The National Government

• The government in Washington was responsible for delivering the mail, maintaining a military, conducting foreign policy, and collecting tariffs and taxes.

• It had few other responsibilities and few institutions with which it could have undertaken additional responsibilities even if it had chosen to do so.

• In the late nineteenth century, that mostly meant giving tremendous subsidies to railroads, usually in the form of grants of federal land, to encourage them to extend their lines deeper into the nation

• In addition, the federal government administered a system of annual pensions for Union Civil War veterans who had retired from work and for their widows.

• At its peak, this pension system was making payments to a majority of the male citizens (black and white) of the North and to many women as well.

• Some reformers hoped to make the system permanent and universal

• In most other respects, however, the United States in the late nineteenth century was a society without a modern, national government

Presidents and Patronage

• The power of party bosses had an important effect on the power of the presidency.

• The office had great symbolic importance, but its occupants were unable to do very much except distribute government appointments

• The battle over patronage overshadowed all else during Hayes’s unhappy presidency.

• His one important substantive initiative—an effort to create a civil service system—attracted no support from either party.

• And his early announcement that he would not seek reelection only weakened him further.

• Garfield began his presidency by trying to defy the Stalwarts in his appointments and by showing support for civil service reform

Cleveland, Harrison, and the Tariff

• In the unsavory election of 1884, the Republican candidate for president was Senator James G. Blaine of Maine—known to his admirers as the “Plumed Knight” but to many others as a symbol of seamy party politics

• In a campaign filled with personal invective, what may have decided the election was the last-minute introduction of a religious controversy

New Public Issues

• Benjamin Harrison’s record as president was little more substantial than that of his grandfather, who had died a month after taking office

• By the mid-1880s, fifteen western and southern states had adopted laws prohibiting combinations that restrained competition.

• But corporations found it easy to escape limitations by incorporating in states, such as New Jersey and Delaware,

• If antitrust legislation was to be effective, its supporters believed, it would have to come from the national government.

• Responding to growing popular demands, both houses of Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in July 1890, almost without dissent.

• Most members of Congress saw the act as a symbolic measure, one that would help deflect public criticism but was not likely to have any real effect on corporate power.

• For over a decade after its passage, the Sherman Act—indifferently enforced and steadily weakened by the courts—had almost no impact

• Effective railroad regulation, it was now clear, could come only from the federal government.

• Congress responded to public pressure in 1887 with the Interstate Commerce Act, which banned discrimination in rates between long and short hauls, required that railroads publish their rate schedules and file them with the government, and declared that all interstate rail rates must be “reasonable and just”— although the act did not defi ne what that meant.

• A five-person agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), was to administer the act.

• But it had to rely on the courts to enforce its rulings.

19.2: The Agrarian Revolt

The Grangers

• According to popular myth, American farmers were the most individualistic of citizens.

• In reality, however, farmers had been making efforts to organize for many decades.

• The first major farm organization appeared in the 1860s: the Grange

• At first, the Grangers defined their purposes modestly.

• The Grangers grew slowly for a time.

• But when the depression of 1873 caused a major decline in farm prices, membership rapidly increased.

• By 1875, the Grange claimed more than 800,000 members and 20,000 local lodges; it had chapters in almost every state but was strongest in the great staple producing regions of the South and the Midwest

• The Grangers set up cooperative stores, creameries, elevators, warehouses, insurance companies, and factories that produced machines, stoves, and other items.

• More than 400 enterprises were in operation at the height of the movement, and some of them forged lucrative relationships with existing businesses

• The Grangers also worked to elect state legislators pledged to their program

The Farmer’s Alliances

• As early as 1875, farmers in parts of the South (most notably in Texas) were banding together in so-called Farmers’ Alliances.

• By 1880, the Southern Alliance had more than 4 million members; and a comparable Northwestern Alliance was taking root in the plains states and the Midwest and developing ties with its southern counterpart.

• Like the Granges, the Alliances were principally concerned with local problems.

