As a result of this relationship, the rare pieces of legislation passed were largely responses to the
desires of businessmen and industrialists whose support helped build politicians’ careers.
What was the result of this political malaise? Not surprisingly, almost nothing was accomplished on
Chapter 20 | Politics in the Gilded Age, 1870-1900 573
the federal level. However, problems associated with the tremendous economic growth during this time
continued to mount. More Americans were moving to urban centers, which were unable to accommodate
the massive numbers of working poor. Tenement houses with inadequate sanitation led to widespread
illness. In rural parts of the country, people fared no better. Farmers were unable to cope with the
challenges of low prices for their crops and exorbitant costs for everyday goods. All around the country,
Americans in need of solutions turned further away from the federal government for help, leading to the
rise of fractured and corrupt political groups.
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DEFINING “AMERICAN”
Mark Twain and the Gilded Age
Mark Twain (Figure 20.4) wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today with his neighbor, Charles Dudley
Warner, as a satire about the corrupt politics and lust for power that he felt characterized American
society at the time. The book, the only novel Twain ever co-authored, tells of the characters’ desire to sell
their land to the federal government and become rich. It takes aim at both the government in Washington
and those Americans, in the South and elsewhere, whose lust for money and status among the newly
rich in the nation’s capital leads them to corrupt and foolish choices.
Figure 20.4 Mark Twain was a noted humorist, recognized by most Americans as the greatest writer of
his day. He co-wrote the novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today with Charles Dudley Warner in 1873.
In the following conversation from Chapter Fifty-One of the book, Colonel Sellers instructs young
Washington Hawkins on the routine practices of Congress:
“Now let’s figure up a little on, the preliminaries. I think Congress always tries to do as near
right as it can, according to its lights. A man can’t ask any fairer than that. The first preliminary
it always starts out on, is to clean itself, so to speak. It will arraign two or three dozen of its
members, or maybe four or five dozen, for taking bribes to vote for this and that and the other
bill last winter.”
“It goes up into the dozens, does it?”
“Well, yes; in a free country likes ours, where any man can run for Congress and anybody can
vote for him, you can’t expect immortal purity all the time—it ain’t in nature. Sixty or eighty or
a hundred and fifty people are bound to get in who are not angels in disguise, as young Hicks
the correspondent says; but still it is a very good average; very good indeed. . . . Well, after
they have finished the bribery cases, they will take up cases of members who have bought
their seats with money. That will take another four weeks.”
“Very good; go on. You have accounted for two-thirds of the session.”
“Next they will try each other for various smaller irregularities, like the sale of appointments to
West Point cadetships, and that sort of thing— . . . ”
“How long does it take to disinfect itself of these minor impurities?”
“Well, about two weeks, generally.”
“So Congress always lies helpless in quarantine ten weeks of a session. That’s encouraging.”
The book was a success, in part because it amused people even as it excoriated the politics of the day.
Chapter 20 | Politics in the Gilded Age, 1870-1900 575
For this humor, as well as its astute analysis, Twain and Warner’s book still offers entertainment and
insight today.
Visit the PBS Scrap Book (http://openstaxcollege.org/l/gage) for information on
Mark Twain’s life and marriage at the time he wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.
THE ELECTION OF 1876 SETS THE TONE
In many ways, the presidential election of 1876 foreshadowed the politics of the era, in that it resulted
in one of the most controversial results in all of presidential history. The country was in the middle
of the economic downturn caused by the Panic of 1873, a downturn that would ultimately last until
1879, all but assuring that Republican incumbent Ulysses S. Grant would not be reelected. Instead,
the Republican Party nominated a three-time governor from Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes. Hayes was
a popular candidate who advocated for both “hard money”—an economy based upon gold currency
transactions—to protect against inflationary pressures and civil service reform, that is, recruitment based
upon merit and qualifications, which was to replace the practice of handing out government jobs as
“spoils.” Most importantly, he had no significant political scandals in his past, unlike his predecessor
Grant, who suffered through the Crédit Mobilier of America scandal. In this most notorious example of
Gilded Age corruption, several congressmen accepted cash and stock bribes in return for appropriating
inflated federal funds for the construction of the transcontinental railroad.
The Democrats likewise sought a candidate who could champion reform against growing political
corruption. They found their man in Samuel J. Tilden, governor of New York and a self-made millionaire,
who had made a successful political career fighting corruption in New York City, including spearheading
the prosecution against Tammany Hall Boss William Tweed, who was later jailed. Both parties tapped into
the popular mood of the day, each claiming to champion reform and promising an end to the corruption
that had become rampant in Washington (Figure 20.5). Likewise, both parties promised an end to post-
Civil War Reconstruction.
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Figure 20.5 These campaign posters for Rutherford B. Hayes (a) and Samuel Tilden (b) underscore the tactics of
each party, which remained largely unchanged, regardless of the candidates. The Republican placard highlights the
party’s role in preserving “liberty and union” in the wake of the Civil War, hoping to tap into the northern voters’ pride
in victory over secession. The Democratic poster addresses the economic turmoil and corruption of the day,
specifically that of the Grant administration, promising “honesty, reform, and prosperity” for all.
The campaign was a typical one for the era: Democrats shone a spotlight on earlier Republican scandals,
such as the Crédit Mobilier affair, and Republicans relied upon the bloody shirt campaign, reminding the
nation of the terrible human toll of the war against southern confederates who now reappeared in national
politics under the mantle of the Democratic Party. President Grant previously had great success with the
“bloody shirt” strategy in the 1868 election, when Republican supporters attacked Democratic candidate
Horatio Seymour for his sympathy with New York City draft rioters during the war. In 1876, true to the
campaign style of the day, neither Tilden nor Hayes actively campaigned for office, instead relying upon
supporters and other groups to promote their causes.
Fearing a significant African American and white Republican voter turnout in the South, particularly in
the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which further empowered African Americans with protection
in terms of public accommodations, Democrats relied upon white supremacist terror organizations to
intimidate blacks and Republicans. Tactics included physically assaulting many while they attempted to
vote. The Redshirts, based in Mississippi and the Carolinas, and the White League in Louisiana, relied
upon intimidation tactics similar to the Ku Klux Klan but operated in a more open and organized fashion
with the sole goal of restoring Democrats to political predominance in the South. In several instances,
Redshirts would attack freedmen who attempted to vote, whipping them openly in the streets while
simultaneously hosting barbecues to attract Democratic voters to the polls. Women throughout South
Carolina began to sew red flannel shirts for the men to wear as a sign of their political views; women
themselves began wearing red ribbons in their hair and bows about their waists.
The result of the presidential election, ultimately, was close. Tilden won the popular vote by nearly 300,000
votes; however, he had only 184 electoral votes, with 185 needed to proclaim formal victory. Three states,
Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, were in dispute due to widespread charges of voter fraud and
miscounting. Questions regarding the validity of one of the three electors in Oregon cast further doubt
on the final vote; however, that state subsequently presented evidence to Congress confirming all three
electoral votes for Hayes.
