Final paper

American Lives: Sitting Bull and the American West

Sitting Bull was born on the northern Great Plains (in present-day South Dakota) in about 1831. He distinguished himself as an accomplished buffalo hunter and warrior among the Hunkpapa, part of the seven-tribe confederacy that made up the Western Sioux, or Lakota, and his brave record and high rank among his people led to his designation as a war chief. Also a holy man responsible for his people’s spiritual well-being, Sitting Bull initially encouraged the Lakota to interact with White Americans who sought to trade and barter with Native Americans at various trading posts established along the Missouri River.

However, as increasingly more White traders, and the U.S. Army, moved into the region, relations between the Lakota and the Americans worsened. Discovery of gold in the Dakota Territory and western Montana in 1874, and the gold rush that followed, led to a series of battles that resulted in the cession of many Native American lands and the confinement of Native Americans onto designated reservations on the Great Plains. Sitting Bull emerged as the leader of all the tribes and bands who refused to sign treaties with the U.S. government. He became a symbol of Native Americans’ final resistance to the encroachment of White settlement.

Sitting Bull and his followers adopted a defensive strategy and experienced significant victories in keeping the army at bay. In June 1876 he oversaw the warriors who decimated Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his cavalry regiment at the Battle of Little Big Horn, in eastern Montana territory, in which Custer and 262 of his men died. In the aftermath, however, the army gained the upper hand in the conflict. Sitting Bull fled to Canada with many of his followers, but when he returned to the United States, he was arrested and jailed for 2 years.

Upon his release, Sitting Bull tried to comply with the government’s assimilation program by briefly becoming a farmer. The arid plains environment made farming without irrigation nearly impossible, however, and his crops failed. Despondent that the traditional Native American lifestyle was no longer an option, Sitting Bull grasped for any opportunity to earn a living. He traveled for a season as a performer in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, reenacting his peoples’ defeat for White audiences in the eastern United States and Europe. Although the experience proved painful and humiliating, he endured multiple performances before crowds who came to see an authentic Native American.

When a new religious movement known as the Ghost Dance gained popularity among the Lakota, Sitting Bull once again became a target of government concern. Officials saw him as an apostle of the movement, which envisioned Native American sovereignty and prosperity and strove for the decline of White control, and they issued orders for his arrest. On December 15, 1890, a conflict erupted between police and Sitting Bull’s supporters, resulting in the death of one of the arresting officers and Sitting Bull himself (Anderson, 1996).

Sitting Bull’s death signaled that Native American resistance was near its end. The lands that Sitting Bull and other Native American tribes sought to defend embodied “the West,” that vast space in which industrialization, adventurism, discrimination, and technology coalesced to forever change the United States.

1.1 Western Settlement

When European settlement began on the Atlantic coast in the 17th and 18th centuries, the western frontier was Ohio and the Old Northwest. For the Spanish explorers arriving in the South and West, the frontier was not the west but the northern region of Native American cultures and French and English settlement. Beyond the colonial period, as American settlement moved to fill up the land beyond the Atlantic coast, the West moved as well. The Old Northwest became the Midwest and the frontier pushed on to the Great Plains, to the lands that Sitting Bull and other Native Americans called home.

Urged forward by new technologies such as the railroad, mechanized farming equipment, and barbed wire, and supported by entrepreneurs and industrialists, Americans filled in the frontier, that region of territory stretching west of the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, by the end of the 19th century. The Lakota and other Plains tribes had first encountered American settlers as they pushed west in wagons on overland trails, but after the Civil War a rapid boom in railroad construction accelerated the process that exchanged Native American villages and hunting grounds for American farms, ranches, and towns.

The Railroad

The rapid western population growth that filled in the frontier could not have happened without the railroad. Only about 50,000 Americans migrated to the Southwest after westward trails were opened in the 1840s, but the floodgates opened when a westward railroad connection was completed in 1869 and migrants could ride the railroad westward (Hine & Faragher, 2007). In the 19th century the railroad symbolized American commercial and technological development. It was an icon of a new way of life and became a focus of some of the most eloquent writers of the day. In 1855 Walt Whitman, in Leaves of Grass, made this observation about the railroad in America:

I see over my own continent the Pacific railroad surmounting every barrier. I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte carrying freight and passengers. I hear locomotives rushing and roaring, the shrill steam-whistle. I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world. (Whitman, 2012)

The railroad also symbolized the new connectedness in America, since it united various parts of the nation like never before. The Transcontinental Railroad, constructed between 1863 and 1869, linked two major railroad construction projects, finally connecting the nation from east to west. Newly arrived immigrants, Chinese workers moving out of the mining fields, and large numbers of Mormons provided the bulk of the arduous labor required to clear land, lay track, and tunnel through mountains. By 1900 there were 200,000 miles of railroad track in the United States (White, 2012).

