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T h e A m e r i c A n Y Aw p

© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com

© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com

T h e A m e r i c A n

Y Aw p A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook

v o l . 2 : s i n c e 1 8 7 7

e di t e d by jo se ph l . l o c k e a n d be n w r ig h t

sta n f or d u n i v e r si t y pr e s s • sta n f or d, c a l i f or n i a

© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Some rights reserved.

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This book is licensed under the Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 4.0, Attribution- ShareAlike. This license permits commercial and non-commercial use of this work, so long as attribution is given. For more information about the license, visit https:// creativecommons .org/ licenses/ by -sa/ 4 .0/.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Locke, Joseph L., editor. | Wright, Ben, editor. Title: The American yawp : a massively collaborative open U.S. history textbook /

edited by Joseph L. Locke and Ben Wright. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. |

Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018015206 (print) | LCCN 2018017638 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781503608139 (e-book) | ISBN 9781503606715 | ISBN 9781503606715 (v. 1 :pbk. :alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503606883(v. 2 :pbk. :alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503608139(v. 1 :ebook) | ISBN 9781503608146(v. 2 :ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: United States—History—Textbooks. Classification: LCC E178.1 (ebook) | LCC E178.1 .A493673 2019 (print) |

DDC 973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018015206

Bruce Lundquist Typeset by Newgen in Sabon LT 11/15 Cover illustration: Detail from “Victory!” by M.F. Tobin, ca. 1884. Source: Susan H. Douglas Political Americana Collection, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

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Yawp \yôp\ n: 1: a raucous noise 2: rough vigorous language “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”

Walt Whitman, 1854

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Preface ix

16. Capital and Labor 1

17. Conquering the West 28

18. Life in Industrial America 56

19. American Empire 82

20. The Progressive Era 109

21. World War I and Its Aftermath 140

22. The New Era 163

23. The Great Depression 192

24. World War II 225

25. The Cold War 257

26. The Affluent Society 288

27. The Sixties 314

28. The Unraveling 343

29. The Triumph of the Right 376

30. The Recent Past 411

Contributors 441

contents

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© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com

Civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965. Library of Congress.

We are the heirs of our history. Our communities, our politics, our cul- ture: it is all a product of the past. As William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”1 To understand who we are, we must therefore understand our history.

But what is history? What does it mean to study the past? History can never be the simple memorizing of names and dates (how would we even know what names and dates are worth studying?). It is too com- plex a task and too dynamic a process to be reduced to that. It must be something more because, in a sense, it is we who give life to the past. Historians ask historical questions, weigh evidence from primary sources (material produced in the era under study), grapple with rival interpre- tations, and argue for their conclusions. History, then, is our ongoing conversation about the past.

Every generation must write its own history. Old conclusions—say, about the motives of European explorers or the realities of life on slave plantations—fall before new evidence and new outlooks. Names of

preface

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x p r e f A c e

leaders and dates of events may not change, but the weight we give them and the context with which we frame them invariably evolves. History is a conversation between the past and the present. To understand a global society, we must explore a history of transnational forces. To understand the lived experiences of ordinary Americans, we must look beyond the elites who framed older textbooks and listen to the poor and disadvan- taged from all generations.

But why study history in the first place? History can cultivate essential and relevant—or, in more utilitarian terms, “marketable”—skills: careful reading, creative thinking, and clear communication. Many are familiar with a famous quote of philosopher George Santayana: “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”2 The role of history in shaping current events is more complicated than this quote implies, but Santayana was right in arguing that history offers important lessons. The historical sensibility yields perspective and context and broader aware- ness. It liberates us from our narrow experiences and pulls us into, in the words of historian Peter Stearns, “the laboratory of human experience.”3 Perhaps a better way to articulate the importance of studying history would be, “Those who fail to understand their history will fail to under- stand themselves.”

Historical interpretation is never wholly subjective: it requires method, rigor, and perspective. The open nature of historical discourse does not mean that all arguments—and certainly not all “opinions”—about the past are equally valid. Some are simply wrong. And yet good historical questions will not always have easy answers. Asking “When did Chris- topher Columbus first sail across the Atlantic?” will tell us far less than “What inspired Columbus to attempt his voyage?” or “How did Native Americans interpret the arrival of Europeans?” Crafting answers to these questions reveals far greater insights into our history.

But how can any textbook encapsulate American history? Should it organize around certain themes or surrender to the impossibility of syn- thesis and retreat toward generality? In the oft-cited lines of the Ameri- can poet Walt Whitman, we found as good an organizing principle as any other: “I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable,” he wrote, “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”4 Long before Whitman and long after, Americans have sung something collectively amid the deafening roar of their many individual voices. Here we find both chorus and cacophony together, as one. This textbook therefore offers the story of that barbaric, untranslatable American yawp by con-

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p r e f A c e x i

structing a coherent and accessible narrative from all the best of recent historical scholarship. Without losing sight of politics and power, it in- corporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers narratives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets, congested tenements, and marbled halls. It navigates between maternity wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. Whitman’s America, like ours, cut across the narrow boundaries that can strangle narratives of American history.

