History of the USA
their seats. Many of them had been elected on the basis of BLACK CODES,
established in the southern states in 1865-66 to restore a form of quasi-
slavery. To the shocked and angered North, it seemed that the sufferings
endured in the war had been in vain: politics as before the war--only now
with a powerful southern Democratic bloc in Congress--would resume.
The Republican majority in Congress refused to admit southern legislators
to their seats until a congressional committee reexamined the entire
question of Reconstruction. Soon, Radical Republicans (those who wished to
use the victory as an opportunity to remake the South in the Yankee image)
were in open conflict with Johnson. He attempted to terminate the
FREEDMEN'S BUREAU (an agency established in 1865 to aid refugees) and to
veto legislation aimed at protecting the civil rights of former slaves (see
CIVIL RIGHTS ACTS). In the congressional election of 1866 a huge majority
of Republicans was elected, and the Radicals gained a precarious
ascendancy. Senator Charles SUMNER of Massachusetts and Representative
Thaddeus STEVENS (New England-born) of Pennsylvania were among the leaders
of the Radical cause.
The 14TH AMENDMENT (enacted in 1866; ratified in 1868) made all persons
born or naturalized in the country U.S. citizens and forbade any state to
interfere with their fundamental civil rights. In March 1867 all state
governments in the South were terminated and military occupation
established. Federal commanders were charged with reconstructing southern
governments through constitutional conventions, to which delegates were to
be elected by universal male suffrage. After a new state government was in
operation and had ratified the 14th Amendment, its representatives would be
admitted to Congress. In February 1868 an impeachment effort sought
unsuccessfully to remove President Johnson from office.
The Republican majority in Congress made no significant effort to create
social equality for blacks, but only to give them the vote and to ensure
them equal protection under the law (trial by jury, freedom of movement,
the right to hold office and any employment, and the like). This political
equality would give blacks an equal start, Republicans insisted, and they
would then carry the burden of proving themselves equal in other ways. Yet
Republicans well knew that antiblack attitudes persisted in the North as
well as in the South. Until ratification (1870) of the 15TH AMENDMENT,
which made it illegal to deny the vote on the grounds of race, most
northern states refused blacks the vote.
A Nation Transformed: The South
Like the North, the South was transformed by the Civil War and its
aftermath. Southerners had learned lessons in the effectiveness of a strong
central government and realized the impossibility of continuing the old
ways of the antebellum period. Former Whigs in the South, often called
Conservatives, pushed eagerly to build industry and commerce in the Yankee
style. Meanwhile, reconstructed southern state governments enacted many
reforms, establishing free public schools for all, popular election of all
officials, more equitable taxes, and more humane penal laws.
Republican Ulysses S. Grant was elected president in 1868 with electoral
votes gained in occupied southern states. Democrats alleged that Radical
Reconstruction was not genuinely concerned with aiding black people, but
with using southern black votes to keep the Republicans in power in
Congress and to retain their protective tariffs and other aids to
industrialists. When evidence of corruption surfaced during the Grant
administration, Democrats declared that it proved that the outcome of
Republican friendliness to capitalists was graft and plunder.
By 1870 the antisouthern mood that had supported Radical Reconstruction had
faded, as had the surge of concern for southern blacks. New domestic
problems were pushing to the fore. A resurgence of white voting in the
South, together with the use of violence to intimidate blacks and their
white sympathizers, brought southern states back into Democratic hands.
Northerners, awakened to economic questions by the great depression that
began in 1873 and lasted for 5 years, tacitly agreed to return the race
issue to the control of southern whites.
After the disputed election of 1876, amid evidence of electoral corruption,
the Republican presidential candidate promised to withdraw the last federal
occupation troops from the South. The election was decided by a
congressional electoral commission, and Rutherford B. HAYES became
president. As promised, he withdrew (1877) the troops; Reconstruction was
over.
THE GILDED AGE
The era known as the GILDED AGE (1870s to 1890s) was a time of vigorous,
exploitative individualism. Despite widespread suffering by industrial
workers, southern sharecroppers, displaced American Indians, and other
groups, a mood of optimism possessed the United States. The theories of the
English biologist Charles Darwin--expounded in The Origin of Species (1859)-
-concerning the natural selection of organisms best suited to survive in
their environment began to influence American opinion. Some intellectuals
in the United States applied the idea of the survival of the fittest to
human societies (SOCIAL DARWINISM) and arrived at the belief that
government aid to the unfortunate was wrong.