Railroad construction was difficult and exhausting, but many immigrant workers found it provided an opportunity to earn enough money to return to their homeland and live richly. Chinese railroad laborer We Wen Tan helped construct the railroad that moved eastward from California to Utah. He was present at the symbolic moment on May 10, 1869, when the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads met at Promontory Point in Utah. Upon its completion, he returned to his home village in China with the equivalent of $10,000, considered a fortune at the time. He built a large home and eventually sent his son to the United States (Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, 2014).

Homesteaders and Immigrant Farmers on the Great Plains

Another factor contributing to westward expansion was the Homestead Act. Passed by Congress in 1862 in the midst of the Civil War, the Homestead Act granted 160 acres of land in the public domain to any settler who lived on it for 5 years and improved it by building a house and plowing. The law reinforced the 19th-century belief in free labor (the notion that one could make free employment choice), and that the ownership of land defined American success. Proponents of the free labor ideology linked property ownership and hard work to independence and the rights of citizenship, and the terms of the Homestead Act enabled thousands of Americans to pursue these values.

The first settlers to take advantage of the Homestead Act had settled in the central and upper Midwest, where soil was rich and farming relatively easy. But by the late 1870s and 1880s, those seeking land were forced to look to the Great Plains, where arid soil, native grasses, and a harsh climate made earning a living off the land more difficult. In the short term the struggles of homesteading the Plains were eased by a multiyear wet cycle in the climate during these years. Above-average rainfall attracted thousands of farmers to settle in the region that had been called “The Great American Desert” just a generation before. In 1886, though, the cycle suddenly reversed. Drought lasted through the mid-1890s, driving half the populations of western Kansas and Nebraska to abandon their farms and move back east (Hine & Faragher, 2007).

Some homesteaders did succeed on the Plains, however. John Bakken, the son of Norwegian immigrants, moved with his family to Milton, North Dakota, to claim a plot of land. There he met and married Marget Axvig, a Norwegian immigrant, who helped him settle a homestead in Silvesta Township, North Dakota. Indeed, although western settlement and farming is often described as a male activity, women were essential to the success of homesteads and ranches. In addition to domestic work, western women often became entrepreneurs or worked for wages, providing capital needed for their own and their families’ survival. Women also played key roles in community building in the West, founding schools and other public institutions (Moynihan, Armitage, & Dichamp, 1998). John and Marget constructed a sod house, where they raised their two children, Tilda and Eddie. A colorized photograph of the family later became the basis of a postage stamp commemorating the Homestead Act.

Although taking advantage of the government land program was one way to populate the frontier, it was the railroads that were most active in the settlement of the Great Plains. Thanks to government grants issued to encourage their growth, western railroad lines controlled large tracts of land. Some settlers purchased land from the railroad in addition to claiming land under the federal homestead program. Railroad executives were eager to build settlement along their lines, and in doing so they increased the diversity of the region’s population.

Agents for some of the railroads enticed easterners and even European immigrants with offers of cheap land on credit and free transportation on the railroad line. Other railroads sponsored or organized settlements. One railroad company sent agents to Germany, where they recruited as many as 60,000 people to settle along the Santa Fe Railway line. Another railroad organized a company that established 16 settlements in Kansas and Colorado. The largest numbers of immigrants were of German extraction, but significant populations also came from Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark. Other immigrants came on their own or in patterns of chain migration following family or other contacts. More than 2 million European immigrants located in the Great Plains between 1870 and 1900 (Hudson, 1985).

Farming on the Great Plains was hard work and required the cooperative effort of all family members. Fathers and sons did the heavy fieldwork of plowing, planting, and harvesting. Women grew vegetables, tended chickens, made butter and cheese, and preserved food for the winter months. Children were also expected to contribute to the household economy by participating in farming chores such as milking the cows or baling hay. As the farming economy grew more competitive, and farm size reduced due to repeated division among heirs, older children often left the farm to seek wage labor in urban areas, with the expectation that part of their wages would be used to help with family expenses. By the late 1880s American farmers had to respond to a multitude of changes in order to compete in the emerging national and global marketplace for agricultural products.

The Southwestern Frontier

The southwestern frontier encompassed the states and territories that stretched along the 1,500-mile border with Mexico, including California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, as well as Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado (see Figure 1.1). Much of the territory had once been part of Spain’s colonial empire. Texas became part of the United States in 1845, and the United States annexed the rest of the region as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War of 1846 to 1848.

Figure 1.1: Map of the Southwest

American settlement encroached on the lands of the Native Americans of the Great Plains, Southwest, and Far West. Once the American frontier was officially closed in 1890, these native peoples lost their lands and strove to preserve their cultural traditions.