We have produced The American Yawp to help guide students in their encounter with American history. The American Yawp is a collabora- tively built, open American history textbook designed for general readers and college-level history courses. Over three hundred academic histo- rians—scholars and experienced college-level instructors—have come together and freely volunteered their expertise to help democratize the American past for twenty-first century readers. The project is freely ac- cessible online at www .AmericanYawp .com, and in addition to providing a peer review of the text, Stanford University Press has partnered with The American Yawp to publish a low-cost print edition. Furthermore, The American Yawp remains an evolving, collaborative text: you are en- couraged to help us improve by offering comments on our feedback page, available through AmericanYawp .com.

The American Yawp is a fully open resource: you are encouraged to use it, download it, distribute it, and modify it as you see fit. The project is formally operated under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC-BY-SA) License and is designed to meet the stan- dards of a “Free Cultural Work.” We are happy to share it and we hope you will do the same.

Joseph Locke & Ben Wright, editors

n o T e s T o p r e fAc e 1. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House,

1954), 73. 2. George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Or the Phases of Human Progress,

Volume I (New York: Scribner, 1905), 284. 3. Peter N. Stearns, “Why Study History,” American Historical Associa-

tion (July 11, 2008). https:// www .historians .org/ about -aha -and -membership/ aha -history -and -archives/ archives/ why -study -history - (1998.

4. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn: Rome, 1855), 55.

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© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. www.americanyawp.com

T h e A m e r i c A n Y Aw p

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A Maryland Na- tional Guard unit fires on strikers during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Harper’s Weekly, via Wikimedia.

16 Capital and Labor

I. Introduction The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 heralded a new era of labor con- flict in the United States. That year, mired in the stagnant economy that followed the bursting of the railroads’ financial bubble in 1873, rail lines slashed workers’ wages (even, workers complained, as they reaped enormous government subsidies and paid shareholders lucrative stock dividends). Workers struck from Baltimore to St. Louis, shutting down railroad traffic—the nation’s economic lifeblood—across the country.

Panicked business leaders and friendly political officials reacted quickly. When local police forces would not or could not suppress the strikes, governors called out state militias to break them and restore rail service. Many strikers destroyed rail property rather than allow militias to reopen the rails. The protests approached a class war. The governor of Maryland deployed the state’s militia. In Baltimore, the militia fired into a crowd of striking workers, killing eleven and wounding many more. Strikes convulsed towns and cities across Pennsylvania. The head of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Thomas Andrew Scott, suggested that if workers

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2 C h a p t e r 1 6

were unhappy with their wages, they should be given “a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread.”1 Law enforcement in Pittsburgh refused to put down the protests, so the governor called out the state militia, who killed twenty strikers with bayonets and rifle fire. A month of chaos erupted. Strikers set fire to the city, destroying dozens of buildings, over a hundred engines, and over a thousand cars. In Reading, strikers destroyed rail property and an angry crowd bombarded militia- men with rocks and bottles. The militia fired into the crowd, killing ten. A general strike erupted in St. Louis, and strikers seized rail depots and declared for the eight-hour day and the abolition of child labor. Federal troops and vigilantes fought their way into the depot, killing eighteen and breaking the strike. Rail lines were shut down all across neighboring Il- linois, where coal miners struck in sympathy, tens of thousands gathered to protest under the aegis of the Workingmen’s Party, and twenty protest- ers were killed in Chicago by special police and militiamen.

Courts, police, and state militias suppressed the strikes, but it was federal troops that finally defeated them. When Pennsylvania militiamen were unable to contain the strikes, federal troops stepped in. When mi- litia in West Virginia refused to break the strike, federal troops broke it instead. On the orders of the president, American soldiers were deployed all across northern rail lines. Soldiers moved from town to town, sup- pressing protests and reopening rail lines. Six weeks after it had begun, the strike had been crushed. Nearly 100 Americans died in “The Great Upheaval.” Workers destroyed nearly $40 million worth of property. The strike galvanized the country. It convinced laborers of the need for insti- tutionalized unions, persuaded businesses of the need for even greater political influence and government aid, and foretold a half century of labor conflict in the United States.2

II. the March of Capital Growing labor unrest accompanied industrialization. The greatest strikes first hit the railroads only because no other industry had so effectively marshaled together capital, government support, and bureaucratic man- agement. Many workers perceived their new powerlessness in the com- ing industrial order. Skills mattered less and less in an industrialized, mass-producing economy, and their strength as individuals seemed ever smaller and more insignificant when companies grew in size and power and managers grew flush with wealth and influence. Long hours, dan- gerous working conditions, and the difficulty of supporting a family on

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C a p I t a L a n d L a b o r 3

John Pierpont Morgan with two friends, c. 1907. Library of Congress.

meager and unpredictable wages compelled armies of labor to organize and battle against the power of capital.

