chapter 17 freedom’s boundaries, at home and abroad, 1890-1900 populism, imperialism, and the rise...

Chapter 17Freedom’s Boundaries, at Home and Abroad, 1890-

1900Populism, Imperialism, and the

Rise of Jim Crow

The Industrial Revolution in Action at Carnegie’s Ironworks, c. 1890

Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd EditionCopyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & CompanyAndrew Carnegie’s ironworks at Homestead

The Populist Challenge: The Farmers’ Revolt

• After the Civil War, *sharecropping* had kept millions of black and white southern farmers in poverty. Farmers blamed their woes on 1-railroads’ high freight rates, 2-high interest-rate loans from bankers and merchants, and 3- the fiscal policies of the federal government that reduced the money supply and farm prices.


In response, farmers organized the *Farmers’ Alliance* in Texas in the late 1870s, which quickly spread to dozens of states. The alliance at first stayed away from politics, and established cooperatives called “exchanges” to finance and market crops. But when banks refused to loan money for the exchanges, the alliance proposed the “subtreasury plan.”


The *Subtreasury Plan* involved the federal government establishing warehouses where farmers could store their crops until sold, and by using the crops as collateral, the government would issue loans directly to farmers at low interest rates, ending their dependence on bankers and merchants for credit. Demands for the subtreasury **led the alliance to politics.**

The Populist Challenge: The “People’s” Party

• In the early 1890s, the Farmers’ alliance formed the *People’s Party* (called *Populists*), the **era’s greatest political insurgency**. The Populists appealed, not just to farmers, but to all “producers,” including miners, industrial workers, and small businessmen. But most of its supporters were *cotton and wheat farmers in the South and West.*

The Populist Challenge: The People’s Party

• The Populists organized massive educational campaigns using pamphlets, newspapers, and revival-style mass meetings throughout the country. *This was the last expression of the nineteenth-century idea that America was a commonwealth of small producers whose freedom rested on individual ownership of productive property and the dignity of labor.*

The Populist Challenge: The People’s Platform

• The Populists adopted a famous platform at their 1892 Omaha convention. It proposed many measures to **restore democracy and economic opportunity for ordinary Americans**.

The Populist Challenge: The Populist Coalition

• In some parts of the South, the Populists heroically tried to unite black and white farmers on a common political and economic program, but the barriers were too great.


• Black farmers organized their own Cotton Farmer’s Alliance. In a few places, like North Carolina, white and black Populists together won state elections. In most of the South, however, Democrats defeated the Populists by mobilizing whites to vote against “Negro supremacy,” intimidating blacks, and rigging elections.


• The Populists also engaged the reform efforts of farmer and middle-class women, and endorsed women’s suffrage in many states. --In **1892, the Populist candidate for president, James Weaver, won more than 1 million votes, and the party carried five western states and elected three governors and fifteen members of Congress.**

The Populist Challenge: The Government and Labor

• When a severe depression in 1893 intensified conflict between labor and capital, it seemed that the Populists might gain the votes of industrial workers who had traditionally supported the two major parties. Employers used state or federal authority to protect their economic power and suppress labor unrest. In May 1894, the federal government dispersed Coxey’s Army, a march of the unemployed led by Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey that converged on the nation’s capital.

The Populist Challenge: Debs and the Pullman Strike

• Also in 1894, workers in Pullman, Illinois, who manufactured railroad cars for the Pullman company went on strike against pay cuts. When the 150,000 members of the American Railway Union, a union of skilled and unskilled workers led by the charismatic Eugene V. Debs, refused to work on Pullman cars and thus paralyzed the nation’s rail traffic, President Grover Cleveland won an *injunction from federal courts that ordered the strikers back to work.*

The Populist Challenge: Debs and the Pullman Strike

• Violence between strikers and troops left 34 dead, and when union leaders, including Debs, were *imprisoned for violating the injunction, the strike collapsed*. The Supreme Court reaffirmed Debs’s sentence in a famous ruling approving the use of injunctions against strikes. Debs claimed that **powerful capitalists aligned with state and national government now infringed on Americans’ freedoms.**