A map shows the boundaries of western expansion, along with Native American tribe names. There were six geographical areas of expansion: the Great Plains, the plateau and woodlands, the Northwest coast, California, the Great Basin, and the Southwest.

American expansionism encountered a mix of existing Latino and Native American cultures and societies in the Southwest. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had transferred more than half of Mexico to the United States, and the Southwest remained a region that connected people and communities; migrants and trade moved fluidly between the two nations, establishing a pattern that persists well into the 21st century.

In Texas, ranching and staple crops such as cotton formed the economic base, and like residents of other former slave states, Texans struggled with the economic and social problems of the Reconstruction era. A highly stratified society elevated Americans and descendants of Spaniards, especially those with large landholdings, above the bulk of farm laborers, cowboys, and craft workers.

New Mexico’s inhabitants were more likely to be mestizo, a mix of Native American and Latino descent, who spoke Spanish and worshipped in the Roman Catholic Church. New Mexico, and to a certain degree Arizona, represented an area of the frontier where American and Native American cultures faced less direct conflict, and Native Americans there were not subjected to the federal land allotment policies that severely reduced the landholdings of Native Americans elsewhere in the West. Although the Pueblo tribes persisted in the Southwest, surviving as craft workers and sheep herders, in the spring of 1864 bands of the Navajo people endured what became known as the Long Walk, a forced deportation from their reservation in Arizona territory to Bosque Redondo in New Mexico. Forced to march up to 13 miles a day over an 18-day period, as many as 200 perished during the trek. The Native Americans of California did not fare well either; many had already lost their landholdings to Latinos during the territory’s years as part of New Spain and Mexico.

Latinos in the West

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had granted Mexicans who chose to stay north of the new border U.S. citizenship. However, some people had difficulty adjusting. The Mexicans were originally farmers and herders, but soon the Americans—or Anglos, as they were called—began encroaching on their settlements in much the same way they had encroached on the lands of the Plains tribes. Federal policy at the end of the Mexican War guaranteed Latino residents’ land and property rights, but in practice Americans ignored these.

Unable to hold on to family lands, Latinos found it difficult to compete with Americans and were often relegated to unskilled manual labor. Significant numbers of Mexicans turned to migrant or seasonal farm labor for the first time. Many more, including women, moved to growing towns and cities, where they labored as seamsters or launderers (Daniel, 1981).

Some Mexicans organized to protest the new economic order that took away their lands and reduced employment opportunities, and sought to limit the damage to their communities and families. A New Mexico group ripped up railroad ties and other symbols of the new industrial farming order. Others protested more peacefully, calling for political action to protect their rights. Despite the cultural and economic changes, Latinos in the Southwest managed to preserve and extend their culture. Like the mestizos, most Latinos put their faith in the Catholic Church, but they worshipped with a distinct flair. Special religious days, including those celebrating Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Day of the Dead, remained important reminders of their traditional culture. Other Mexican national holidays, such as Cinco de Mayo (May 5) marking Mexico’s 1862 victory over the French, later expanded to become ubiquitous holidays celebrated across the United States.

Mormon Settlement

Another group of southwestern settlers that would clash with federal authorities, the Mormons, began settling in the Great Basin territory in the 1840s. The Mormons, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, initiated settlements throughout what would become Utah, Idaho, western Colorado, and northern Arizona. The group formed in western New York in the 1830s but fled to Illinois and Missouri in an effort to escape persecution for their religious beliefs, which included polygamy (plural wives). After their founder and leader, Joseph Smith, was murdered, new leader Brigham Young led a large migration westward. In the Great Basin, the Mormons founded the state of Deseret, which eventually included 500 settlements.

Once Congress established Utah Territory in 1850, however, the Mormons clashed with federal authorities over their way of life. Newspaper accounts condemned them as sexual deviants for supporting plural marriage, even though only about 15% of Mormons actually practiced polygamy. A series of federal laws restricted the practice, and in 1879 the Supreme Court ruled against polygamy in the case of Reynolds v. United States. Upholding the Bill of Rights’ guarantee of religious freedom, the court ruled that the Mormons were free to believe in the principle of plural marriage, but it denied the legality of the actual practice.

Two additional laws further restricted their religion. The 1882 Edmunds Act restricted the voting rights of those practicing polygamy and imposed possible fines and jail penalties. The Edmunds–Tucker Act, passed in 1887, confiscated the major financial assets of the Mormon Church and also established a special federal election commission to oversee all elections in Utah Territory. With the frontier rapidly closing, the Mormons had nowhere else to flee. In the early 1890s the church officially renounced the practice of polygamy, and many prominent Mormon communities continued in Utah and other parts of the Great Basin (Eliason, 2001).