The post–Civil War era saw revolutions in American industry. Tech- nological innovations and national investments slashed the costs of pro- duction and distribution. New administrative frameworks sustained the weight of vast firms. National credit agencies eased the uncertainties surrounding rapid movement of capital between investors, manufactur- ers, and retailers. Plummeting transportation and communication costs opened new national media, which advertising agencies used to national- ize various products.

By the turn of the century, corporate leaders and wealthy industrial- ists embraced the new principles of scientific management, or Taylorism, after its noted proponent, Frederick Taylor. The precision of steel parts, the harnessing of electricity, the innovations of machine tools, and the mass markets wrought by the railroads offered new avenues for effi- ciency. To match the demands of the machine age, Taylor said, firms needed a scientific organization of production. He urged all manufactur- ers to increase efficiency by subdividing tasks. Rather than having thirty mechanics individually making thirty machines, for instance, a manufac- turer could assign thirty laborers to perform thirty distinct tasks. Such a shift would not only make workers as interchangeable as the parts they were using, it would also dramatically speed up the process of produc- tion. If managed by trained experts, specific tasks could be done quicker

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Glazier Stove Company moulding room, Chelsea, Michigan, c. 1900–1910. Li- brary of Congress.

and more efficiently. Taylorism increased the scale and scope of manufac- turing and allowed for the flowering of mass production. Building on the use of interchangeable parts in Civil War–era weapons manufacturing, American firms advanced mass production techniques and technologies. Singer sewing machines, Chicago packers’ “disassembly” lines, McCor- mick grain reapers, Duke cigarette rollers: all realized unprecedented effi- ciencies and achieved unheard-of levels of production that propelled their companies into the forefront of American business. Henry Ford made the assembly line famous, allowing the production of automobiles to sky- rocket as their cost plummeted, but various American firms had been paving the way for decades.3

Cyrus McCormick had overseen the construction of mechanical reap- ers (used for harvesting wheat) for decades. He had relied on skilled blacksmiths, skilled machinists, and skilled woodworkers to handcraft horse-drawn machines. But production was slow and the machines were expensive. The reapers still enabled massive efficiency gains in grain farming, but their high cost and slow production times put them out of reach of most American wheat farmers. But then, in 1880, McCormick hired a production manager who had overseen the manufacturing of Colt firearms to transform his system of production. The Chicago plant in- troduced new jigs, steel gauges, and pattern machines that could make precise duplicates of new, interchangeable parts. The company had pro- duced twenty-one thousand machines in 1880. It made twice as many in

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C a p I t a L a n d L a b o r 5

1885, and by 1889, less than a decade later, it was producing over one hundred thousand a year.4

Industrialization and mass production pushed the United States into the forefront of the world. The American economy had lagged behind Britain, Germany, and France as recently as the 1860s, but by 1900 the United States was the world’s leading manufacturing nation. Thirteen years later, by 1913, the United States produced one third of the world’s industrial output—more than Britain, France, and Germany combined.5

Firms such as McCormick’s realized massive economies of scale: after accounting for their initial massive investments in machines and mar- keting, each additional product lost the company relatively little in pro- duction costs. The bigger the production, then, the bigger the profits. New industrial companies therefore hungered for markets to keep their high-volume production facilities operating. Retailers and advertisers sustained the massive markets needed for mass production, and corpo- rate bureaucracies meanwhile allowed for the management of giant new firms. A new class of managers—comprising what one prominent eco- nomic historian called the “visible hand”—operated between the worlds of workers and owners and ensured the efficient operation and adminis- tration of mass production and mass distribution. Even more important to the growth and maintenance of these new companies, however, were the legal creations used to protect investors and sustain the power of massed capital.6

The costs of mass production were prohibitive for all but the very wealthiest individuals, and, even then, the risks would be too great to bear individually. The corporation itself was ages old, but the actual right to incorporate had generally been reserved for public works projects or government-sponsored monopolies. After the Civil War, however, the corporation, using new state incorporation laws passed during the Mar- ket Revolution of the early nineteenth century, became a legal mecha- nism for nearly any enterprise to marshal vast amounts of capital while limiting the liability of shareholders. By washing their hands of legal and financial obligations while still retaining the right to profit massively, investors flooded corporations with the capital needed to industrialize.

But a competitive marketplace threatened the promise of investments. Once the efficiency gains of mass production were realized, profit mar- gins could be undone by cutthroat competition, which kept costs low as price cutting sank into profits. Companies rose and fell—and investors suffered losses—as manufacturing firms struggled to maintain supremacy

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6 C h a p t e r 1 6

in their particular industries. Economies of scale were a double-edged sword: while additional production provided immense profits, the high fixed costs of operating expensive factories dictated that even modest losses from selling underpriced goods were preferable to not selling prof- itably priced goods at all. And as market share was won and lost, profits proved unstable. American industrial firms tried everything to avoid com- petition: they formed informal pools and trusts, they entered price-fixing agreements, they divided markets, and, when blocked by antitrust laws and renegade price cutting, merged into consolidations. Rather than suf- fer from ruinous competition, firms combined and bypassed it altogether.