• They formed cooperatives and other marketing mechanisms.

• They established stores, banks, processing plants, and other facilities for their members—to free them from the hated “furnishing merchants” who kept so many farmers in debt.

• Some Alliance leaders, however, also saw the movement as an effort to build a society in which economic competition might give way to cooperation

• From the beginning, women were full voting members in most local Alliances.

• Many held offices and served as lecturers

• Others emphasized issues of particular concern to women, especially temperance.

• Like their urban counterparts, agrarian women argued that sobriety was a key to stability in rural society.

• Alliances (and the Populist Party they eventually created) advocated extending the vote to women in many areas of the country.

• Although the Alliances quickly became far more widespread than the Granges had ever been, they suffered from similar problems.

• Their cooperatives did not always work well, partly because the market forces operating against them were sometimes too strong to be overcome, partly because the cooperatives themselves were often mismanaged

• In the 1890 off-year elections, candidates supported by the Alliances won partial or complete control of the legislatures in twelve states.

• They also won six governorships, three seats in the U.S. Senate, and approximately fifty in the U.S. House of Representatives.

• Many of the successful Alliance candidates were Democrats who had benefited— often passively—from Alliance endorsements

• The election of 1892 (which restored Grover Cleveland to the presidency) demonstrated the potential power of the new movement.

• The Populist presidential candidate was James B. Weaver of Iowa, a former Greenbacker who received the nomination after the death of Leonidas Polk, the early favorite.

The Populist Constituency

• The Populists dreamed of creating a broad political coalition.

• But populism always appealed principally to farmers, particularly to small farmers with little long-range economic security— people whose operations were minimally mechanized, if at all, who relied on one crop, and who had access only to limited credit.

• In the Midwest, the Populists were usually family farmers struggling to hold on to their land (or to get it back).

• In the South, there were many modest landowners too, but in addition there were significant numbers of sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

• Whatever their differences, however, most Populists had at least one thing in common: they were engaged in a type of farming that was becoming less viable in the face of new, mechanized, diversified, and consolidated commercial agriculture.

• Populists tended to be not only economically but also culturally marginal.

• The movement appealed above all to geographically isolated farmers who felt cut off from the mainstream of national life and resented their isolation.

• Populism gave such people an outlet for their grievances; it also provided them with a social experience, a sense of belonging to a community that they had previously lacked.

• The Populists were also notable for the groups they failed to attract.

• One exception was the Rocky Mountain states, where the Populists did have some significant success in attracting miners to their cause

• In the South, white Populists struggled with the question of whether to accept African Americans into the party.

• Their numbers and poverty made black farmers possibly valuable allies.

• There was an important black component to the movement—a network of “Colored Alliances” that by 1890 had more than one and a quarter million members.

• But most white Populists were willing to accept the assistance of African Americans only as long as it was clear that whites would remain indisputably in control.

• When southern conservatives began to attack the Populists for undermining white supremacy, the interracial character of the movement quickly faded.

• Most of the Populist leaders were members of the rural middle class: professional people, editors and lawyers, or longtime politicians and agitators.

Populist Ideas

• It proposed a system of “sub treasuries,” which would replace and strengthen the cooperatives of Grangers and Alliances that had been experimenting for years

• the Populists called for the abolition of national banks, the end of absentee ownership of land, the direct election of U.S. senator

• They called as well for regulation and (after 1892) government ownership of railroads, telephones, and telegraphs.

• And they demanded a system of government-operated postal savings banks, a graduated income tax, and the inflation of the currency.

• Eventually, the party as a whole embraced the demand of its western members for the remonetization of silver.

• Some Populists were openly anti-Semitic, pointing to the Jews as leaders of the obscure fi nancial forces

• Others were anti-intellectual, anti-eastern, and anti-urban.

• Yet the occasional bigotry of some Populists should not dominate the image of Populism as a whole, which was a serious effort to find solutions to real problems.