Asians in the West

In addition to Native Americans, Latinos, and Mormons, yet another group contributed to the rich social tapestry of the developing Southwest: immigrants from Asia, particularly China. This group was among the thousands of adventurous workers attracted to discoveries of gold and silver in the Southwest, particularly in California. Many citizens and immigrants traversed difficult overland trails to seek their fortune, attracted by the state’s explosive economic development. Between 1860 and 1890 approximately one third of California’s population was foreign born, making it one of the most diverse states in the nation. Immigrants hailing from the German states, Ireland, and Great Britain were common throughout the United States, but the Far West particularly attracted Chinese and other immigrants from Asia.

First arriving in the years surrounding the gold rush of 1849, more than 200,000 Chinese immigrants came to California in succeeding decades, where they soon accounted for almost 10% of the state’s population. The presence of the Chinese in America was part of a worldwide Asian migration driven by economic distress in their homelands caused by overpopulation and lack of employment opportunities.

Their anguish coincided with a desperate need for labor in the West, especially for railroad construction. Merchants and brokers in the United States arranged passage for the immigrants, almost always single men, who agreed to repay the debt they incurred from travel once they secured employment. Many men were recruited by a San Francisco–based confederation of Chinese merchants called the Chinese Six Companies, which acted as an employment agency and helped immigrants acclimate to the state’s social and economic systems. The few female immigrants worked as domestic servants or prostitutes (Takaki, 1990).

Chinese immigrants worked in the gold fields as laborers, cooks, and launderers until the fields played out, meaning no more gold could be extracted from them. Few were prosperous enough to stake a gold mining claim on their own. Unlike owning the land outright, a mining claim only gave the holder rights to extract the minerals below the surface. When railroad construction began in earnest, Chinese workers dominated crews on the Central Pacific, eventually accounting for the majority of the company’s employees. Many were specifically recruited to provide backbreaking pick and shovel labor constructing the railroad across the Sierra Nevada.

After 1869, when the Transcontinental Railroad was completed, the Chinese spread into the larger general labor pool. There they fell into competition with Latino and White laborers and faced considerable nativism and racism. White labor organizations campaigned against the use of Chinese labor, arguing that they drove down wages for American citizens. Violent clashes between American and Chinese workers became common, leading to anti-Chinese mobs in San Francisco in the late 1870s. A growing movement led by an Irish-born labor organizer named Denis Kearney lashed out with the slogan “The Chinese Must Go!” (as cited in Hagaman, 2004, p. 61).

Kearney’s followers formed the backbone of the anti-Chinese movement among White workers in Northern California. Kearney helped organize the Workingmen’s Party of California, the goal of which was to protect the place of White workers in American society. By 1878 Kearney was leading the charge against competition from inexpensive immigrant labor, and the Chinese specifically. He traveled as far as Boston to warn audiences about the potential competitive threat that inexpensive Asian labor posed to American workers.

The workers’ cries against Chinese competition developed a political component, and soon both the Democratic and Republican Parties in California demanded that Congress act to protect American workers against what some employers dubbed the “indispensable enemy” because of the key roles the Chinese immigrants played in western development (Saxton, 1995). The government responded in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned the entrance of Chinese laborers for a span of 10 years. Renewed in 1892 and eventually made permanent in 1902, it effectively cut off the flow of Asian immigration into the United States until the middle of the 20th century.

1.2 The Western Economy

Agriculture drove the economic expansion of the trans-Mississippi West after 1865. Although gold rushes and mining booms initially attracted rushes of settlement, farming was the most common economic pursuit among westerners. The number of farms in the United States doubled between 1865 and 1900, with most of this growth coming from the expanding West. Homesteaders used the newly invented steel plow to break the tough grasslands of the Great Plains, shifting the nation’s breadbasket from New York’s Hudson River valley to the emerging settlements in the Midwest. In the Southwest and Far West, ranchers invested in herds of cattle to graze on natural grasslands and provide meat and dairy products to the nation. The railroads enabled these important changes, hauling cattle and grains to faraway markets and making it possible for farmers to produce more and compete in national and even global markets.

Ranching on the Open Range

Cattle ranching on the open range characterized parts of the Southwest, and especially the Great Plains. Ranchers purchased large herds of cattle, including the popular Texas longhorns, and set them to graze across vast expanses of open and largely unoccupied land. A mix of English and Spanish stock, the hearty longhorns’ numbers had increased exponentially during the Civil War. Armed with their namesake horns, they also required little protection against predators, making them easy to manage. Massive herds of cattle flourished, making the industry one of the most profitable in the West.