Chapter 20 | Politics in the Gilded Age, 1870-1900 577
As a result of the disputed election, the House of Representatives established a special electoral
commission to determine which candidate won the challenged electoral votes of these three states. In what
later became known as the Compromise of 1877, Republican Party leaders offered southern Democrats an
enticing deal. The offer was that if the commission found in favor of a Hayes victory, Hayes would order
the withdrawal of the remaining U.S. troops from those three southern states, thus allowing the collapse
of the radical Reconstruction governments of the immediate post-Civil War era. This move would permit
southern Democrats to end federal intervention and control their own states’ fates in the wake of the end
of slavery (Figure 20.6).
Figure 20.6 Titled “A Truce not a Compromise,” this cartoon suggests the lack of consensus after the election of
1876 could have ended in another civil war.
After weeks of deliberation, the electoral commission voted eight to seven along straight party lines,
declaring Hayes the victor in each of the three disputed states. As a result, Hayes defeated Tilden in
the electoral vote by a count of 185–184 and became the next president. By April of that year, radical
Reconstruction ended as promised, with the removal of federal troops from the final two Reconstruction
states, South Carolina and Louisiana. Within a year, Redeemers—largely Southern Democrats—had
regained control of the political and social fabric of the South.
Although unpopular among the voting electorate, especially among African Americans who referred to it
as “The Great Betrayal,” the compromise exposed the willingness of the two major political parties to avoid
a “stand-off” via a southern Democrat filibuster, which would have greatly prolonged the final decision
regarding the election. Democrats were largely satisfied to end Reconstruction and maintain “home rule”
in the South in exchange for control over the White House. Likewise, most realized that Hayes would likely
be a one-term president at best and prove to be as ineffectual as his pre-Civil War predecessors.
Perhaps most surprising was the lack of even greater public outrage over such a transparent compromise,
indicative of the little that Americans expected of their national government. In an era where voter turnout
remained relatively high, the two major political parties remained largely indistinguishable in their
agendas as well as their propensity for questionable tactics and backroom deals. Likewise, a growing belief
in laissez-faire principles as opposed to reforms and government intervention (which many Americans
believed contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War) led even more Americans to accept the nature of an
inactive federal government (Figure 20.7).
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Figure 20.7 Powerful Republican Party leader Roscoe Conkling is shown here as the devil. Hayes walks off with the
prize of the 1876 election, the South, personified as a woman. The cartoon, drawn by Joseph Keppler, has a caption
that quotes Goethe: “Unto that Power he doth belong Which only doeth Right while ever willing Wrong.”
20.2 The Key Political Issues: Patronage, Tariffs, and Gold
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
• Explain the difference between the spoils system and civil service, and discuss the
importance of this issue in the period from 1872 to 1896
• Recognize the ways in which the issue of tariffs impacted different sectors of the
economy in late nineteenth-century America
• Explain why Americans were split on the issue of a national gold standard versus free
coinage of silver
• Explain why political patronage was a key issue for political parties in the late
nineteenth century
Although Hayes’ questionable ascendancy to the presidency did not create political corruption in the
nation’s capital, it did set the stage for politically motivated agendas and widespread inefficiency in the
White House for the next twenty-four years. Weak president after weak president took office, and, as
mentioned above, not one incumbent was reelected. The populace, it seemed, preferred the devil they
didn’t know to the one they did. Once elected, presidents had barely enough power to repay the political
favors they owed to the individuals who ensured their narrow victories in cities and regions around the
country. Their four years in office were spent repaying favors and managing the powerful relationships
that put them in the White House. Everyday Americans were largely left on their own. Among the few
political issues that presidents routinely addressed during this era were ones of patronage, tariffs, and the
nation’s monetary system.
PATRONAGE: THE SPOILS SYSTEM VS CIVIL SERVICE
At the heart of each president’s administration was the protection of the spoils system, that is, the power
Chapter 20 | Politics in the Gilded Age, 1870-1900 579
of the president to practice widespread political patronage. Patronage, in this case, took the form of the
president naming his friends and supporters to various political posts. Given the close calls in presidential
elections during the era, the maintenance of political machinery and repaying favors with patronage was
important to all presidents, regardless of party affiliation. This had been the case since the advent of a
two-party political system and universal male suffrage in the Jacksonian era. For example, upon assuming
office in March 1829, President Jackson immediately swept employees from over nine hundred political
offices, amounting to 10 percent of all federal appointments. Among the hardest-hit was the U.S. Postal
Service, which saw Jackson appoint his supporters and closest friends to over four hundred positions in
the service (Figure 20.8).
Figure 20.8 This political cartoon shows Andrew Jackson riding a pig, which is walking over “fraud,” “bribery,” and
“spoils,” and feeding on “plunder.”
As can be seen in the table below (Table 20.1), every single president elected from 1876 through 1892 won
despite receiving less than 50 percent of the popular vote. This established a repetitive cycle of relatively
weak presidents who owed many political favors, which could be repaid through one prerogative power:
patronage. As a result, the spoils system allowed those with political influence to ascend to powerful
positions within the government, regardless of their level of experience or skill, thus compounding both
the inefficiency of government as well as enhancing the opportunities for corruption.
Table 20.1 U.S. Presidential Election Results (1876–1896)
Year Candidates Popular Vote Percentage Electoral Vote
1876 Rutherford B. Hayes 4,034,132 47.9% 185
Samuel Tilden 4,286,808 50.9% 184
Others 97,709 1.2% 0
1880 James Garfield 4,453,337 48.3% 214
Winfield Hancock 4,444,267 48.2% 155
Others 319,806 3.5% 0
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Table 20.1 U.S. Presidential Election Results (1876–1896)
Year Candidates Popular Vote Percentage Electoral Vote
1884 Grover Cleveland 4,914,482 48.8% 219
James Blaine 4,856,903 48.3% 182
Others 288,660 2.9% 0
1888 Benjamin Harrison 5,443,663 47.8% 233
Grover Cleveland 5,538,163 48.6% 168
Others 407,050 3.6% 0
1892 Grover Cleveland 5,553,898 46.0% 277
Benjamin Harrison 5,190,799 43.0% 145
Others 1,323,330 11.0% 22
1896 William McKinley 7,112,138 51.0% 271
William Jennings Bryan 6,510,807 46.7% 176
Others 315,729 2.3% 0
At the same time, a movement emerged in support of reforming the practice of political appointments. As
early as 1872, civil service reformers gathered to create the Liberal Republican Party in an effort to unseat
incumbent President Grant. Led by several midwestern Republican leaders and newspaper editors, this
party provided the impetus for other reform-minded Republicans to break free from the party and actually
join the Democratic Party ranks. With newspaper editor Horace Greeley as their candidate, the party called
for a “thorough reform of the civil service as one the most pressing necessities” facing the nation. Although
easily defeated in the election that followed, the work of the Liberal Republican Party set the stage for an
even stronger push for patronage reform.