19.2: The Crisis of the 1980s

The Panic of 1893

• The Panic of 1893 precipitated the most severe depression the nation had yet experienced.

• It began in March 1893, when the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, unable to meet payments on loans, declared bankruptcy.

• Two months later, the National Cordage Company failed as well.

• Together, the two corporate failures triggered a collapse of the stock market.

• And since many of the major New York banks were heavy investors in the stock market, a wave of bank failures soon began.

• That caused a contraction of credit, which meant that many of the new, aggressive, and loan-dependent businesses soon went bankrupt.

• Depressed prices in agriculture since 1887 had weakened the purchasing power of farmers, the largest group in the population. Depression conditions in Europe caused a loss of American markets abroad and a withdrawal by foreign investors of gold invested in the United States

• The depression reflected the degree to which the American economy was now interconnected, the degree to which failures in one area affected all other areas.

• And the depression showed how dependent the economy was on the health of the railroads, which remained the nation’s most powerful corporate and financial institutions.

• When the railroads suffered, as they did beginning in 1893, everything suffered.

• Once the panic began, its effects spread with startling speed.

• Within six months, more than 8,000 businesses, 156 railroads, and 400 banks failed.

• Already low agricultural prices tumbled further. Up to 1 million workers, 20 percent of the labor force, lost their jobs—the highest level of unemployment in American history to that point.

• The depression was unprecedented not only in its severity but also in its persistence.

• Although there was some improvement beginning in 1895, prosperity did not fully return until 1901

• To many middle-class Americans, the labor turmoil of the time—the Homestead and Pullman strikes, was a sign of dangerous instability, even perhaps a revolution. Labor radicalism—some of it real, more of it imagined by the frightened middle class—heightened the general sense of crisis among the public.

The Silver Question

• The financial panic weakened the government’s monetary system.

• President Cleveland believed that the instability of the currency was the primary cause of the depression.

• The “money question,” therefore, became the basis for some of the most dramatic political conflicts of the era.

• At the heart of the complicated debate was the question of what would form the basis of the dollar.

• Today, the value of the dollar rests on little more than public confidence in the government.

• But in the nineteenth century, many people believed that currency was worthless if there was not something concrete behind it—precious metal (species), which holders of paper money could collect if they presented their currency to a bank or to the Treasury.

• During most of its existence as a nation, the United States had recognized two metals—gold and silver—as a basis for the dollar, a situation known as “bimetallism

• In 1873, Congress passed a law that seemed simply to recognize the existing situation by officially discontinuing silver coinage.

• Few people objected at the time.

• Before long, many Americans concluded that a conspiracy of big bankers had been responsible for the “demonetization” of silver and referred to the law as the “Crime of ’73.”

• The other group consisted of discontented farmers, who wanted an increase in the quantity of money—and inflation of the currency—as a means of raising the prices of farm products and easing payment of the farmers’ debts.

• The inflationists demanded that the government return at once to “free silver”—that is, to the “free and unlimited coinage of silver” at the old ratio of 16 to 1.

• But by the time the depression began in 1893, Congress had made no more than a token response to their demands.

• At the same time, the nation’s gold reserves were steadily dropping.

• President Cleveland believed that the chief cause of the weakening gold reserves was the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890

• Supporters of the gold standard considered its survival essential to the honor and stability of the nation.

• Supporters of free silver considered the gold standard an instrument of tyranny.

• “Free silver” became to them a symbol of liberation.

• Silver would be a “people’s money

19.3: “A Cross of Gold”

The Emergence of Bryan

• As the election of 1896 approached, Republicans, watching the failure of the Democrats to deal effectively with the depression, were confident of success

• The Republican platform opposed the free coinage of silver except by agreement with the leading commercial nations

• The Democratic National Convention of 1896 was the scene of unusual drama.

• Southern and western delegates, eager to neutralize the challenge of the People’s Party, were determined to seize control of the party from conservative easterners and incorporate some Populist demands—among them free silver—into the Democratic platform.

• They wanted as well to nominate a pro-silver presidential candidate.