Ranching grew rapidly once railroads reached into the West. Way stations in Abilene, Kansas, shipped out 35,000 head of cattle after workers completed the Kansas Pacific Railway in 1867, and over the next 5 years ranchers shipped more than 1.5 million head of Texas longhorns from Abilene. Wichita and Dodge City, Kansas, grew up as market towns in competition with Abilene, and ranchers in the region increased the volume of western cattle transported by rail to distribution centers and slaughterhouses in faraway St. Louis and Chicago. Serving as the nation’s leading meatpacking city, as well as a central hub for east–west railroad lines, Chicago contained the massive Union Stock Yards, where workers could slaughter and process up to 21,000 cattle daily (Hine & Faragher, 2007).

Diversity characterized the ranching frontier. Cowboys, as seasonal migrant workers, were critical to the open range. They drove the herds of cattle as far as 1,500 miles for grazing and rounded them up for sale in the market towns. In return for a monthly salary of $25 to $40, payable at the end of the drive, cowboys worked from sunup to sundown and spent much of their time out in the open range with little in the way of shelter or other comforts. A diverse lot, White American cowboys were likely to work side by side with Native Americans, African Americans, and Latinos. Regardless of their ethnic background, cowboys tended to share camaraderie made necessary by a job that brought them together in the desolate conditions of the open cattle drive.

African American cowboys found opportunities in the West not available to them in the East. One of these men was Daniel W. Wallace, who began driving cattle as a teenager and ultimately purchased a 1,200-acre ranch in Texas that grazed 500 to 600 head of cattle. For more than 30 years, he remained a member of the White-dominated Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. One of the most respected African American ranchers in the state, when he died in 1939, his estate was valued at more than $1 million (Earnest & Sance, 2010).

Closing of the Range

Cattle ranching grew more lucrative in the late 1870s and early 1880s, attracting eastern and even European investors, but the westward migration of settlers onto the Great Plains ultimately interfered with its expansive use of the open range. Settlers laid claim to or bought the land once open to all for grazing. Farmers raised fences to keep cattle out of their fields and tilled increasing swathes of the region’s grasslands on which ranchers depended to feed their growing herds.

Overstocking of cattle glutted the market, and weather-related disasters such as blizzards took a devastating toll on the industry in the mid-1880s. The massive herds depleted the native grasses as well, causing many cattle to die of starvation. The free-for-all of open range grazing fell by the wayside as more business-oriented techniques came into favor. Instead of cattle drives across hundreds of miles by lonesome cowboys, the industry concentrated herds on fixed ranches contained in fenced pastures and fed them a diet that consisted largely of grain (Kantor, 1998).

Mining the Frontier

California and the rest of the desert Southwest proved to be rich in mineral resources. The discovery of California gold in 1848 drew prospectors from the other parts of the United States, Europe, and Asia, all seeking to strike it rich. Between 1848 and 1852 the population of California grew from 14,000 to nearly a quarter million.

Mineral richness was not limited to California. Arizona held important deposits of copper, and Nevada was home to a massive silver deposit known as the Comstock Lode. The massive vein of silver Henry Comstock discovered along the Carson River sparked an influx of more than 10,000 miners seeking to make a fortune. Most were disappointed when they discovered that the silver lay deep underground, requiring a capital investment of $900,000 and the skill of engineers to drill some 3,000 feet underground to manage its extraction (James, 1998). Investors and mining corporations encouraged settlement of frontier towns, and when the railroad made transportation of goods and passengers possible, the shipping trade grew into its own important industry.

Mining Boomtowns

Mining towns blossomed overnight, employing ancillary agents as merchants and grocers. Saloons, dance halls, newspapers, and theaters were established to provide services and entertainment to miners and prospectors. In these boomtowns men outnumbered women, sometimes by as much as 10 to 1, and few arrived with their families in tow. Boardinghouses filled with single men, and theaters and amateur sporting events occupied the miners’ spare time. It was the saloon, however, that featured most famously in the leisure culture of the Far West. There miners mingled with ranch hands and gamblers to relax and socialize. Saloons served beer and whiskey, but they also provided food and limited lodging for travelers. Many saloons offered entertainment such as poker or other games of chance and also featured dancing women who sometimes doubled as prostitutes (Dixon, 2005).

The Mining Economy

By the 1870s control of the western mining industry was concentrated into the hands of a few wealthy men. Among them was George Hearst, who became rich through his investment in the Comstock Lode. Hearst later invested in the Homestake Mine located on former Lakota land in South Dakota’s Black Hills. It turned out to be the most productive gold mine of the era. Although some individuals continued to prospect on their own, the majority of miners worked for corporations.