Clearly owing favors to his Republican handlers for his surprise compromise victory by the slimmest of
margins in 1876, President Hayes was ill-prepared to heed those cries for reform, despite his own stated
preference for a new civil service system. In fact, he accomplished little during his four years in office
other than granting favors, as dictated by Republic Party handlers. Two powerful Republican leaders
attempted to control the president. The first was Roscoe Conkling, Republican senator from New York
and leader of the Stalwarts, a group that strongly supported continuation of the current spoils system
(Figure 20.9). Long supporting former President Grant, Conkling had no sympathy for some of Hayes’
early appeals for civil service reform. The other was James G. Blaine, Republican senator from Maine
and leader of the Half-Breeds. The Half-Breeds, who received their derogatory nickname from Stalwart
supporters who considered Blaine’s group to be only “half-Republican,” advocated for some measure of
civil service reform.
Chapter 20 | Politics in the Gilded Age, 1870-1900 581
Figure 20.9 This cartoon shows Roscoe Conkling playing a popular puzzle game of the day with the heads of
potential Republican presidential candidates, illustrating his control over the picks of the party.
With his efforts towards ensuring African American civil rights stymied by a Democratic Congress, and
his decision to halt the coinage of silver merely adding to the pressures of the economic Panic of 1873,
Hayes failed to achieve any significant legislation during his presidency. However, he did make a few
overtures towards civil service reform. First, he adopted a new patronage rule, which held that a person
appointed to an office could be dismissed only in the interest of efficient government operation but not
for overtly political reasons. Second, he declared that party leaders could have no official say in political
appointments, although Conkling sought to continue his influence. Finally, he decided that government
appointees were ineligible to manage campaign elections. Although not sweeping reforms, these were
steps in a civil service direction.
Hayes’ first target in his meager reform effort was to remove Chester A. Arthur, a strong Conkling man,
from his post as head of the New York City Customs House. Arthur had been notorious for using his
post as customs collector to gain political favors for Conkling. When Hayes forcibly removed him from
the position, even Half-Breeds questioned the wisdom of the move and began to distance themselves
from Hayes. The loss of his meager public support due to the Compromise of 1877 and the declining
Congressional faction together sealed Hayes fate and made his reelection impossible.
AN ASSASSIN’S BULLET SETS THE STAGE FOR CIVIL SERVICE REFORM
In the wake of President Hayes’ failure, Republicans began to battle over a successor for the 1880
presidential election. Initially, Stalwarts favored Grant’s return to the White House, while
Half-Breeds
promoted their leader, James Blaine. Following an expected convention deadlock, both factions agreed
to a compromise presidential candidate, Senator James A. Garfield of Ohio, with Chester Arthur as his
vice-presidential running mate. The Democratic Party turned to Winfield Scott Hancock, a former Union
commander who was a hero of the Battle of Gettysburg, as their candidate.
Garfield won a narrow victory over Hancock by forty thousand votes, although he still did not win a
majority of the popular vote. But less than four months into his presidency, events pushed
civil service
reform on the fast track. On July 2, 1881, Charles Guiteau shot and killed Garfield (Figure 20.10), allegedly
uttering at the time, “I am a Stalwart of Stalwarts!” Guiteau himself had wanted to be rewarded for his
political support—he had written a speech for the Garfield campaign—with an ambassadorship to France.
His actions at the time were largely blamed on the spoils system, prompting more urgent cries for change.
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Figure 20.10 Garfield’s shooting and the subsequent capture of the assassin, Charles Guiteau, are depicted in this
illustration for a newspaper of the day. The president clung to life for another two months after the assassination.
DEFINING “AMERICAN”
The Assassination of a President
I executed
the Divine command.
And Garfield did remove,
To save my party,
and my country
From the bitter fate of War.
—Charles Guiteau
Charles Guiteau was a lawyer and supporter of the Republican Party, although not particularly well known
in either area. But he gave a few speeches, to modest crowds, in support of the Republican nominee
James Garfield, and ultimately deluded himself that his speeches influenced the country enough to cause
Garfield’s victory. After the election, Guiteau immediately began pressuring the new president, requesting
a post as ambassador. When his queries went unanswered, Guiteau, out of money and angry that his
supposed help had been ignored, planned to kill the president.
He spent significant time planning his attack and considered weapons as diverse as dynamite and a
stiletto before deciding on a gun, stating, “I wanted it done in an American manner.” He followed the
president around the Capitol and let several opportunities pass, unwilling to kill Garfield in front of his wife
or son. Frustrated with himself, Guiteau recommitted to the plan and wrote a letter to the White House,
explaining how this act would “unite the Republican Party and save the Republic.”
Guiteau shot the president from behind and continued to shoot until police grabbed him and hauled him
away. He went to jail, and, the following November after Garfield had died, he stood trial for murder. His
poor mental health, which had been evident for some time, led to eccentric courtroom behavior that the
newspapers eagerly reported and the public loved. He defended his case with a poem that used religious
imagery and suggested that God had ordered him to commit the murder. He defended himself in court
by saying, “The doctors killed Garfield, I just shot him.” While this in fact was true, it did not save him.
Guiteau was convicted and hanged in the summer of 1882.
Chapter 20 | Politics in the Gilded Age, 1870-1900 583
Take a look at America’s Story (http://openstaxcollege.org/l/guiteau) from the
Library of Congress, which highlights the fact that Guiteau in fact did not kill the
president, but rather infection from his medical treatment did.
Surprising both his party and the Democrats when he assumed the office of president, Chester Arthur
immediately distanced himself from the Stalwarts. Although previously a loyal party man, Arthur
understood that he owed his current position to no particular faction or favor. He was in the unique
position to usher in a wave a civil service reform unlike any other political candidate, and he chose to
do just that. In 1883, he signed into law the Pendleton Civil Service Act, the first significant piece of
antipatronage legislation. This law created the Civil Service Commission, which listed all government
patronage jobs and then set aside approximately 10 percent of the list as appointments to be determined
through a competitive civil service examination process. Furthermore, to prevent future presidents from
undoing this reform, the law declared that future presidents could enlarge the list but could never shrink
it by moving a civil service job back into the patronage column.
TARIFFS IN THE GILDED AGE
In addition to civil service, President Arthur also carried the reformist spirit into the realm of tariffs, or
taxes on international imports to the United States. Tariffs had long been a controversial topic in the United
States, especially as the nineteenth century came to a close. Legislators appeared to be bending to the
will of big businessmen who desired higher tariffs in order to force Americans to buy their domestically
produced goods rather than higher-priced imports. Lower tariffs, on the other hand, would reduce prices
and lower the average American’s cost of living, and were therefore favored by many working-class
families and farmers, to the extent that any of them fully understood such economic forces beyond the
prices they paid at stores. Out of growing concern for the latter group, Arthur created the U.S. Tariff
Commission in 1882 to investigate the propriety of increasingly high tariffs. Despite his concern, along
with the commission’s recommendation for a 25 percent rollback in most tariffs, the most Arthur could
accomplish was the “Mongrel Tariff” of 1883, which lowered tariff rates by barely 5 percent.