Between 1895 and 1904, and particularly in the four years between 1898 and 1902, a wave of mergers rocked the American economy. Com- petition melted away in what is known as “the great merger movement.” In nine years, four thousand companies—nearly 20 percent of the Ameri- can economy—were folded into rival firms. In nearly every major in- dustry, newly consolidated firms such as General Electric and DuPont utterly dominated their market. Forty-one separate consolidations each controlled over 70 percent of the market in their respective industries. In 1901, financier J. P. Morgan oversaw the formation of United States Steel, built from eight leading steel companies. Industrialization was built on steel, and one firm—the world’s first billion-dollar company— controlled the market. Monopoly had arrived.7

III. the rise of Inequality Industrial capitalism realized the greatest advances in efficiency and pro- ductivity that the world had ever seen. Massive new companies mar- shaled capital on an unprecedented scale and provided enormous profits that created unheard-of fortunes. But it also created millions of low-paid, unskilled, unreliable jobs with long hours and dangerous working condi- tions. Industrial capitalism confronted Gilded Age Americans with un- precedented inequalities. The sudden appearance of the extreme wealth of industrial and financial leaders alongside the crippling squalor of the urban and rural poor shocked Americans. “This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times,” economist Henry George wrote in his 1879 bestseller, Progress and Poverty.8

The great financial and industrial titans, the so-called robber barons, including railroad operators such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, oilmen such as J. D. Rockefeller, steel magnates such as Andrew Carnegie, and bank-

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C a p I t a L a n d L a b o r 7

Vanderbilt mansion, The Breakers. New- port, Rhode Island, c. 1904. Library of Congress.

ers such as J. P. Morgan, won fortunes that, adjusted for inflation, are still among the largest the nation has ever seen. According to various measurements, in 1890 the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans owned one fourth of the nation’s assets; the top 10 percent owned over 70 percent. And inequality only accelerated. By 1900, the richest 10 percent con- trolled perhaps 90 percent of the nation’s wealth.9

As these vast and unprecedented new fortunes accumulated among a small number of wealthy Americans, new ideas arose to bestow moral legitimacy upon them. In 1859, British naturalist Charles Darwin pub- lished his theory of evolution through natural selection in his On the Origin of Species. It was not until the 1870s, however, that those theo- ries gained widespread traction among biologists, naturalists, and other scientists in the United States and, in turn, challenged the social, politi- cal, and religious beliefs of many Americans. One of Darwin’s greatest popularizers, the British sociologist and biologist Herbert Spencer, ap- plied Darwin’s theories to society and popularized the phrase survival of the fittest. The fittest, Spencer said, would demonstrate their superi- ority through economic success, while state welfare and private charity would lead to social degeneration—it would encourage the survival of the weak.10

“There must be complete surrender to the law of natural selection,” the Baltimore Sun journalist H. L. Mencken wrote in 1907. “All growth must occur at the top. The strong must grow stronger, and that they may

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“Five Cents a Spot”: unauthor- ized immigrant lodgings in a Bayard Street ten- ement. New York City, c. 1890. Li- brary of Congress.

do so, they must waste no strength in the vain task of trying to uplift the weak.”11 By the time Mencken wrote those words, the ideas of social Darwinism had spread among wealthy Americans and their defenders. Social Darwinism identified a natural order that extended from the laws of the cosmos to the workings of industrial society. All species and all societies, including modern humans, the theory went, were governed by a relentless competitive struggle for survival. The inequality of outcomes was to be not merely tolerated but encouraged and celebrated. It signified the progress of species and societies. Spencer’s major work, Synthetic Phi- losophy, sold nearly four hundred thousand copies in the United States by the time of his death in 1903. Gilded Age industrial elites, such as steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, inventor Thomas Edison, and Standard Oil’s John D. Rockefeller, were among Spencer’s prominent followers. Other American thinkers, such as Yale’s William Graham Sumner, echoed his ideas. Sumner said, “Before the tribunal of nature a man has no more right to life than a rattlesnake; he has no more right to liberty than any wild beast; his right to pursuit of happiness is nothing but a license to maintain the struggle for existence.”12

But not all so eagerly welcomed inequalities. The spectacular growth of the U.S. economy and the ensuing inequalities in living conditions and incomes confounded many Americans. But as industrial capitalism over- took the nation, it achieved political protections. Although both major political parties facilitated the rise of big business and used state power to

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C a p I t a L a n d L a b o r 9

support the interests of capital against labor, big business looked primar- ily to the Republican Party.