Mining of gold and silver turned out to be short lived, and base minerals such as copper, ore, lead, and other heavy metals came to dominate the industry. Mining work was dangerous and difficult, and miners began organizing unions to demand better pay and safer working conditions. In 1893 the Western Federation of Miners organized, initially to prevent employers from using violence during workplace disputes. It eventually called for radical changes in the economic and social order. Within a few years the organization claimed more than 50,000 members and was the strongest labor organization in the West (Hine & Faragher, 2007).

The effects of the growing mining industry were felt beyond the fast urbanization of boomtowns. Cattle ranches in Southern California shipped meat to miners in the state’s northern counties. Inland valley farmers increased their production of wheat and other staple crops to feed the growing population. Easterners and immigrants began to take advantage of cheap land and earn their fortunes in agriculture. Irish immigrant James Irvine came to California with the gold rush, invested in land and merchandising, and eventually controlled the massive 120,000 acre Irvine Ranch, now the city of Irvine (Kyle, 1990). Concentration of land, mining, and industry quickly came to replace the free-for-all culture of the mining booms.

1.3 The Defeat of the Plains Tribes

The conquest of the West is as much a story of miners exploring and exposing gold and silver mines, or of cattle ranchers settling the western grasslands with their large herds, as it is of Whites displacing and conquering Native Americans.

At the end of the Civil War, nearly 250,000 Native Americans resided in the West. Southern tribes, including the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw, had been forcibly moved to the Indian Territory (today’s state of Oklahoma) in the 1830s. Tribes like the Apache, Hopi, and Navajo, native to the Southwest, were destroyed or pushed into submission by the 1870s. By that time the largest segment of Native Americans (about two thirds of the population) resided on the Great Plains. Among them were Sitting Bull’s Lakota, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, and the Comanche. Their defeat ensured American control of western territory, opening final areas of the frontier to American settlement and industrial expansion.

Plains Culture

Since acquiring the horse from the Spanish in the 17th century, the Plains tribes had lived a nomadic existence, traveling along with the buffalo herds on which they depended for food and other basic necessities of life. Using the horse to excel at hunting and warfare, Plains people were skilled fighters who proved to be formidable opponents of the U.S. Cavalry units sent to secure the West for American development.

Though they formed tribes with several thousand members, Plains tribes’ nomadic existence made division into smaller bands necessary. Within the Lakota tribe, for example, Sitting Bull’s band of Hunkpapa operated as an independent group with a chief and tribal council. Conflict among tribes was common, especially as the numbers of buffalo declined and bands competed for a scarce food supply.

Decline of the American Buffalo

The once numerous American buffalo herds were rapidly depleted by travelers and settlers, who often shot them for sport. This illustration shows White settlers shooting buffalo while riding on a train.

Before Europeans came to the eastern shores of North America, the continent swarmed with great dark herds of buffalo. By some estimates 30 million roamed the land. Once they began to use horses for hunting, which allowed the easy slaughter of more of the massive beasts, the Plains tribes depended on the buffalo for almost every element of their survival: food for eating, hides for clothing and shelter, bones for weapons and tools. According to one scholar, the buffalo not only was Native Americans’ chief source of food, it also “contributed vitally to the shape of their political and social institutions and spiritual beliefs” (Utley, 2003).

Several forces contributed to the decimation of the buffalo. In the late 1860s the Union Pacific Railroad split the great herd into a northern and southern half. To passengers on these trains, bored with the long journey, the herds of slow-moving buffalo became an entertaining diversion. Passengers with rifles often shot at the buffalo for sport, and the buffalo hunt and excursion was born.

In the early 1870s those working in tanneries on the East Coast realized that buffalo hides made excellent leather products. This sparked a wave of “hide hunters,” who were responsible for killing up to 3 million American buffalo a year. White hunters were not solely responsible for the destruction of the expansive herds. Once the market for buffalo hides grew, Native Americans accelerated their hunting with an aim to make a profit. They grew eager to participate in the national economy and engaged in a wide trade in buffalo hides. Within a short time the southern herd of American buffalo was almost completely extinct. Remarkably, in 1883 the United States sent a scientific expedition to the frontier; when the expedition returned home, its members reported that they could only find 200 buffalo in the entire western half of the United States. Some Americans spoke out against the killing of the buffalo, but their voices were in the minority.

Federal Native American Policy

The movement of American settlement into the West was accompanied by a continually changing relationship between the U.S. government and the Native Americans. Despite major cessions of tribal lands and multiple treaties guaranteeing their landholdings, pressure from White settlers prompted the federal government to renegotiate agreements and sometimes to take Native American lands by force.

The last 3 decades of the 19th century witnessed a final push to remove Native Americans from desirable land, concentrate their existence onto increasingly smaller plots, and urge their assimilation into the dominant White culture. While some tribes readily bowed to government pressure, others took up arms in a final effort to maintain cultural and political autonomy. Their resistance stood at odds with the federal government’s desire to extinguish tribal society through education, land policies, and federal law.