• His great voice echoed through the hall as he defended “free silver” in what became one of the most famous political speeches in American history.

• The Populists had embraced the free-silver cause, but most Populists still believed that other issues were more important.

• Many argued that “fusion” with the Democrats—who had endorsed free silver but ignored most of the other Populist demands—would destroy their party.

The Conservative Victory

• The campaign of 1896 produced desperation among conservatives.

• The business and financial community, frightened beyond reason at the prospect of a Bryan victory, contributed lavishly to the Republican campaign, which may have spent as much as $7 million, as compared to the Democrats’ $300,000.

• He became the first presidential candidate in American history to stump every section of the country systematically, to appear in villages and hamlets, indeed the first to say frankly to the voters that he wanted to be president

• For the Populists and their allies, the election results were a disaster.

• They had gambled everything on their “fusion” with the Democratic Party and lost.

• Within months of the election, the People’s Party began to dissolve.

• Never again would American farmers unite so militantly to demand economic reform.

McKinley and Recovery

• The administration of William McKinley, which began in the aftermath of the turmoil, saw a return to relative calm

• McKinley and his allies committed themselves fully to only one issue, one on which they knew virtually all Republicans agreed: the need for higher tariff rates.

• Within weeks of his inauguration, the administration won the approval of the Dingley Tariff, raising duties to the highest point in American history

• And so the “battle of the standards” ended in victory for the forces of conservatism.

• Economic developments at the time seemed to vindicate the Republicans.

• Prosperity began to return in 1898. Foreign crop failures sent farm prices surging upward, and American business entered another cycle of expansion.

• Prosperity and the gold standard, it seemed, were closely allied.

• But while the free-silver movement had failed, it had raised an important question for the American economy

19.4: Stirrings of Imperialism

The New Manifest Destiny

• Several developments helped shift American attention to lands across the seas.

• Foreign trade became increasingly important to the American economy in the late nineteenth century.

• Many Americans began to consider the possibility of acquiring colonies that might expand such markets further.

• Americans were well aware of the imperialist fever that was raging through Europe and leading the major powers to partition most of Africa among themselves and to turn eager eyes on the Far East and the feeble Chinese Empire

• Some Americans feared that their nation would soon be left out, that no territory would remain to be acquired.

• The same distortion of Darwinism that industrialists and others had long been applying to domestic economic affairs in the form of Social Darwinism was now applied to world affairs

Hemispheric Hegemony

• In October 1889, Blaine helped organize the first PanAmerican Congress, which attracted delegates from nineteen nations.

• The delegates agreed to create the Pan-American Union, a weak international organization located in Washington, D.C., that served as a clearinghouse of information to the member nations.

• The Cleveland administration took a similarly active interest in Latin America

Hawaii and Samoa

• The islands of Hawaii in the mid-Pacifi c had been an important way station for American ships in the China trad

• By the 1880s, officers of the expanding American navy were looking covetously at Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu as a possible permanent base for U.S. ships

• When the first Americans arrived in Hawaii in the 1790s on merchant ships from New England, there were perhaps a half million people living there.

• Battles among rival communities were frequent, as ambitious chieftains tried to consolidate power over their neighbors.

• The arrival of these merchants, missionaries, and planters was devastating to traditional Hawaiian society.

• The newcomers inadvertently brought infectious diseases to which the Hawaiians, like the American Indians before them, were tragically vulnerable.

• By the mid-nineteenth century, more than half the native population had died.

• In 1887, the United States negotiated a treaty with Hawaii that permitted it to open a naval base at Pearl Harbor.

• By then, growing sugar for export to America had become the basis of the Hawaiian economy—as a result of an 1875 agreement allowing Hawaiian sugar to enter the United States duty-free.

• The American-dominated sugar plantation system not only displaced native Hawaiians from their lands but also sought to build a workforce with Asian immigrants, whom the Americans considered more reliable and more docile than the natives.