Such bold attempts at reform further convinced Republican Party leaders, as the 1884 election approached,
that Arthur was not their best option to continue in the White House. Arthur quickly found himself a
man without a party. As the 1884 election neared, the Republican Party again searched their ranks for a
candidate who could restore some semblance of the spoils system while maintaining a reformist image.
Unable to find such a man, the predominant Half-Breeds again turned to their own leader, Senator Blaine.
However, when news of his many personal corrupt bargains began to surface, a significant portion of the
party chose to break from the traditional Stalwarts-versus-Half-Breeds debate and form their own faction,
the Mugwumps, a name taken from the Algonquin phrase for “great chief.”
Anxious to capitalize on the disarray within the Republican Party, as well as to return to the White
House for the first time in nearly thirty years, the Democratic Party chose to court the Mugwump vote
by nominating Grover Cleveland, the reform governor from New York who had built a reputation by
attacking machine politics in New York City. Despite several personal charges against him for having
fathered a child out of wedlock, Cleveland managed to hold on for a close victory with a margin of less
than thirty thousand votes.
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Cleveland’s record on civil service reform added little to the initial blows struck by President Arthur.
After electing the first Democratic president since 1856, the Democrats could actually make great use of
the spoils system. Cleveland was, however, a notable reform president in terms of business regulation
and tariffs. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1886 that individual states could not regulate interstate
transportation, Cleveland urged Congress to pass the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. Among several
other powers, this law created the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to oversee railroad prices and
ensure that they remained reasonable to all customers. This was an important shift. In the past, railroads
had granted special rebates to big businesses, such as John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, while charging
small farmers with little economic muscle exorbitant rates. Although the act eventually provided for real
regulation of the railroad industry, initial progress was slow due to the lack of enforcement power held
by the ICC. Despite its early efforts to regulate railroad rates, the U.S. Supreme Court undermined the
commission in Interstate Commerce Commission v. Cincinnati, New Orleans, and Texas Pacific Railway Cos. in
1897. Rate regulations were limits on profits that, in the opinion of a majority of the justices, violated the
Fourteenth Amendment protection against depriving persons of their property without due process of the
law.
As for tariff reform, Cleveland agreed with Arthur’s position that tariffs remained far too high and
were clearly designed to protect big domestic industries at the expense of average consumers who could
benefit from international competition. While the general public applauded Cleveland’s efforts at both
civil service and tariff reform, influential businessmen and industrialists remained adamant that the next
president must restore the protective tariffs at all costs.
To counter the Democrats’ re-nomination of Cleveland, the Republican Party turned to Benjamin Harrison,
grandson of former president William Henry Harrison. Although Cleveland narrowly won the overall
popular vote, Harrison rode the influential coattails of several businessmen and party bosses to win the
key electoral states of New York and New Jersey, where party officials stressed Harrison’s support for a
higher tariff, and thus secure the White House. Not surprisingly, after Harrison’s victory, the United States
witnessed a brief return to higher tariffs and a strengthening of the spoils system. In fact, the McKinley
Tariff raised some rates as much as 50 percent, which was the highest tariff in American history to date.
Some of Harrison’s policies were intended to offer relief to average Americans struggling with high costs
and low wages, but remained largely ineffective. First, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 sought to
prohibit business monopolies as “conspiracies in restraint of trade,” but it was seldom enforced during
the first decade of its existence. Second, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of the same year required the
U.S. Treasury to mint over four million ounces of silver into coins each month to circulate more cash into
the economy, raise prices for farm goods, and help farmers pay their way out of debt. But the measure
could not undo the previous “hard money” policies that had deflated prices and pulled farmers into well-
entrenched cycles of debt. Other measures proposed by Harrison intended to support African Americans,
including a Force Bill to protect voters in the South, as well as an Education Bill designed to support public
education and improve literacy rates among African Americans, also met with defeat.
MONETARY POLICIES AND THE ISSUE OF GOLD VS SILVER
Although political corruption, the spoils system, and the question of tariff rates were popular discussions
of the day, none were more relevant to working-class Americans and farmers than the issue of the nation’s
monetary policy and the ongoing debate of gold versus silver (Figure 20.11). There had been frequent
attempts to establish a bimetallic standard, which in turn would have created inflationary pressures and
placed more money into circulation that could have subsequently benefitted farmers. But the government
remained committed to the gold standard, including the official demonetizing of silver altogether in 1873.
Such a stance greatly benefitted prominent businessmen engaged in foreign trade while forcing more
farmers and working-class Americans into greater debt.
Chapter 20 | Politics in the Gilded Age, 1870-1900 585
Figure 20.11 This cartoon illustrates the potential benefits of a bimetal system, but the benefits did not actually
extend to big business, which preferred the gold standard and worked to keep it.
As farmers and working-class Americans sought the means by which to pay their bills and other living
expenses, especially in the wake of increased tariffs as the century came to a close, many saw adherence
to a strict gold standard as their most pressing problem. With limited gold reserves, the money supply
remained constrained. At a minimum, a return to a bimetallic policy that would include the production of
silver dollars would provide some relief. However, the aforementioned Sherman Silver Purchase Act was
largely ineffective to combat the growing debts that many Americans faced. Under the law, the federal
government purchased 4.5 million ounces of silver on a monthly basis in order to mint silver dollars.
However, many investors exchanged the bank notes with which the government purchased the silver
for gold, thus severely depleting the nation’s gold reserve. Fearing the latter, President Grover Cleveland
signed the act’s repeal in 1893. This lack of meaningful monetary measures from the federal government
would lead one group in particular who required such assistance—American farmers—to attempt to take
control over the political process itself.
20.3 Farmers Revolt in the Populist Era
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
• Understand how the economic and political climate of the day promoted the formation
of the farmers’ protest movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century
• Explain how the farmers’ revolt moved from protest to politics
The challenges that many American farmers faced in the last quarter of the nineteenth century were
significant. They contended with economic hardships born out of rapidly declining farm prices,
prohibitively high tariffs on items they needed to purchase, and foreign competition. One of the largest
challenges they faced was overproduction, where the glut of their products in the marketplace drove the
price lower and lower.
Overproduction of crops occurred in part due to the westward expansion of homestead farms and in part
because industrialization led to new farm tools that dramatically increased crop yields. As farmers fell
deeper into debt, whether it be to the local stores where they bought supplies or to the railroads that
shipped their produce, their response was to increase crop production each year in the hope of earning
more money with which to pay back their debt. The more they produced, the lower prices dropped. To
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a hard-working farmer, the notion that their own overproduction was the greatest contributing factor to
their debt was a completely foreign concept (Figure 20.12).
Figure 20.12 This North Dakota sod hut, built by a homesteading farmer for his family, was photographed in 1898,
two years after it was built. While the country was quickly industrializing, many farmers still lived in rough, rural
conditions.