Expanding the Reservation System

A permanent policy of creating small reservations onto which individual tribes could be isolated and controlled gained prominence among federal policy makers. At a meeting in 1851, the U.S. government gave the leaders of the Plains tribes gifts and bounties in return for accepting these tribal limitations. The government gave the Dakota region north of the Platte River to the Lakota, the area west of the Powder River to the Crow, and the foothills of Colorado to the Cheyenne and Arapaho (Billington & Ridge, 2001). Advocates of the reservations hoped that the policy would help Native Americans assimilate into the larger mainstream culture of the United States.

The reservation areas included land that had limited agricultural use and was therefore of little interest to White settlers. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, the federal agency created in 1824 to oversee policies related to Native Americans, designated agents to tend to tribal needs (though agents had varying degrees of competence) and keep a watchful eye for any sign of hostility from the tribes. The agents promised the tribal chiefs that concentration onto these reservations was the best strategy because the lands would be theirs “forever.” Most agents were political appointees with little long-term interest in the Native Americans’ well-being, however. Corruption was rampant; some officials, for example, conspired with local ranchers to provide tribes with substandard rations and pocketed the profits.

The reservation policy ended the long history of treaties negotiated (and often ignored) between the federal government and individual tribes. Tribes were designated as “domestic dependent nations” instead of separate nations, subjecting members to federal and territorial laws. As a result, the tribes continued to be subject to federal regulation and oversight.

Diplomacy and the Wars on the Plains

The Plains tribes did not accept the evolving federal policies without objection; from the 1850s to the 1880s there was almost continual fighting. Often this would take the form of small raids, with 30 to 40 Native Americans attacking groups of settlers traveling west. Following the Civil War, the U.S. Army massed its forces in the West and attempted to subdue the Native American threat. Among these troops were four regiments of African American soldiers, nicknamed “Buffalo Soldiers” by their Native American adversaries.

However, despite the conflict, both sides also sought reconciliation. Red Cloud, another leader of the Lakota Sioux and one of the most fearsome foes the U.S. Army had faced, was one leader who pursued diplomacy (though he had doubts of its success). In 1870 the New York Times described Red Cloud as the “most celebrated warrior now living on the American Continent” (as cited in Lehman, 2010, p. 59) as he traveled to Washington, D.C., to give an eloquent speech before government officials. Red Cloud told the officials:

Look at me. . . . Whose voice was first sounded on this land—the red people with bows and arrows. The Great Father says he is good and kind to us. I can’t see it. I am good to his white people. From the word sent me I have come all the way to his house. My face is red, yours is white. The Great Spirit taught you to read and write but not me. . . . The white children have surrounded me and have left me nothing but an island. When we first had this land we were strong, now we are melting like snow on the hillside while you are growing like spring grass. (as cited in Lehman, 2010, p. 59)

Red Cloud had realized that the tribal traditional way of life could not continue among the growing numbers of Whites; thus, he urged his people to transition peacefully into the reservation system. His Washington trip underscored his willingness to work toward the reservation transition but also gave him the opportunity to seek resources such as badly needed farm implements and equipment. His outreach to the government angered Sitting Bull and other leaders of the Native American resistance and led to divisions that further weakened the tribes’ ability to resist.

Little Big Horn

Many Native Americans found life on their isolated reservations unfamiliar and longed for a return to traditional life. Diplomacy one moment led to violence the next, as demonstrated by the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876. The conflict was sparked by the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota, an area the Lakota and other tribes regarded as sacred. The lure of gold made Native American lands much more valuable to Whites, and President Ulysses S. Grant moved to declare the Black Hills region outside the Great Sioux Reservation. The U.S. Army established a presence of several thousand troops to check the increasingly hostile Native American tribes. Meanwhile, thousands of White prospectors, unwilling to wait for government action, swarmed the Native Americans’ land.

At the Battle of Little Big Horn in June 1875, warriors from the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes defeated the Seventh Cavalry regiment and killed Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer.

In 1876 Civil War hero Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry arrived to quell the uprising. One of the most skilled military men in the West, Custer had engaged in multiple conflicts with Native Americans beginning in 1866. His most notorious engagement occurred in November 1868 at the Washita River encampment of a group of Cheyenne. The location near present-day Cheyenne, Oklahoma, served as a winter camp for multiple Native American bands. Custer’s troops surrounded the camp and attacked at dawn, massacring dozens of men, women, and children. Hailed as an important victory in the Indian Wars, the attack enhanced Custer’s reputation but also established his reckless habit of charging into tribal encampments without fully assessing their numbers.