The Republican Party had risen as an antislavery faction committed to “free labor,” but it was also an ardent supporter of American business. Abraham Lincoln had been a corporate lawyer who defended railroads, and during the Civil War the Republican national government took ad- vantage of the wartime absence of southern Democrats to push through a pro-business agenda. The Republican congress gave millions of acres and dollars to railroad companies. Republicans became the party of business, and they dominated American politics throughout the Gilded Age and the first several decades of the twentieth century. Of the sixteen presiden- tial elections between the Civil War and the Great Depression, Repub- lican candidates won all but four. Republicans controlled the Senate in twenty-seven out of thirty-two sessions in the same period. Republican dominance maintained a high protective tariff, an import tax designed to shield American businesses from foreign competition; southern plant- ers had vehemently opposed this policy before the war but now could do nothing to prevent. It provided the protective foundation for a new American industrial order, while Spencer’s social Darwinism provided moral justification for national policies that minimized government in- terference in the economy for anything other than the protection and support of business.

IV. the Labor Movement The ideas of social Darwinism attracted little support among the mass of American industrial laborers. American workers toiled in difficult jobs for long hours and little pay. Mechanization and mass production threw skilled laborers into unskilled positions. Industrial work ebbed and flowed with the economy. The typical industrial laborer could expect to be unemployed one month out of the year. They labored sixty hours a week and could still expect their annual income to fall below the poverty line. Among the working poor, wives and children were forced into the labor market to compensate. Crowded cities, meanwhile, failed to ac- commodate growing urban populations and skyrocketing rents trapped families in crowded slums.

Strikes ruptured American industry throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Workers seeking higher wages, shorter hours, and safer working conditions had struck throughout the antebellum era,

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The Lawrence textile strike, 1912. Library of Congress.

but organized unions were fleeting and transitory. The Civil War and Reconstruction seemed to briefly distract the nation from the plight of labor, but the end of the sectional crisis and the explosive growth of big business, unprecedented fortunes, and a vast industrial workforce in the last quarter of the nineteenth century sparked the rise of a vast American labor movement.

The failure of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 convinced workers of the need to organize. Union memberships began to climb. The Knights of Labor enjoyed considerable success in the early 1880s, due in part to its efforts to unite skilled and unskilled workers. It welcomed all labor- ers, including women (the Knights only barred lawyers, bankers, and liquor dealers). By 1886, the Knights had over seven hundred thousand members. The Knights envisioned a cooperative producer-centered soci- ety that rewarded labor, not capital, but, despite their sweeping vision, the Knights focused on practical gains that could be won through the organization of workers into local unions.13

In Marshall, Texas, in the spring of 1886, one of Jay Gould’s rail com- panies fired a Knights of Labor member for attending a union meeting. His local union walked off the job, and soon others joined. From Texas and Arkansas into Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois, nearly two hundred thou- sand workers struck against Gould’s rail lines. Gould hired strikebreakers and the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a kind of private security contractor, to suppress the strikes and get the rails moving again. Political leaders

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C a p I t a L a n d L a b o r 1 1

helped him, and state militias were called in support of Gould’s compa- nies. The Texas governor called out the Texas Rangers. Workers coun- tered by destroying property, only winning them negative headlines and for many justifying the use of strikebreakers and militiamen. The strike broke, briefly undermining the Knights of Labor, but the organization re- grouped and set its eyes on a national campaign for the eight-hour day.14

In the summer of 1886, the campaign for an eight-hour day, long a rallying cry that united American laborers, culminated in a national strike on May 1, 1886. Somewhere between three hundred thousand and five hundred thousand workers struck across the country.

In Chicago, police forces killed several workers while breaking up protesters at the McCormick reaper works. Labor leaders and radicals called for a protest at Haymarket Square the following day, which police also proceeded to break up. But as they did, a bomb exploded and killed seven policemen. Police fired into the crowd, killing four. The deaths of the Chicago policemen sparked outrage across the nation, and the sensa- tionalization of the Haymarket Riot helped many Americans to associate unionism with radicalism. Eight Chicago anarchists were arrested and, despite no direct evidence implicating them in the bombing, were charged and found guilty of conspiracy. Four were hanged (and one committed

An 1892 cover of Harper’s Weekly depicted Pinkerton detectives, who had surrendered to steel mill workers during the Homestead Strike, navigating a gauntlet of violent strikers. Library of Congress.

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suicide before he could be executed). Membership in the Knights had peaked earlier that year but fell rapidly after Haymarket; the group be- came associated with violence and radicalism. The national movement for an eight-hour day collapsed.15

The American Federation of Labor (AFL) emerged as a conservative alternative to the vision of the Knights of Labor. An alliance of craft unions (unions composed of skilled workers), the AFL rejected the Knights’ expansive vision of a “producerist” economy and advocated “pure and simple trade unionism,” a program that aimed for practical gains (higher wages, fewer hours, and safer conditions) through a con- servative approach that tried to avoid strikes. But workers continued to strike.