In addition to the cycle of overproduction, tariffs were a serious problem for farmers. Rising tariffs on
industrial products made purchased items more expensive, yet tariffs were not being used to keep farm
prices artificially high as well. Therefore, farmers were paying inflated prices but not receiving them.
Finally, the issue of gold versus silver as the basis of U.S. currency was a very real problem to many
farmers. Farmers needed more money in circulation, whether it was paper or silver, in order to create
inflationary pressure. Inflationary pressure would allow farm prices to increase, thus allowing them to
earn more money that they could then spend on the higher-priced goods in stores. However, in 1878,
federal law set the amount of paper money in circulation, and, as mentioned above, Harrison’s Sherman
Silver Act, intended to increase the amount of silver coinage, was too modest to do any real good,
especially in light of the unintended consequence of depleting the nation’s gold reserve. In short, farmers
had a big stack of bills and wanted a big stack of money—be it paper or silver—to pay them. Neither was
forthcoming from a government that cared more about issues of patronage and how to stay in the White
House for more than four years at a time.
FARMERS BEGIN TO ORGANIZE
The initial response by increasingly frustrated and angry farmers was to organize into groups that
were similar to early labor unions. Taking note of how the industrial labor movement had unfolded
in the last quarter of the century, farmers began to understand that a collective voice could create
significant pressure among political leaders and produce substantive change. While farmers had their own
challenges, including that of geography and diverse needs among different types of famers, they believed
this model to be useful to their cause.
One of the first efforts to organize farmers came in 1867 with Oliver Hudson Kelly’s creation of the Patrons
of Husbandry, more popularly known as the Grange. In the wake of the Civil War, the Grangers quickly
grew to over 1.5 million members in less than a decade (Figure 20.13). Kelly believed that farmers could
best help themselves by creating farmers’ cooperatives in which they could pool resources and obtain
better shipping rates, as well as prices on seeds, fertilizer, machinery, and other necessary inputs. These
cooperatives, he believed, would let them self-regulate production as well as collectively obtain better rates
from railroad companies and other businesses.
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Figure 20.13 This print from the early 1870s, with scenes of farm life, was a promotional poster for the Grangers,
one of the earliest farmer reform groups.
At the state level, specifically in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa, the Patrons of Husbandry
did briefly succeed in urging the passage of Granger Laws, which regulated some railroad rates along
with the prices charged by grain elevator operators. The movement also created a political party—the
Greenback Party, so named for its support of print currency (or “greenbacks”) not based upon a gold
standard—which saw brief success with the election of fifteen congressmen. However, such successes
were short-lived and had little impact on the lives of everyday farmers. In the Wabash case of 1886,
brought by the Wabash, St. Louis, and Pacific Railroad Company, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against
the State of Illinois for passing Granger Laws controlling railroad rates; the court found such laws to
be unconstitutional. Their argument held that states did not have the authority to control interstate
commerce. As for the Greenback Party, when only seven delegates appeared at an 1888 national
convention of the group, the party faded from existence.
Explore Rural Life in the Late Nineteenth Century (http://openstaxcollege.org/l/
rurallife) to study photographs, firsthand reports, and other information about how
farmers lived and struggled at the end of the nineteenth century.
The Farmers’ Alliance, a conglomeration of three regional alliances formed in the mid-1880s, took root in
the wake of the Grange movement. In 1890, Dr. Charles Macune, who led the Southern Alliance, which was
based in Texas and had over 100,000 members by 1886, urged the creation of a national alliance between his
organization, the Northwest Alliance, and the Colored Alliance, the largest African American organization
in the United States. Led by Tom Watson, the Colored Alliance, which was founded in Texas but quickly
spread throughout the Old South, counted over one million members. Although they originally advocated
for self-help, African Americans in the group soon understood the benefits of political organization and a
unified voice to improve their plight, regardless of race. While racism kept the alliance splintered among
the three component branches, they still managed to craft a national agenda that appealed to their large
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membership. All told, the Farmers’ Alliance brought together over 2.5 million members, 1.5 million white
and 1 million black (Figure 20.14).
Figure 20.14 The Farmers’ Alliance flag displays the motto: “The most good for the most PEOPLE,” clearly a
sentiment they hoped that others would believe.
The alliance movement, and the subsequent political party that emerged from it, also featured prominent
roles for women. Nearly 250,000 women joined the movement due to their shared interest in the farmers’
worsening situation as well as the promise of being a full partner with political rights within the group,
which they saw as an important step towards advocacy for women’s suffrage on a national level. The
ability to vote and stand for office within the organization encouraged many women who sought similar
rights on the larger American political scene. Prominent alliance spokeswoman, Mary Elizabeth Lease of
Kansas, often spoke of membership in the Farmers’ Alliance as an opportunity to “raise less corn and more
hell!”
The Conner Prairie Interactive History Park (http://openstaxcollege.org/l/
ruralwomen) discusses the role of women in rural America and how it changed
throughout the end of the nineteenth century.
The alliance movement had several goals similar to those of the original Grange, including greater
regulation of railroad prices and the creation of an inflationary national monetary policy. However, most
creative among the solutions promoted by the Farmers’ Alliance was the call for a subtreasury plan. Under
this plan, the federal government would store farmers’ crops in government warehouses for a brief period
of time, during which the government would provide loans to farmers worth 80 percent of the current
crop prices. Thus, farmers would have immediate cash on hand with which to settle debts and purchase
goods, while their crops sat in warehouses and farm prices increased due to this control over supply at the
market. When market prices rose sufficiently high enough, the farmer could withdraw his crops, sell at the
higher price, repay the government loan, and still have profit remaining.
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Economists of the day thought the plan had some merit; in fact, a greatly altered version would
subsequently be adopted during the Great Depression of the 1930s, in the form of the Agricultural
Adjustment Act. However, the federal government never seriously considered the plan, as congressmen
questioned the propriety of the government serving as a rural creditor making loans to farmers with no
assurance that production controls would result in higher commodity prices. The government’s refusal to
act on the proposal left many farmers wondering what it would take to find solutions to their growing
indebtedness.
FROM ORGANIZATION TO POLITICAL PARTY
Angry at the federal government’s continued unwillingness to substantively address the plight of the
average farmer, Charles Macune and the Farmers’ Alliance chose to create a political party whose
representatives—if elected—could enact real change. Put simply, if the government would not address the
problem, then it was time to change those elected to power.
In 1891, the alliance formed the Populist Party, or People’s Party, as it was more widely known. Beginning
with nonpresidential-year elections, the Populist Party had modest success, particularly in Kansas,
Nebraska, and the Dakotas, where they succeeded in electing several state legislators, one governor, and
a handful of congressmen. As the 1892 presidential election approached, the Populists chose to model
themselves after the Democratic and Republican Parties in the hope that they could shock the country with
a “third-party” victory.