The Populist Challenge: Populism and Labor

• In 1894, the Populists doubled their efforts to appeal to industrial workers, and in state and congressional elections that year, with the depression worsening, voters abandoned the Democrats. The Populist vote in rural areas increased, but most workers did not vote Populist. Few Populist demands spoke to workers’ needs, as their calls for **higher agricultural prices would raise food costs for workers and diminish the value of their wages, and the movement’s Protestant and revivalist culture alienated Catholic and immigrant workers.**

The Populist Challenge: Populism and Labor

• Urban workers instead voted for the Republicans, who argued that higher tariff rates would revive the economy by protecting American manufacturing and workers from imports and cheap foreign labor. The Republicans gained a massive 177 seats in the House.

The Populist Challenge: Bryan and Free Silver

• In 1896, the Democrats and Populists united behind presidential candidate *William Jennings Bryan*, a young congressman from Nebraska. Bryan had won the Democratic nomination in a speech that captured the fears and hopes of farmers. Bryan called for the “free coinage” of silver (the unrestricted minting of silver money.)

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The Populist Challenge: Bryan and Free Silver

• Bryan’s demand for free silver was the latest expression of a long-standing view that increasing the amount of currency in circulation would *raise the prices of farmers’ crops and make it easier for them to pay their debts.*

The Populist Challenge: The Campaign of 1896

• Republicans argued gold was the only “honest” currency, and that abandoning it would prevent economic recovery by scaring creditors away from making loans. They nominated Ohio governor William McKinley, who passed the highly protectionist McKinley Tariff in Congress in 1890. The 1896 election was the first modern presidential election.

The Populist Challenge: The Campaign of 1896

• The Republicans poured an unprecedented amount of $$money$$ into a highly organized campaign that used a massive educational effort directed against the Democrats’ calls for free silver. The results showed a **nation divided along regional lines**. McKinley won the election with the votes of industrial states in the Northeast and Midwest

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aevuhg4mFl8• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoCUXInCrXs

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Brief overviews of Populism

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The Segregated South

• Populism’s defeat in the South allowed for the imposition of a new racial order. The Redeemers, a coalition of merchants, planters, and businessmen who ruled the region after 1877 and claimed to have “redeemed” the south from the corruption and horrors of “black rule,” worked to reverse Reconstruction’s achievements.


- New laws allowed the arrest of those without employment and increased punishment for petty crimes. As the South’s prison population rose, convicts, mostly poor blacks, were rented out to railroad, miners, and lumber companies as cheap, involuntary labor, at a high profit. Labor unions in the South assailed the convict labor system.


• By 1900, except for the major iron and steel city of Birmingham, Alabama, southern cities had little industry and mostly exported cotton, tobacco, and rice. The South as a whole stayed dependent on the North for capital and manufactured goods.


• Black farmers, the most disadvantaged rural southerners, suffered the most from the region’s economic misery, and in most of the Deep South blacks owned a smaller percentage of land in 1900 than they had in the late 1870s.


• Blacks, trapped at the bottom of an economically stagnant South, emigrated by the tens of thousands. In 1879 and 1880, nearly 60,000 African-Americans moved to Kansas, seeking political rights, safety, and education and economic opportunity. Its participants called the move the Exodus, named after the biblical account of the Jews’ flight from slavery in Egypt.


• But despite worsening conditions, most blacks had no choice but to stay in the South. While economic expansion took place in Northern cities, most employers there offered jobs only to white migrants from rural areas and European immigrants, not blacks.


• Despite “Redemption”, blacks continued to hold office and vote in the South after 1877. Even while Democrats restructured southern politics to limit blacks’ political power and representation, blacks continued to hold office in states and Congress. But black political opportunities diminished in this period.