• Three thousand miles south of Hawaii, the Samoan islands had also long served as a way station for American ships in the Pacific trade

• But Great Britain and Germany were also interested in the islands, and they too secured treaty rights from the native princes.

• For the next ten years, the three powers jockeyed for dominance in Samoa

• Finally, the three nations agreed to share power over Samoa.

• The three-way arrangement failed to halt the rivalries of its members; and in 1899, the United States and Germany divided the islands between them, compensating Britain with territories elsewhere in the Pacific.

• The United States retained the harbor at Pago Pago

19.5: War with Spain

Controversy over Cuba

• The Spanish-American War was a result of events in Cuba, which along with Puerto Rico now represented all that remained of Spain’s once extensive American empire.

• Cubans had been resisting Spanish rule since at least 1868.

• Many Americans had sympathized with the Cubans during that long struggle, but the United States had not intervened.

• In 1895, the Cubans rebelled again.

• This revolution produced a ferocity on both sides that horrified many Americans.

• The Cubans deliberately devastated the island to force the Spaniards to leave

• While excitement over the de Lôme letter was still high, the American battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor with a loss of more than 260 people.

• The ship had been ordered to Cuba in January to protect American lives and property.

• Many Americans assumed that the Spanish had sunk the ship, particularly when a naval court of inquiry hastily and inaccurately reported that an external explosion by a submarine mine had caused the disaster.

• War hysteria swept the country, and Congress unanimously appropriated $50 million for military preparations.

• “Remember the Maine!” became a national chant for revenge

A Splendid Little War

• Secretary of State John Hay called the Spanish-American conflict “a splendid little war,” an opinion that most Americans— except many of the enlisted men who fought in it

• And yet the American war effort was not without difficulties.

• United States soldiers faced serious supply problems: a shortage of modern rifles and ammunition, uniforms too heavy for the warm Caribbean weather, inadequate medical services, and skimpy, almost indigestible food

• There were racial conflicts.

• A significant proportion of the American invasion force consisted of black soldiers.

• Some were volunteer troops put together by African American communities

• Racial tensions continued in Cuba, where African Americans played crucial roles in some of the important battles of the war

Seizing the Philippines

• By an accident of history, the assistant secretary of the navy during the Cuban revolution was Theodore Roosevelt, an ardent Anglophile eager to see the United States join the British and other nations as imperial powers

• British friends had persuaded him that the war in Cuba gave the United States a rare opportunity to expand the American empire.

• Roosevelt responded by sending the navy’s Pacific fleet to the Philippines, with orders to attack as soon as American declared wa

The Battle for Cuba

• The war in Cuba continued after the capture of the Philippines.

• At first, the American commanders planned a long period of training before actually sending troops into combat.

• But when a Spanish fleet under Admiral Pascual Cervera slipped past the American navy into Santiago harbor on the southern coast of Cuba, plans changed quickly

• Roosevelt himself emerged unscathed, but nearly a hundred of his soldiers were killed or wounded.

• He remembered the battle as “the great day of my life.”

• Under the terms of the armistice, Spain recognized the independence of Cuba.

• It ceded Puerto Rico (now occupied by American troops) and the Pacific island of Guam to the United States.

• And it accepted continued American occupation of Manila pending the final disposition of the Philippines.

Puerto Rico and the United States

• The annexation of Puerto Rico produced relatively little controversy in the United States

• As Puerto Rican society became increasingly distinctive, resistance to Spanish rule began to emerge, just as it had in Cuba.

• The Puerto Rican sugar industry flourished as it took advantage of the American market that was now open to it without tariffs.

• As in Hawaii, Americans began establishing large sugar plantations on the island and hired natives to work them; many of the planters did not even live in Puerto Rico.

• The growing emphasis on sugar as a cash crop, and the transformation of many Puerto Rican farmers into paid laborers, led to a reduction in the growing of food for the island.

The Debate over the Philippines

• Although the annexation of Puerto Rico produced relatively little controversy, the annexation of the Philippines

• McKinley claimed to be reluctant to support annexation.