At their national convention that summer in Omaha, Nebraska, they wrote the Omaha Platform to more
fully explain to all Americans the goals of the new party (Figure 20.15). Written by Ignatius Donnelly,
the platform statement vilified railroad owners, bankers, and big businessmen as all being part of a
widespread conspiracy to control farmers. As for policy changes, the platform called for adoption of the
subtreasury plan, government control over railroads, an end to the national bank system, the creation of a
federal income tax, the direct election of U.S. senators, and several other measures, all of which aimed at a
more proactive federal government that would support the economic and social welfare of all Americans.
At the close of the convention, the party nominated James B. Weaver as its presidential candidate.
Figure 20.15 The People’s Party gathered for its nominating convention in Nebraska, where they wrote the Omaha
Platform to state their concerns and goals.
In a rematch of the 1888 election, the Democrats again nominated Grover Cleveland, while Republicans
went with Benjamin Harrison. Despite the presence of a third-party challenger, Cleveland won another
close popular vote to become the first U.S. president to be elected to nonconsecutive terms. Although
he finished a distant third, Populist candidate Weaver polled a respectable one million votes. Rather
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than being disappointed, several Populists applauded their showing—especially for a third party with
barely two years of national political experience under its belt. They anxiously awaited the 1896 election,
believing that if the rest of the country, in particular industrial workers, experienced hardships similar to
those that farmers already faced, a powerful alliance among the two groups could carry the Populists to
victory.
20.4 Social and Labor Unrest in the 1890s
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
• Explain how the Depression of 1893 helped the Populist Party to grow in popularity in
the 1890s
• Understand the forces that contributed to the Populist Party’s decline following the
1896 presidential election
Insofar as farmers wanted the rest of the country to share their plight, they got their wish. Soon after
Cleveland’s election, the nation catapulted into the worst economic depression in its history to date. As the
government continued to fail in its efforts to address the growing problems, more and more Americans
sought relief outside of the traditional two-party system. To many industrial workers, the
Populist Party
began to seem like a viable solution.
FROM FARMERS’ HARDSHIPS TO A NATIONAL DEPRESSION
The late 1880s and early 1890s saw the American economy slide precipitously. As mentioned above,
farmers were already struggling with economic woes, and the rest of the country followed quickly.
Following a brief rebound from the speculation-induced Panic of 1873, in which bank investments in
railroad bonds spread the nation’s financial resources too thin—a rebound due in large part to the
protective tariffs of the 1880s—a greater economic catastrophe hit the nation, as the decade of the 1890s
began to unfold.
The causes of the Depression of 1893 were manifold, but one major element was the speculation in
railroads over the previous decades. The rapid proliferation of railroad lines created a false impression of
growth for the economy as a whole. Banks and investors fed the growth of the railroads with fast-paced
investment in industry and related businesses, not realizing that the growth they were following was built
on a bubble. When the railroads began to fail due to expenses outpacing returns on their construction, the
supporting businesses, from banks to steel mills, failed also.
Beginning with the closure of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad Company in 1893, several railroads
ceased their operations as a result of investors cashing in their bonds, thus creating a ripple effect
throughout the economy. In a single year, from 1893 to 1894, unemployment estimates increased from
3 percent to nearly 19 percent of all working-class Americans. In some states, the unemployment rate
soared even higher: over 35 percent in New York State and 43 percent in Michigan. At the height of this
depression, over three million American workers were unemployed. By 1895, Americans living in cities
grew accustomed to seeing the homeless on the streets or lining up at soup kitchens.
Immediately following the economic downturn, people sought relief through their elected federal
government. Just as quickly, they learned what farmers had been taught in the preceding decades: A weak,
inefficient government interested solely in patronage and the spoils system in order to maintain its power
was in no position to help the American people face this challenge. The federal government had little in
place to support those looking for work or to provide direct aid to those in need. Of course, to be fair, the
government had seldom faced these questions before. Americans had to look elsewhere.
Chapter 20 | Politics in the Gilded Age, 1870-1900 591
A notable example of the government’s failure to act was the story of Coxey’s Army. In the spring of 1894,
businessman Jacob Coxey led a march of unemployed Ohioans from Cincinnati to Washington, DC, where
leaders of the group urged Congress to pass public works legislation for the federal government to hire
unemployed workers to build roads and other public projects. From the original one hundred protesters,
the march grew five hundred strong as others joined along the route to the nation’s capital. Upon their
arrival, not only were their cries for federal relief ignored, but Coxey and several other marchers were
arrested for trespassing on the grass outside the U.S. Capitol. Frustration over the event led many angry
workers to consider supporting the Populist Party in subsequent elections.
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AMERICANA
L. Frank Baum: Did Coxey’s Army inspire Dorothy and the
Wizard of Oz?
Scholars, historians, and economists have long argued inconclusively that L. Frank Baum intended the
story of The Wizard of Oz as an allegory for the politics of the day. Whether that actually was Baum’s
intention is up for debate, but certainly the story could be read as support for the Populist Party’s crusade
on behalf of American farmers. In 1894, Baum witnessed Coxey’s Army’s march firsthand, and some feel
it may have influenced the story (Figure 20.16).
Figure 20.16 This image of Coxey’s Army marching on Washington to ask for jobs may have helped
inspire L. Frank Baum’s story of Dorothy and her friends seeking help from the Wizard of Oz.
According to this theory, the Scarecrow represents the American farmer, the Tin Woodman is the
industrial worker, and the Cowardly Lion is William Jennings Bryan, a prominent “Silverite” (strong
supporters of the Populist Party who advocated for the free coinage of silver) who, in 1900 when the book
was published, was largely criticized by the Republicans as being cowardly and indecisive. In the story,
the characters march towards Oz, much as Coxey’s Army marched to Washington. Like Dorothy and her
companions, Coxey’s Army gets in trouble, before being turned away with no help.
Following this reading, the seemingly powerful but ultimately impotent Wizard of Oz is a representation
of the president, and Dorothy only finds happiness by wearing the silver slippers—they only became
ruby slippers in the later movie version—along the Yellow Brick Road, a reference to the need for the
country to move from the gold standard to a two-metal silver and gold plan. While no literary theorists
or historians have proven this connection to be true, it is possible that Coxey’s Army inspired Baum to
create Dorothy’s journey on the yellow brick road.
Several strikes also punctuated the growing depression, including a number of violent uprisings in the
coal regions of Ohio and Pennsylvania. But the infamous Pullman Strike of 1894 was most notable for its
nationwide impact, as it all but shut down the nation’s railroad system in the middle of the depression. The
strike began immediately on the heels of the Coxey’s Army march when, in the summer of 1894, company
Chapter 20 | Politics in the Gilded Age, 1870-1900 593
owner George Pullman fired over two thousand employees at Pullman Co.—which made railroad cars,
such as Pullman sleeper cars—and reduced the wages of the remaining three thousand workers. Since
the factory operated in the company town of Pullman, Illinois, where workers rented homes from George
Pullman and shopped at the company store owned by him as well, unemployment also meant eviction.
Facing such harsh treatment, all of the Pullman workers went on strike to protest the decisions. Eugene V.