• Between 1890 and 1906, every southern state enacted laws or constitutional provisions intended to eliminate the black vote. Because the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited the use of race as a qualification for suffrage, southern lawmakers designed laws that seemed color-blind, but were meant to keep blacks from voting


• Most popular were 1-the poll tax (a fee citizens must pay to be eligible to vote), 2-literacy tests, and 3-a requirement that a voter show an “understanding” of the state constitution. By 1940, only 3 percent of adult blacks in the South were registered to vote. Poor and illiterate whites were also disenfranchised by these laws.


• *Disenfranchisement could not have occurred without Northern approval.* In 1891, the Senate defeated a proposal to protect black voting rights in the South, and the Supreme Court approved disenfranchisement laws. According to the Fourteenth Amendment, any state that deprived its male citizens of the franchise was supposed to lose part of its representation in Congress, but this was not held to apply to blacks.


• Alongside disenfranchisement in the 1890s, segregation was imposed throughout the South. *Laws and local customs that required separating the races had existed in the North before the Civil War, and during Reconstruction, southern schools and other institutions had been segregated.* In the 1880s, though, race relations in the South were fluid, with some railroads, theaters, and hotels admitting blacks and whites, while others discriminated.


• In 1883, the Supreme Court invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had outlawed racial discrimination by hotels and other public facilities, and held that the Fourteenth Amendment banned unequal treatment by state authorities, not private business.


• In the landmark 1896 ruling **Plessy v. Ferguson**, the Court approved state laws requiring separate facilities for blacks and whites, arguing that segregated facilities did not discriminate as long as they were **“separate but equal.”**


• States responded to Plessy by passing laws requiring segregation in every part of southern life, in schools, hospitals, toilets, and cemeteries. Despite the doctrine of “separate but equal,” facilities for blacks were either inferior or nonexistent.


• In each year between 1883 and 1905, more than fifty persons, most of them black, were lynched (killed by a mob) in the South. Lynching continued well into the twentieth century.

The Emergence of Booker T. Washington

Some black leaders, for example, started to emphasize self-help and individual self-advancement into middle-class America as an alternative to politics. **Booker T. Washington** symbolized this change in black life.


In 1895, Washington delivered a speech at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition urging blacks to *accommodate segregation and cease agitation for civil and political rights*. He founded the *Tuskegee Institute* in Alabama, a center for *vocational training* (education for jobs, not broad liberal arts), as he believed obtaining farms and skilled work was more important than full citizenship for blacks.


He told an audience in Atlanta, *“In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”* Whites who wanted a docile labor force that would not form unions and work cheaply embraced his vision, while many blacks supported him from a belief that direct assaults on white power were failures and that blacks should build up their own communities.

The Rise of “Jim Crow”

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New Immigration and New Nativism

America seemed to be fracturing along racial and class lines in the late nineteenth century.

Immigrants were increasingly seen as a threat to Americans’ sense of identity and traditions. This was largely due to a change in the sources of immigration to the United States.


• Despite prolonged depression, 3.5 million immigrants came to the United States in the 1890s, looking for industrial work in the Northeast and Midwest. They came not from Ireland, England, Germany, or Scandinavia, as had earlier European immigrants, but from nations in southern and eastern Europe, particularly Italy and the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires.


• The *Immigration Restriction League*, founded in Boston in 1894, called for reducing immigration by barring the illiterate from entering the country. This measure was adopted by Congress in 1897 but vetoed by President Cleveland.

NEW IMMIGRATION AND NEW NATIVISM

• Although single Chinese men had been welcomed as cheap contract labor in the West, when Chinese families started to migrate in the 1870s, Congress barred women from migrating. In *1883, Congress temporarily excluded all Chinese immigrants from entering the country*. This was the first time that race had been used to exclude an entire group of people from entering the U.S., and it was made permanent in 1902.