Industrialization and Large-Scale Exploitation of NaturalResources
During the Gilded Age ambitious and imaginative capitalists ranged the
continent looking for new opportunities. Business lurched erratically from
upswings to slumps, while the country's industrial base grew rapidly.
Factories and mines labored heavily through these years to provide the raw
materials and finished products needed for expansion of the railroad
system. In 1865 (as construction of the first TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD was
underway; completed 1869) approximately 56,000 km (35,000 mi) of track
stretched across the United States; by 1910 the total reached about 386,000
km (240,000 mi) of interconnected uniform-gauge track. By 1890 the United
States contained one-third of the world's railroad trackage.
After new gold and silver discoveries in the late 1850s, until about 1875,
individual prospectors explored the western country and desert basins in
search of mineral riches. Then mining corporations took over, using hired
laborers and eastern- trained engineers. Indians were either brutally
exterminated or placed on small reservations. Warfare with the Great Plains
Indians broke out in 1864; these INDIAN WARS did not entirely subside until
after the slaughtering of the buffalo herds, the basis of Indian life,
which had occurred by the mid-1880s. Through the DAWES ACT of 1887, which
forced most Indians to choose 160-acre (65-ha) allotments within their
reservations, reformers hoped to break down tribal bonds and induce Indians
to take up sedentary agriculture. Unallocated reservation lands were
declared surplus and sold to whites.
Cattle ranching was the first large-scale enterprise to invade the Great
Plains beginning in the late 1860s. By the 1880s, however, the open range
began to give way to fenced pastureland and to agriculture, made possible
by the newly invented barbed- wire fence and by "dry farming," a technique
of preserving soil moisture by frequent plowing. Millions of farmers moved
into the high plains west of the 100th meridian. So huge was their grain
output that slumping world prices beginning in the mid- 1880s put them into
severe financial straits. Meanwhile, the vast continental sweep between
Kansas and California became filled with new states.
By the early 1900s the nation's economy, tied together by the railroads
into a single market, was no longer composed primarily of thousands of
small producers who sold to local markets. Rather, it was dominated by a
small number of large firms that sold nationwide and to the world at large.
With great size, however, came large and complex problems. In 1887,
Congress created the INTERSTATE COMMERCE COMMISSION to curb cutthroat
competition among the railroads and to ensure that railroad rates were
"reasonable and just." In 1890, on the other hand, Congress attempted to
restore competition through passage of the SHERMAN ANTI-TRUST ACT, which
declared illegal trusts and other combinations that restrained trade. The
U.S. Supreme Court favored laissez-faire and consistently blocked both
federal and state efforts to regulate private business. The so-called
robber barons and their immense fortunes were practically unscathed as they
exploited the nation's natural resources and dominated its economic life.
New Social Groupings: Immigrants, Urbanites, and UnionMembers
In 1890 the American people numbered 63 million, double the 1860
population. During these years the nation's cities underwent tremendous
growth. Many new urbanites came from the American countryside, but many
others came from abroad. From 1860 to 1890 more than 10 million immigrants
arrived in the United States; from 1890 to 1920, 15 million more arrived
(see IMMIGRATION). Most were concentrated in northern cities: by 1910, 75
percent of immigrants lived in urban areas, while less than 50 percent of
native-born Americans did so. In the 1880s the so-called new immigration
began: in addition to the Germans, Scandinavians, Irish, and others of the
older immigrant groups, there came such peoples as Italians, Poles,
Hungarians, Bohemians, Greeks, and Jews (from central and eastern Europe,
especially Russia). Roman Catholics grew in number from 1.6 million in 1850
to 12 million in 1900, producing a renewed outburst of bitter anti-Catholic
nativism in the 1880s. The large cities, with their saloons, theaters,
dance halls, and immigrant slums, were feared by many native American
Protestants, who lived primarily in small cities and the rural countryside.