In 1892, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers struck at one of Carnegie’s steel mills in Homestead, Pennsylvania. After repeated wage cuts, workers shut the plant down and occupied the mill. The plant’s operator, Henry Clay Frick, immediately called in hundreds of Pinkerton detectives, but the steel workers fought back. The Pinker- tons tried to land by river and were besieged by the striking steel workers. After several hours of pitched battle, the Pinkertons surrendered, ran a bloody gauntlet of workers, and were kicked out of the mill grounds. But the Pennsylvania governor called the state militia, broke the strike, and reopened the mill. The union was essentially destroyed in the aftermath.16

Still, despite repeated failure, strikes continued to roll across the in- dustrial landscape. In 1894, workers in George Pullman’s Pullman car factories struck when he cut wages by a quarter but kept rents and utili- ties in his company town constant. The American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene Debs, launched a sympathy strike: the ARU would refuse to handle any Pullman cars on any rail line anywhere in the country. Thousands of workers struck and national railroad traffic ground to a halt. Unlike in nearly every other major strike, the governor of Illinois sympathized with workers and refused to dispatch the state militia. It didn’t matter. In July, President Grover Cleveland dispatched thousands of American soldiers to break the strike, and a federal court issued a pre- emptive injunction against Debs and the union’s leadership. The strike violated the injunction, and Debs was arrested and imprisoned. The strike evaporated without its leadership. Jail radicalized Debs, proving to him that political and judicial leaders were merely tools for capital in its struggle against labor.17 But it wasn’t just Debs. In 1905, the degrad- ing conditions of industrial labor sparked strikes across the country. The

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Two female strik- ers picket during the Uprising of the 20,000 in New York City in 1910. Library of Congress.

final two decades of the nineteenth century saw over twenty thousand strikes and lockouts in the United States. Industrial laborers struggled to carve for themselves a piece of the prosperity lifting investors and a rapidly expanding middle class into unprecedented standards of living. But workers were not the only ones struggling to stay afloat in industrial America. American farmers also lashed out against the inequalities of the Gilded Age and denounced political corruption for enabling economic theft.

V. the populist Movement “Wall Street owns the country,” the Populist leader Mary Elizabeth Lease told dispossessed farmers around 1890. “It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.” Farmers, who remained a ma- jority of the American population through the first decade of the twenti- eth century, were hit especially hard by industrialization. The expanding markets and technological improvements that increased efficiency also de- creased commodity prices. Commercialization of agriculture put farmers

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in the hands of bankers, railroads, and various economic intermediaries. As the decades passed, more and more farmers fell ever further into debt, lost their land, and were forced to enter the industrial workforce or, espe- cially in the South, became landless farmworkers.

The rise of industrial giants reshaped the American countryside and the Americans who called it home. Railroad spur lines, telegraph lines, and credit crept into farming communities and linked rural Americans, who still made up a majority of the country’s population, with towns, regional cities, American financial centers in Chicago and New York, and, eventually, London and the world’s financial markets. Meanwhile, improved farm machinery, easy credit, and the latest consumer goods flooded the countryside. But new connections and new conveniences came at a price.

Farmers had always been dependent on the whims of the weather and local markets. But now they staked their financial security on a national economic system subject to rapid price swings, rampant speculation, and limited regulation. Frustrated American farmers attempted to reshape the fundamental structures of the nation’s political and economic systems, systems they believed enriched parasitic bankers and industrial monopo- lists at the expense of the many laboring farmers who fed the nation by producing its many crops and farm goods. Their dissatisfaction with an erratic and impersonal system put many of them at the forefront of what would become perhaps the most serious challenge to the established po- litical economy of Gilded Age America. Farmers organized and launched their challenge first through the cooperatives of the Farmers’ Alliance and later through the politics of the People’s (or Populist) Party.

Mass production and business consolidations spawned giant cor- porations that monopolized nearly every sector of the U.S. economy in the decades after the Civil War. In contrast, the economic power of the individual farmer sank into oblivion. Threatened by ever-plummeting commodity prices and ever-rising indebtedness, Texas agrarians met in Lampasas, Texas, in 1877 and organized the first Farmers’ Alliance to restore some economic power to farmers as they dealt with railroads, merchants, and bankers. If big business relied on its numerical strength to exert its economic will, why shouldn’t farmers unite to counter that power? They could share machinery, bargain from wholesalers, and ne- gotiate higher prices for their crops. Over the following years, organizers spread from town to town across the former Confederacy, the Midwest, and the Great Plains, holding evangelical-style camp meetings, distribut-

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The banner of the first Texas Farmers’ Alli- ance. Source: N. A. Dunning (ed.), Farmers’ Alliance History and Ag- ricultural Digest (Washington, DC: Alliance Publish- ing Co., 1891), iv.

ing pamphlets, and establishing over one thousand alliance newspapers. As the alliance spread, so too did its near-religious vision of the nation’s future as a “cooperative commonwealth” that would protect the inter- ests of the many from the predatory greed of the few. At its peak, the Farmers’ Alliance claimed 1,500,000 members meeting in 40,000 local sub-alliances.18

The alliance’s most innovative programs were a series of farmers’ co- operatives that enabled farmers to negotiate higher prices for their crops and lower prices for the goods they purchased. These cooperatives spread across the South between 1886 and 1892 and claimed more than a million members at their high point. While most failed financially, these “phil- anthropic monopolies,” as one alliance speaker termed them, inspired farmers to look to large-scale organization to cope with their economic difficulties.19 But cooperation was only part of the alliance message.