The Rise of the American Federation of Labor (AFL)

• The dissolution of the Knights of Labor and the rise of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in the 1890s signaled in the labor movement a move away from broad reforms to more limited aims. Strikes like the Pullman strike seemed to show that direct confrontations with capital devastated workers’ organizations.


• Unions, declared Samuel Gompers, the AFL’s founder and longtime president, should avoid seeking economic independence, politics, or the utopian goals of groups like the Knights. Gompers and the AFL thought unions should simply bargain with employers for higher wages and better working conditions.


The AFL unions that grew restricted its membership to skilled workers, a small minority of workers, which effectively excluded most unskilled workers, who were mostly blacks, women, and new European immigrants. The AFL became strong in trades with highly skilled workers, like printing and construction, but was weak or nonexistent in basic industries like steel or the factories that dominated the economy.

The Women’s Era, Or, “If at first you don’t succeed….”

The 1890s began what would be called the “women’s era”—three decades in which women, though still denied the vote, had greater opportunities for economic independence and a role in public life. Nearly 5 million women worked for wages by 1900, and though most were young, unmarried, and worked in traditional women’s jobs such as domestic service and garments, a new generation of college-educated women were taking better-paid white-collar jobs.

The Women’s Era, Or, “If at first you don’t succeed….”

• Women also had more influence in politics and society, through a number of new organizations, like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874, which moved from demanding prohibition laws to demanding comprehensive economic and political reform, including the vote.

Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd EditionCopyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company

A drawing for the 1896 meeting of the NationalAmerican Woman Suffrage Association

Becoming a World Power—The New Imperialism

• In the *late 1890s the United States became an imperial power in the world*. The last quarter of the nineteenth century is known as the *age of imperialism*, when rival European empires divided large parts of the world among themselves. In this period, the United States was considered a second-rate power.

Becoming a World Power: American Expansionism

• **Territorial expansion** had been part of American life from the beginning, but the *1890s marked a major transformation of America’s relationship to the rest of the world*. Americans more and more saw their nation as an **emerging world power.** Until the 1890s, the expansion of the United States had been in North America, though the *Monroe Doctrine* shows that many Americans had seen the Western Hemisphere as an *American sphere of influence*


• Americans talked of acquiring *Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and other territories*, but the only territory acquired after the Civil War was Alaska, regarded by many as worthless. Most who looked overseas wanted to *expand trade, not take new possessions.* Many farmers and manufacturers believed that America’s production could no longer be absorbed in domestic markets, and thought “overproduction” was causing recurrent economic crisis. They wanted foreign customers for their

products.


• A few late-19th century Christian thinkers actively promoted American expansionism. Josiah Strong, a well-known Congregationalist clergyman, tried to update manifest destiny in his book, Our Country (1885). Here he argued that Anglo-Saxon Americans, who had shown their ability for liberty and self-government in North America, should spread their institutions and values to “inferior races” overseas whom, he suggested, *would benefit American manufacturers by becoming new consumers of their goods.*


• Naval officer Alfred T. Mahan, in The Influence of Sea Power Upon History (1890), argued that *no nation could prosper without a large merchant fleet engaged in international trade and a powerful navy to protect it,* which required overseas bases. Mahan insisted that with the western frontier closed, Americans had to look overseas for opportunity.


• Mahan influenced James G. Blaine, President Harrison’s Secretary of State, who advocated the acquisition of *Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Cuba for naval bases*. In 1893, American planters in Hawaii *organized a rebellion there that overthrew the native Hawaiian government of Queen Liliuokalani.* In 1898, during the Spanish-American War, the United States annexed the Hawaiian islands.

Becoming a World Power: The “Splendid Little War”

• All these factors contributed to America’s emergence as a world power in the Spanish-American War of 1898. But the war’s immediate cause was Cubans’ long struggle for national independence from Spain. Ten years of guerrilla warfare began in 1868, and revolt resumed in 1895. Reports of Cuban civilians suffering in Spanish detention camps aroused outrage and sympathy in America. Cries for intervention increased after February 15, 1898, when an explosion, probably accidental, destroyed the **Maine**, an American battleship in Havana harbor, killing 270 sailors.