The outbreak of labor protests from the 1870s on, often characterized by
immigrant workers opposing native-born employers, intensified the
hostility. In 1878 the KNIGHTS OF LABOR formed, opening its ranks to all
working people, skilled or unskilled. The Knights called for sweeping
social and economic reforms, and their numbers rose to 700,000 in 1886.
Then, as the organization broke apart because of internal stresses, the
American Federation of Labor, under Samuel GOMPERS, formed to take its
place. Concentrating on skilled craftworkers and tight organization, it
endured.
Domestic Politics
Gilded Age politics became a contest between evenly balanced Republicans
and Democrats. Winning elections by small margins, they alternated in their
control of Congress and the White House. Five men served as Republican
presidents: Hayes; James A. GARFIELD (1881); Chester A. ARTHUR (1881-85),
who succeeded Garfield on his assassination; Benjamin HARRISON (1889-93);
and William MCKINLEY (1897-1901). Their party regarded industrial growth
and capitalist leadership with approval, believing that they led to an ever-
widening opening of opportunity for all.
Grover CLEVELAND rose from obscurity to become Democratic governor of New
York in the early 1880s and then U.S. president (1885-89; 1893-97; although
he won a popular-vote plurality in the election of 1888, he lost to
Harrison in the electoral college). Reared a Jacksonian Democrat, he
believed that society is always in danger of exploitation by the wealthy
and powerful. A vigorous president, he labored to clean up government by
making civil service effective; took back huge land grants given out
fraudulently in the West; and battled to lower the protective tariff.
In the Great Plains and the South, grain and cotton farmers, suffering from
falling crop prices, demanded currency inflation to raise prices. By 1892 a
POPULIST PARTY had appeared, to call for free coinage of silver to achieve
this goal. Cleveland resisted, stating that such a monetary policy would
destroy confidence, prolong the great depression that began in 1893, and
injure city consumers. In 1896 the Democrats, taken over by southern and
western inflationists, ran William Jennings BRYAN on a FREE SILVER
platform. Ethnic voters surged into the Republican ranks--for the
depression was a disastrous one and the Republican party had always urged
active government intervention to stimulate the economy. In addition, as
city dwellers they feared inflation. William McKinley's election began a
long period of one-party (Republican) domination in the northern states and
in Washington.
THE PROGRESSIVE ERA
During the period known as the Progressive Era (1890s to about 1920) the
U.S. government became increasingly activist in both domestic and foreign
policy. Progressive, that is, reform- minded, political leaders sought to
extend their vision of a just and rational order to all areas of society
and some, indeed, to all reaches of the globe.
America Looks Outward
During the 1890s, U.S. foreign policy became aggressively activist. As
American industrial productivity grew, many reformers urged the need for
foreign markets. Others held that the United States had a mission to carry
Anglo-Saxon culture to all of humankind, to spread law and order and
American civilization. In 1895 the United States intervened bluntly in the
VENEZUELA BOUNDARY DISPUTE between Venezuela and imperial Britain, warning
that, under the Monroe Doctrine, American force might be used if Venezuela
were not treated equitably. A Cuban revolution against Spain, begun in
1895, finally led to the SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR (1898), undertaken to free
Cuba. From that war the United States emerged with a protectorate over Cuba
and an island empire consisting of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam.
The United States also annexed the Hawaiian Islands in 1898, completing a
bridge to the markets of the Far East. In 1900 the American government
announced the OPEN DOOR POLICY, pledging to support continued Chinese
independence as well as equal access for all nations to China's markets.
William McKinley's assassination brought Theodore ROOSEVELT to the
presidency in 1901. A proud patriot, he sought to make the United States a
great power in the world. In 1903 he aided Panama in becoming independent
of Colombia, then secured from Panama the right for the United States to
build and control a canal through the isthmus. In 1904, in the Roosevelt
Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, he asserted the right of the United
States to intervene in the internal affairs of Western Hemisphere nations
to prevent "chronic wrongdoing." The following year his good offices helped
end the Russo-Japanese War. Having much strengthened the navy, Roosevelt
sent (1907) the Great White Fleet on a spectacular round-the-world cruise
to display American power.