In the South, alliance-backed Democratic candidates won four gov- ernorships and forty-eight congressional seats in 1890.20 But at a time when falling prices and rising debts conspired against the survival of fam- ily farmers, the two political parties seemed incapable of representing the needs of poor farmers. And so alliance members organized a political party—the People’s Party, or the Populists, as they came to be known.

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The Populists attracted supporters across the nation by appealing to those convinced that there were deep flaws in the political economy of Gilded Age America, flaws that both political parties refused to address. Veterans of earlier fights for currency reform, disaffected industrial la- borers, proponents of the benevolent socialism of Edward Bellamy’s popular Looking Backward, and the champions of Henry George’s farmer-friendly “single-tax” proposal joined alliance members in the new party. The Populists nominated former Civil War general James B. Weaver as their presidential candidate at the party’s first national conven- tion in Omaha, Nebraska, on July 4, 1892.21

At that meeting the party adopted a platform that crystallized the alliance’s cooperate program into a coherent political vision. The plat- form’s preamble, written by longtime political iconoclast and Minnesota populist Ignatius Donnelly, warned that “the fruits of the toil of mil- lions [had been] boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few.”22 Taken as a whole, the Omaha Platform and the larger Populist move- ment sought to counter the scale and power of monopolistic capitalism with a strong, engaged, and modern federal government. The platform proposed an unprecedented expansion of federal power. It advocated na- tionalizing the country’s railroad and telegraph systems to ensure that essential services would be run in the best interests of the people. In an at- tempt to deal with the lack of currency available to farmers, it advocated postal savings banks to protect depositors and extend credit. It called for the establishment of a network of federally managed warehouses—called subtreasuries—which would extend government loans to farmers who stored crops in the warehouses as they awaited higher market prices. To save debtors it promoted an inflationary monetary policy by monetiz- ing silver. Direct election of senators and the secret ballot would ensure that this federal government would serve the interest of the people rather than entrenched partisan interests, and a graduated income tax would protect Americans from the establishment of an American aristocracy. Combined, these efforts would, Populists believed, help shift economic and political power back toward the nation’s producing classes.

In the Populists’ first national election campaign in 1892, Weaver re- ceived over one million votes (and twenty-two electoral votes), a truly startling performance that signaled a bright future for the Populists. And when the Panic of 1893 sparked the worst economic depression the na- tion had ever yet seen, the Populist movement won further credibility and gained even more ground. Kansas Populist Mary Lease, one of the

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movement’s most fervent speakers, famously, and perhaps apocryphally, called on farmers to “raise less corn and more Hell.” Populist stump speakers crossed the country, speaking with righteous indignation, blam- ing the greed of business elites and corrupt party politicians for causing the crisis fueling America’s widening inequality. Southern orators like Texas’s James “Cyclone” Davis and Georgian firebrand Tom Watson stumped across the South decrying the abuses of northern capitalists and the Democratic Party. Pamphlets such as W. H. Harvey’s Coin’s Financial School and Henry D. Lloyd’s Wealth Against Commonwealth provided Populist answers to the age’s many perceived problems. The faltering economy combined with the Populist’s extensive organizing. In the 1894 elections, Populists elected six senators and seven representatives to Con- gress. The third party seemed destined to conquer American politics.23

The movement, however, still faced substantial obstacles, especially in the South. The failure of alliance-backed Democrats to live up to their campaign promises drove some southerners to break with the party of their forefathers and join the Populists. Many, however, were unwilling to take what was, for southerners, a radical step. Southern Democrats, for their part, responded to the Populist challenge with electoral fraud and racial demagoguery. Both severely limited Populist gains. The alli- ance struggled to balance the pervasive white supremacy of the American South with their call for a grand union of the producing class. American racial attitudes—and their virulent southern strain—simply proved too formidable. Democrats race-baited Populists, and Populists capitulated. The Colored Farmers’ Alliance, which had formed as a segregated sister organization to the southern alliance and had as many as 250,000 mem- bers at its peak, fell prey to racial and class-based hostility. The group went into rapid decline in 1891 when faced with the violent white repres- sion of a number of Colored Farmers’ Alliance–sponsored cotton picker strikes. Racial mistrust and division remained the rule, even among Pop- ulists, and even in North Carolina, where a political marriage of con- venience between Populists and Republicans resulted in the election of Populist Marion Butler to the Senate. Populists opposed Democratic cor- ruption, but this did not necessarily make them champions of interracial democracy. As Butler explained to an audience in Edgecombe County, “We are in favor of white supremacy, but we are not in favor of cheating and fraud to get it.”24 In fact, across much of the South, Populists and Farmers’ Alliance members were often at the forefront of the movement for disfranchisement and segregation.