Becoming a World Power: The “Splendid” Little War

• When Spain rejected American demands for a cease-fire with Cuban rebels, and eventual Cuban independence, the Congress approved President McKinley’s request for a declaration of war, which was justified as a humanitarian intervention. Congress adopted the *Teller Amendment,* declaring that the United States had no intention of annexing or dominating Cuba. The war was brief and resulted in only a few hundred American casualties, what one official called a “splendid little war.”

Becoming a World Power: Roosevelt at San Juan Hill

• The most publicized land battle of the war involved the assault on **San Juan Hill**, outside Santiago, Cuba, made by **Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders**. Roosevelt was pro-expansionist and believed war would unite the nation and its men, whose masculinity he thought had suffered in the economic crisis of the 1890s. Roosevelt’s exploits made him a national hero, and after being elected New York’s governor that fall, he became McKinley’s vice-president in 1900.

Becoming a World Power: An American Empire

• The “war to liberate Cuba” soon became an *imperial mission that culminated with the creation of a *small overseas American empire*. The Spanish colony of the Philippines also fell into American hands as a result of the war. McKinley would not return the Philippines to Spain or hand it over to the Filipinos who had fought for independence from Spain, because he didn’t believe they could govern themselves. He also spoke of Americans’ duty to “uplift and civilize” the Filipinos and train them to rule themselves. In the treaty ending the war, the United States acquired the *Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam.*


• Before McKinley recognized Cuba’s independence, he forced that island’s new government to approve the *Platt Amendment* to the new Cuban constitution, which gave *the United States the right to intervene in Cuba with its military whenever it saw fit*.


• Americans’ interest in their new possessions had more to do with *trade than settlement or extracting resources*, and they sought Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Carribean, and the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii, in the Pacific as outposts for *trade* with Latin America and Asia.


• In 1899, secretary of state John Hay declared the *Open Door Policy*, demanding that European powers which had divided China into commercial spheres of influence allow equal trade access to the United States. Western influence and presence in China soon led to the *Boxer Rebellion*, in which Christian Chinese as well as foreigners were targeted by Chinese nationalists, and American troops helped quell the uprising.

Becoming a World Power: The Phillipine War

• While many Cubans, Filipinos, and Puerto Ricans had welcomed American intervention as a means to wrest independence from Spain, continued American control, direct and indirect, quickly alienated these patriots and others. After victory in the Philippines, Emilio Aguinaldo, the leader of the independence movement there, established a provisional government with a constitution modeled on that of America. When McKinley decided to retain possession of the islands, the Filipinos rebelled.** A second longer and far more bloody war ensued, lasting from 1899 to 1903, and costing the lives of more than 100,000 Filipinos and 4,200 Americans.**

Becoming a World Power: Republic or Empire

• America’s new empire caused intense debate and controversy. Opponents formed the *Anti-Imperialist League*, which united writers and social reformers who wanted reforms at home, businessmen who thought overseas empire was too expensive, and racists who did not want non-whites brought within the United States. The *League warned Americans that empire was incompatible with democracy and urged Americans to help Puerto Ricans and Filipinos gain their independence*.

Becoming a World Power: Republic or Empire

• At the start of the twentieth century, America seemed ready to become a great power. Writers at home and abroad predicted that American influence would soon pervade the globe. In his book The New Empire, Brooks Adams, the grandson of John Quincy Adams, predicted that America’s economic might would make it “outweigh any single empire, if not all empires combined.” This did not happen until after World War II, but the characteristics that would constitute America’s global strength were already present in 1900.

Spanish-American War

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chapter 17 freedom’s boundaries, at home and abroad, 1890-1900 populism, imperialism, and the rise...

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