Debs, head of the American Railway Union, led the strike.
In order to bring the plight of Pullman, Illinois, to Americans all around the country, Debs adopted the
strike strategy of ordering all American Railroad Union members to refuse to handle any train that had
Pullman cars on it. Since virtually every train in the United States operated with Pullman cars, the strike
truly brought the transportation industry to its knees. Fearful of his ability to end the economic depression
with such a vital piece of the economy at a standstill, President Cleveland turned to his attorney general
for the answer. The attorney general proposed a solution: use federal troops to operate the trains under
the pretense of protecting the delivery of the U.S. mail that was typically found on all trains. When Debs
and the American Railway Union refused to obey the court injunction prohibiting interference with the
mail, the troops began operating the trains, and the strike quickly ended. Debs himself was arrested,
tried, convicted, and sentenced to six months in prison for disobeying the court injunction. The American
Railway Union was destroyed, leaving workers even less empowered than before, and Debs was in prison,
contemplating alternatives to a capitalist-based national economy. The Depression of 1893 left the country
limping towards the next presidential election with few solutions in sight.
THE ELECTION OF 1896
As the final presidential election of the nineteenth century unfolded, all signs pointed to a possible Populist
victory. Not only had the ongoing economic depression convinced many Americans—farmers and factory
workers alike—of the inability of either major political party to address the situation, but also the Populist
Party, since the last election, benefited from four more years of experience and numerous local victories.
As they prepared for their convention in St. Louis that summer, the Populists watched with keen interest
as the Republicans and Democrats hosted their own conventions.
The Republicans remained steadfast in their defense of a gold-based standard for the American economy,
as well as high protective tariffs. They turned to William McKinley, former congressman and current
governor of Ohio, as their candidate. At their convention, the Democrats turned to William Jennings
Bryan—a congressman from Nebraska. Bryan defended the importance of a silver-based monetary system
and urged the government to coin more silver. Furthermore, being from farm country, he was very
familiar with the farmers’ plight and saw some merit in the subtreasury system proposal. In short, Bryan
could have been the ideal Populist candidate, but the Democrats got to him first. The Populist Party
subsequently endorsed Bryan as well, with their party’s nomination three weeks later (Figure 20.17).
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Figure 20.17 Republicans portrayed presidential candidate Bryan as a grasping politician whose Populist leanings
could swallow the Democratic Party. Bryan was in fact not a Populist at all, but a Democrat whose views aligned with
the Populists on some issues. He was formally nominated by the Democratic Party, the Populist Party, and the Silver
Republican Party for the 1896 presidential election.
Browse through the cartoons and commentary at 1896 (http://openstaxcollege.org/l/
1896election) at Vassar College, a site that contains a wealth of information about the
major players and themes of the presidential election of 1896.
As the Populist convention unfolded, the delegates had an important decision to make: either locate
another candidate, even though Bryan would have been an excellent choice, or join the Democrats and
support Bryan as the best candidate but risk losing their identity as a third political party as a result. The
Populist Party chose the latter and endorsed Bryan’s candidacy. However, they also nominated their own
vice-presidential candidate, Georgia Senator Tom Watson, as opposed to the Democratic nominee, Arthur
Sewall, presumably in an attempt to maintain some semblance of a separate identity.
The race was a heated one, with McKinley running a typical nineteenth-century style “front porch”
campaign, during which he espoused the long-held Republican Party principles to visitors who would call
on him at his Ohio home. Bryan, to the contrary, delivered speeches all throughout the country, bringing
his message to the people that Republicans “shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold.”
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DEFINING “AMERICAN”
William Jennings Bryan and the “Cross of Gold”
William Jennings Bryan was a politician and speechmaker in the late nineteenth century, and he
was particularly well known for his impassioned argument that the country move to a bimetal or
silver standard. He received the Democratic presidential nomination in 1896, and, at the nominating
convention, he gave his most famous speech. He sought to argue against Republicans who stated that
the gold standard was the only way to ensure stability and prosperity for American businesses. In the
speech he said:
We say to you that you have made the definition of a business man too limited in its
application. The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer;
the attorney in a country town is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a
great metropolis; the merchant at the cross-roads store is as much a business man as the
merchant of New York; the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day, who begins
in spring and toils all summer, and who by the application of brain and muscle to the natural
resources of the country creates wealth, is as much a business man as the man who goes
upon the Board of Trade and bets upon the price of grain; . . . We come to speak of this
broader class of business men.
This defense of working Americans as critical to the prosperity of the country resonated with his listeners,
as did his passionate ending when he stated, “Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and
the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we
will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: ‘You shall not press down upon the brow
of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.’”
The speech was an enormous success and played a role in convincing the Populist Party that he was
the candidate for them.
The result was a close election that finally saw a U.S. president win a majority of the popular vote for the
first time in twenty-four years. McKinley defeated Bryan by a popular vote of 7.1 million to 6.5 million.
Bryan’s showing was impressive by any standard, as his popular vote total exceeded that of any other
presidential candidate in American history to that date—winner or loser. He polled nearly one million
more votes than did the previous Democratic victor, Grover Cleveland; however, his campaign also served
to split the Democratic vote, as some party members remained convinced of the propriety of the gold
standard and supported McKinley in the election.
Amid a growing national depression where Americans truly recognized the importance of a strong leader
with sound economic policies, McKinley garnered nearly two million more votes than his Republican
predecessor Benjamin Harrison. Put simply, the American electorate was energized to elect a strong
candidate who could adequately address the country’s economic woes. Voter turnout was the largest in
American history to that date; while both candidates benefitted, McKinley did more so than Bryan (Figure
20.18).
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Figure 20.18 The electoral vote map of the 1896 election illustrates the stark divide in the country between the
industry-rich coasts and the rural middle.
In the aftermath, it is easy to say that it was Bryan’s defeat that all but ended the rise of the Populist
Party. Populists had thrown their support to the Democrats who shared similar ideas for the economic
rebound of the country and lost. In choosing principle over distinct party identity, the Populists aligned
themselves to the growing two-party American political system and would have difficulty maintaining
party autonomy afterwards. Future efforts to establish a separate party identity would be met with ridicule
by critics who would say that Populists were merely “Democrats in sheep’s clothing.”
But other factors also contributed to the decline of Populism at the close of the century. First, the discovery
of vast gold deposits in Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896–1899 (also known as the “Yukon
Gold Rush”) shored up the nation’s weakening economy and made it possible to thrive on a gold standard.
Second, the impending Spanish-American War, which began in 1898, further fueled the economy and
increased demand for American farm products. Still, the Populist spirit remained, although it lost some
momentum at the close of the nineteenth century. As will be seen in a subsequent chapter, the reformist
zeal took on new forms as the twentieth century unfolded.