• The Filipinos were “unfit for self government.”

• The only solution was “to take them all and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them.”

• The Treaty of Paris, signed in December 1898, brought a formal end to the war.

• It confirmed the terms of the armistice concerning Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam.

• American negotiators startled the Spanish by demanding that they cede the Philippines to the United States, something the original armistice had not included. The Spanish objected briefly, but an American offer of $20 million for the islands softened their resistance.

• They accepted all the American terms.

• In the U.S. Senate, however, resistance was fierce.

• During the debate over ratification of the treaty, a powerful anti- imperialist movement arose around the country to oppose acquisition of the Philippines

• Favoring ratification was an equally varied group

19.6: The Republic as Empire

Governing the Colonies

• Three of the American dependencies—Hawaii, Alaska (acquired from Russia in 1867), and Puerto Rico—presented relatively few problems.

• They received territorial status (and their residents American citizenship) relatively quickly: Hawaii in 1900, Alaska in 1912, and Puerto Rico in 1917.

• The U.S. Navy took control of the Pacific islands of Guam and Tutuila.

• Some of the smallest, least populated Pacific islands now under American control the United States simply left alone.

• When Cuba drew up a constitution that made no reference to the United States, Congress responded by passing the Platt Amendment in 1901 and pressured Cuba into incorporating its terms into its constitution.

• Americans poured into Cuba, buying up plantations, factories, railroads, and refineries

• As in Puerto Rico and Hawaii, sugar production—spurred by access to the American market— increasingly dominated the island’s economy and subjected it to the same cycle of booms and busts that so plagued other sugar-producing appendages of the United States economy.

The Philippine War

• Americans did not like to think of themselves as imperial rulers in the European mold.

• Yet, like other imperial powers, the United States soon discovered—as it had discovered at home in its relations with the Indians—that subjugating another people required more than ideals; it also required strength and brutality.

• That, at least, was the lesson of the American experience in the Philippines, where American forces soon became engaged in a long and bloody war with insurgent forces fighting for independence.

• The conflict in the Philippines is the least remembered of all American wars.

• It was also one of the longest, lasting from 1898 to 1902, and one of the most vicious

• The Filipinos had been rebelling against Spanish rule even before 1898.

• And as soon as they realized the Americans had come to stay, they rebelled against them as well.

• By 1902, reports of the brutality and of the American casualties had soured the American public on the war.

• But by then, the rebellion had largely exhausted itself and the occupiers had established control over most of the islands.

• The key to their victory was the March 1901 capture of Aguinaldo, who later signed a document urging his followers to stop fighting and declaring his own allegiance to the United States.

• In the meantime, a succession of American governors gradually increased Filipino political autonomy.

• On July 4, 1946, the islands gained their independence

The Open Door

• The acquisition of the Philippines greatly increased the already strong American interest in Asia.

• Americans were particularly concerned about the future of China, with which the United States had an important trade and which was now so enfeebled that it provided a tempting target for exploitation by stronger countries.

• By 1900, England, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan were beginning to carve up China among themselves.

• They pressured the Chinese government for “concessions,” which gave them effective control over various regions, most along the coast of China.

• In some cases, they simply seized Chinese territory and claimed it as their own.

• Many Americans feared that the process would soon cut them out of the China trade altogether.

• Eager for a way to advance American interests in China without risking war

• Europe and Japan received the Open Door proposals coolly.

• Russia openly rejected them; the other powers claimed to accept them in principle but to be unable to act unless all the other powers agreed

The Modern Military System

• The war with Spain had revealed glaring deficiencies in the American military system.

• The army had exhibited the greatest weaknesses, but the entire military organization had demonstrated problems of supply, training, and coordination.

• Between 1900 and 1903, the Root reforms enlarged the regular army from 25,000 to a maximum of 100,000.

• They established federal army standards for the National Guard, ensuring that never again would the nation fi ght a war with volunteer regiments trained and equipped differently than those in the regular army.