Progressivism at Home
Meanwhile, the Progressive Era was also underway in domestic politics. City
governments were transformed, becoming relatively honest and efficient;
social workers labored to improve slum housing, health, and education; and
in many states reform movements democratized, purified, and humanized
government. Under Roosevelt the national government strengthened or created
regulatory agencies that exerted increasing influence over business
enterprise: the Hepburn Act (1906) reinforced the Interstate Commerce
Commission; the Forest Service, under Gifford PINCHOT from 1898 to 1910,
guided lumbering companies in the conservation of--and more rational and
efficient exploitation of--woodland resources; the Pure Food and Drug Act
(1906; see PURE FOOD AND DRUG LAWS) attempted to protect consumers from
fraudulent labeling and adulteration of products. Beginning in 1902,
Roosevelt also used the Justice Department and lawsuits (or the threat of
them) to mount a revived assault on monopoly under the Sherman Anti-Trust
Law. William Howard TAFT, his successor as president (1909-13), drew back
in his policies, continuing only the antitrust campaign. He approved
passage of the 16TH AMENDMENT (the income tax amendment, 1913), however; in
time it would transform the federal government by giving it access to
enormous revenues.
Republicans were split in the election of 1912. The regular nomination went
to Taft, and a short-lived PROGRESSIVE PARTY was formed to run Theodore
Roosevelt. Democrat Woodrow WILSON (1913-21) was therefore able to win the
presidency. Attacking corporate power, he won a drastic lowering of the
tariff (1913) and establishment of a Tariff Commission (1916); creation of
the FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM (1913) to supervise banking and currency; a
broadened antimonopoly program under the CLAYTON ANTI-TRUST ACT (1914);
control over the hours of labor on the railroads (Adamson Act, 1916); and
creation of a body to ensure fair and open competition in business (Fair
Trade Commission, 1914).
During the Progressive Era, southern governments imposed a wide range of
JIM CROW LAWS on black people, using the rationale that such legalization
of segregation resulted in a more orderly, systematic electoral system and
society. Many of the steps that had been taken toward racial equality
during the Reconstruction period were thus reversed. The federal government
upheld the principle of racial segregation in the U.S. Supreme Court case
PLESSY V. FERGUSON (1896), as long as blacks were provided with "separate
but equal" facilities. In the face of the rigidly segregated society that
confronted them, blacks themselves were divided concerning the appropriate
course of action. Since 1895, Booker T. WASHINGTON had urged that blacks
should not actively agitate for equality, but should acquire craft skills,
work industriously, and convince whites of their abilities. W. E. B. DU
BOIS insisted instead (in The Souls of Black Folk, 1903) that black people
ceaselessly protest Jim Crow laws, demand education in the highest
professions as well as in crafts, and work for complete social integration.
In 1910 the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE
(NAACP) was founded to advance these ideals.
Intervention and World War
President Taft continued to stress the economic aspects of Roosevelt's
interventionist spirit. Under Taft's foreign policy (called dollar
diplomacy) U.S. firms were encouraged to increase investments in countries
bordering the Caribbean in the hope that the American economic presence
would ensure political stability there. President Wilson went a step
further, seeking not simply to maintain order, but to advance democracy and
self-rule. In 1915 he sent troops into Haiti to put an end to the chaos of
revolution--and to protect U.S. investments there--and in 1916 he did the
same in the Dominican Republic; the two countries were made virtual
protectorates of the United States. With Nicaragua he achieved the same end
by diplomacy. In hope of tumbling the Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta,
Wilson at first denied him diplomatic recognition, then in April 1914 sent
troops to occupy the Mexican port city of Veracruz and keep from Huerta its
import revenues. The Mexicans were deeply offended, and in November 1914,
Wilson withdrew American forces. The bloody civil war that racked Mexico
until 1920 sent the first large migration of Mexicans, perhaps a million
people, into the United States (see CHICANO).
After the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Wilson sought vainly to
bring peace. In early 1917, however, Germany's unrestricted use of
submarine attacks against neutral as well as Allied shipping inflamed
American opinion for war (see LUSITANIA). Wilson decided that if the United
States was to have any hope of influencing world affairs, it was imperative
that it enter the war and fight to protect democracy against what he called
German autocracy.
America's entry into the war (April 1917) was the climax of the Progressive
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