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bloody shirt campaign
civil service
Coxey’s Army
Farmers’ Alliance
Gilded Age
Grange
Half-Breeds
Mugwumps
Populist Party
Stalwarts
subtreasury plan
Key Terms
the strategy of Republican candidates to stress the sacrifices that the nation had
to endure in its Civil War against Democratic southern secessionists
the contrast to the spoils system, where political appointments were based on merit, not
favoritism
an 1894 protest, led by businessman Jacob Coxey, to advocate for public works jobs for
the unemployed by marching on Washington, DC
a national conglomeration of different regional farmers’ alliances that joined together
in 1890 with the goal of furthering farmers’ concerns in politics
the period in American history during which materialism, a quest for personal gain, and
corruption dominated both politics and society
a farmers’ organization, launched in 1867, which grew to over 1.5 million members in less than a
decade
the group of Republicans led by James G. Blaine, named because they supported some
measure of civil service reform and were thus considered to be only “half Republican”
a portion of the Republican Party that broke away from the Stalwart-versus-Half-Breed
debate due to disgust with their candidate’s corruption
a political party formed in 1890 that sought to represent the rights of primarily farmers
but eventually all workers in regional and federal elections
the group of Republicans led by Roscoe Conkling who strongly supported the continuation of
the patronage system
a plan that called for storing crops in government warehouses for a brief period of
time, during which the federal government would provide loans to farmers worth 80
percent of the current crop prices, releasing the crops for sale when prices rose
Summary
20.1 Political Corruption in Postbellum America
In the years following the Civil War, American politics were disjointed, corrupt, and, at the federal
level, largely ineffective in terms of addressing the challenges that Americans faced. Local and regional
politics, and the bosses who ran the political machines, dominated through systematic graft and bribery.
Americans around the country recognized that solutions to the mounting problems they faced would not
come from Washington, DC, but from their local political leaders. Thus, the cycle of federal ineffectiveness
and machine politics continued through the remainder of the century relatively unabated.
Meanwhile, in the Compromise of 1877, an electoral commission declared Rutherford B. Hayes the winner
of the contested presidential election in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from South Carolina,
Louisiana, and Florida. As a result, Southern Democrats were able to reestablish control over their home
governments, which would have a tremendous impact on the direction of southern politics and society in
the decades to come.
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20.2 The Key Political Issues: Patronage, Tariffs, and Gold
All told, from 1872 through 1892, Gilded Age politics were little more than political showmanship. The
political issues of the day, including the spoils system versus civil service reform, high tariffs versus low,
and business regulation, all influenced politicians more than the country at large. Very few measures
offered direct assistance to Americans who continued to struggle with the transformation into an industrial
society; the inefficiency of a patronage-driven federal government, combined with a growing laissez-faire
attitude among the American public, made the passage of effective legislation difficult. Some of Harrison’s
policies, such as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, aimed to provide relief
but remained largely ineffective.
20.3 Farmers Revolt in the Populist Era
Factors such as overproduction and high tariffs left the country’s farmers in increasingly desperate straits,
and the federal government’s inability to address their concerns left them disillusioned and worried.
Uneven responses from state governments had many farmers seeking an alternative solution to their
problems. Taking note of the labor movements growing in industrial cities around the country, farmers
began to organize into alliances similar to workers’ unions; these were models of cooperation where larger
numbers could offer more bargaining power with major players such as railroads. Ultimately, the alliances
were unable to initiate widespread change for their benefit. Still, drawing from the cohesion of purpose,
farmers sought to create change from the inside: through politics. They hoped the creation of the Populist
Party in 1891 would lead to a president who put the people—and in particular the farmers—first.
20.4 Social and Labor Unrest in the 1890s
As the economy worsened, more Americans suffered; as the federal government continued to offer
few solutions, the Populist movement began to grow. Populist groups approached the 1896 election
anticipating that the mass of struggling Americans would support their movement for change. When
Democrats chose William Jennings Bryan for their candidate, however, they chose a politician who largely
fit the mold of the Populist platform—from his birthplace of Nebraska to his advocacy of the silver
standard that most farmers desired. Throwing their support behind Bryan as well, Populists hoped to
see a candidate in the White House who would embody the Populist goals, if not the party name. When
Bryan lost to Republican William McKinley, the Populist Party lost much of its momentum. As the country
climbed out of the depression, the interest in a third party faded away, although the reformist movement
remained intact.
Review Questions
1. Mark Twain’s Gilded Age is a reference to
________.
A. conditions in the South in the pre-Civil War
era
B. the corrupt politics of the post-Civil War
era
C. the populist movement
D. the Republican Party
2. How did the Great Compromise of 1877
influence the election?
A. It allowed a bilateral government
agreement.
B. It gave new power to northern Republicans.
C. It encouraged southern states to support
Hayes.
D. It gave the federal government new
powers.
3. What accounted for the relative weakness of
the federal government during this era?
Chapter 20 | Politics in the Gilded Age, 1870-1900 599
4. A Mugwump is ________.
A. a supporter of the spoils system
B. a liberal Democrat
C. a former member of the Republican Party
D. a moderate Stalwart
5. Which president made significant steps
towards civil service reform?
A. Chester A. Arthur
B. Benjamin Harrison
C. Grover Cleveland
D. Roscoe Conkling
6. Why were U.S. presidents (with few
exceptions) so adamant about protecting the spoils
system of patronage during the late nineteenth
century?
7. Which of the following was not a vehicle for
the farmers’ protest?
A. the Mugwumps
B. the Grange
C. the Farmers’ Alliance
D. the People’s Party
8. Which of the following contributed directly to
the plight of farmers?
A. machine politics
B. labor unions
C. overproduction
D. inadequate supply
9. What were women’s roles within the Farmer’s
Alliance?
10. How were members of Coxey’s Army
received when they arrived in Washington?
A. They were given an audience with the
president.
B. They were given an audience with
members of Congress.
C. They were ignored.
D. They were arrested.
11. Which of the following does not represent one
of the ways in which William Jennings Bryan
appealed to Populists?
A. He came from farm country.
B. He supported free silver.
C. He supported the subtreasury system.
D. He advocated for higher tariffs.
Critical Thinking Questions
12. How does the term “Gilded Age” characterize American society in the late nineteenth century? In
what ways is this characterization accurate or inaccurate?
13. With farmers still representing a significant segment of American society, why did government
officials—Democrats and Republicans alike—prove unwilling to help find solutions to farmers’ problems?
14. Upon reflection, did the Populist Party make a wise decision in choosing to support the Democratic
Party’s candidate in the 1896 presidential election? Why or why not?
15. Despite its relative weakness during this period, the federal government made several efforts to
provide a measure of relief for struggling Americans. What were these initiatives? In what ways were they
more or less successful?
600 Chapter 20 | Politics in the Gilded Age, 1870-1900
This OpenStax book is available for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11740/1.3
- Chapter 20. Politics in the Gilded Age, 1870-1900
20.1. Political Corruption in Postbellum America*
20.2. The Key Political Issues: Patronage, Tariffs, and Gold*
20.3. Farmers Revolt in the Populist Era*
20.4. Social and Labor Unrest in the 1890s*
Glossary
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