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William Jennings Bryan, 1896. Li- brary of Congress.

Populism exploded in popularity. The first major political force to tap into the vast discomfort of many Americans with the disruptions wrought by industrial capitalism, the Populist Party seemed poise to cap- ture political victory. And yet, even as Populism gained national traction, the movement was stumbling. The party’s often divided leadership found it difficult to shepherd what remained a diverse and loosely organized co- alition of reformers toward unified political action. The Omaha platform was a radical document, and some state party leaders selectively em- braced its reforms. More importantly, the institutionalized parties were still too strong, and the Democrats loomed, ready to swallow Populist frustrations and inaugurate a new era of American politics.

VI. William Jennings bryan and the politics of Gold William Jennings Bryan (March 19, 1860–July 26, 1925) accomplished many different things in his life: he was a skilled orator, a Nebraska con- gressman, a three-time presidential candidate, U.S. secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson, and a lawyer who supported prohibition and opposed Darwinism (most notably in the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial). In terms of his political career, he won national renown for his attack on the gold stan- dard and his tireless promotion of free silver and policies for the benefit of the average American. Although Bryan was unsuccessful in winning the presidency, he forever altered the course of American political history.25

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Bryan was born in Salem, Illinois, in 1860 to a devout family with a strong passion for law, politics, and public speaking. At twenty, he at- tended Union Law College in Chicago and passed the bar shortly there- after. After his marriage to Mary Baird in Illinois, Bryan and his young family relocated to Nebraska, where he won a reputation among the state’s Democratic Party leaders as an extraordinary orator. Bryan later won recognition as one of the greatest speakers in American history.

When economic depressions struck the Midwest in the late 1880s, despairing farmers faced low crop prices and found few politicians on their side. While many rallied to the Populist cause, Bryan worked from within the Democratic Party, using the strength of his oratory. After delivering one speech, he told his wife, “Last night I found that I had a power over the audience. I could move them as I chose. I have more than usual power as a speaker. . . . God grant that I may use it wisely.”26 He soon won election to the Nebraska House of Representatives, where he served for two terms. Although he lost a bid to join the Nebraska Sen- ate, Bryan refocused on a much higher political position: the presidency of the United States. There, he believed he could change the country by defending farmers and urban laborers against the corruptions of big business.

In 1895–1896, Bryan launched a national speaking tour in which he promoted the free coinage of silver. He believed that bimetallism, by inflating American currency, could alleviate farmers’ debts. In contrast, Republicans championed the gold standard and a flat money supply. American monetary standards became a leading campaign issue. Then, in July 1896, the Democratic Party’s national convention met to choose their presidential nominee in the upcoming election. The party platform asserted that the gold standard was “not only un-American but anti- American.” Bryan spoke last at the convention. He astounded his listen- ers. At the conclusion of his stirring speech, he declared, “Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands 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.”27 After a few seconds of stunned silence, the convention went wild. Some wept, many shouted, and the band began to play “For He’s a Jolly Good Fel- low.” Bryan received the 1896 Democratic presidential nomination.

The Republicans ran William McKinley, an economic conserva- tive who championed business interests and the gold standard. Bryan crisscrossed the country spreading the silver gospel. The election drew

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enormous attention and much emotion. According to Bryan’s wife, he received two thousand letters of support every day that year, an enor- mous amount for any politician, let alone one not currently in office. Yet Bryan could not defeat McKinley. The pro-business Republicans outspent Bryan’s campaign fivefold. A notably high 79.3 percent of eli- gible American voters cast ballots, and turnout averaged 90 percent in areas supportive of Bryan, but Republicans swayed the population-dense Northeast and Great Lakes region and stymied the Democrats.28

In early 1900, Congress passed the Gold Standard Act, which put the country on the gold standard, effectively ending the debate over the nation’s monetary policy. Bryan sought the presidency again in 1900 but was again defeated, as he would be yet again in 1908.

Bryan was among the most influential losers in American political his- tory. When the agrarian wing of the Democratic Party nominated the Ne- braska congressman in 1896, Bryan’s fiery condemnation of northeastern financial interests and his impassioned calls for “free and unlimited coin- age of silver” co-opted popular Populist issues. The Democrats stood ready to siphon off a large proportion of the Populists’ political support. When the People’s Party held its own convention two weeks later, the par- ty’s moderate wing, in a fiercely contested move, overrode the objections