Applying similar logic at Little Big Horn, Custer found himself outnumbered and surrounded. In less than an hour, Native American warriors surrounded Custer and his men and killed more than 200 of them, including Custer. News of the event sparked fear and outrage in the American public. Within weeks army troops spread across the region, forcing the remaining Native Americans to surrender. Congress also attached a “sell or starve” provision to a pending Indian Appropriations Act. This stopped the shipment of much-needed food rations to the Sioux until they ceased hostilities and ceded the Black Hills to the U.S. government. The following year another agreement took the remaining Sioux lands and forced their relocation to reservations (Bruun & Crosby, 1999).

Chief Joseph and the Nez Percé Resistance

The forced confinement of Native Americans on faraway land in Indian Territory or on cramped reservation spaces sparked anger and terror among some tribal members. The Nez Percé, for example, occupied 17 million acres of valuable land in Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington and had generally enjoyed cordial relations with settlers and federal officials. Interactions turned sour in the fall of 1877, however, when the U.S. government ordered the Nez Percé to move to a small reservation in Idaho Territory (Hine & Faragher, 2007). One of their leaders, Chief Joseph, refused to comply with this demand and decided the time had come not to fight, but simply to leave. He led 750 tribe members from their ancestral home in western Idaho toward potential safety in Canada. The journey lasted 4 months and covered more than 1,500 miles. The tribe members successfully evaded pursuit from the American frontier military, though not without some intense periods of fighting. Just 40 miles from the Canadian border, as the group prepared for its final leg from its camp in north-central Montana, the U.S. Army surrounded them and killed most of their leaders (Hampton, 2002). To prevent further death, Chief Joseph surrendered, saying:

I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed; Looking Glass is dead. . . . The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led the young men is dead. It is cold and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. (as cited in Cozzens, 2002)

In many ways Chief Joseph is representative of the larger cultural clash between the United States and the Native Americans. The advancing industrial technologies available to Americans, including the railroad and the telegraph, gave them an immediate advantage in pushing the tribes to the margins. Rapid industrialization and increasing White settlement could not be stopped by the declining numbers of Native Americans, no matter how hard they were willing to fight to preserve their land and traditions.

Geronimo and the End of War in the Southwest

Although the most dramatic conflicts between Native Americans and Whites occurred on the Great Plains, tribes in other western areas mounted strong resistance to the encroachment of American industrial society. The Apache wars were the culminating conflict that took place in the Southwest between 1878 and 1886. Geronimo, a former medicine man, was the leader of the Chiricahua tribe and one of the fiercest opponents of the Native American reservation policy. He made it his mission to resist the forced migration of his people to increasingly remote and inhospitable lands and waged his war throughout Arizona and New Mexico. The United States sent hundreds of soldiers to hunt him down. With each raid Geronimo’s forces dwindled, until he had just a handful left. In 1886 he surrendered, and the American government forced him to live the rest of his life on one of the reservations that he so detested (Kraft, 2000).

Assimilation and the Ghost Dance

While the military clashed with tribes in the Southwest and on the Great Plains, some reformers sought another path to appease Native American hostility and better integrate them into U.S. society. In an early push toward Americanization that would later characterize policies aimed at European immigrants, Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887.

The law resulted in the complete “reorganization of Indian space and culture” (Greenwald, 2002). It divided tribal lands that were formerly held in common by the entire community into 160-acre plots for families and smaller plots for individuals. The Dawes Act also offered U.S. citizenship to Native Americans who accepted this so-called severalty and did not object to the division of tribal lands. Americans believed that dividing tribal land into privately owned parcels would transform Native Americans into citizens and farmers who shared White Americans’ values of free labor and capitalism.

The Lakota Sioux were among the first to be affected by the Dawes Act. Although many Sioux tried to engage in farming, they faced often insurmountable barriers. The severalties were located on arid lands where lack of rainfall made it difficult to produce marketable crops without expensive irrigation systems. Lacking the capital for even the most basic tools, many left their lands fallow, and the government reclaimed unplanted acreage. Arguing that the Sioux had consented to the severalty policy, the federal government opened “unused” portions of their lands to White settlement under the Homestead Act or simply sold the land to speculators. Sitting Bull and his followers stood by as their ancestral lands passed from their control with no arrangements for Native American families residing in the ceded areas (Hine & Faragher, 2007).

Many believed that in order to completely assimilate Native Americans into White American culture, their belief in communal ownership had to end—and that the Dawes Act could achieve this (Hauptman, 1995). As was the result of so many American policies directed toward Native Americans, however, the Dawes Act ended in failure. Instead of empowering tribal families as citizens, it established a new layer of governmental control in their lives and further limited freedoms on the reservations. Only a small percentage of Native Americans actually became farmers, while many more became dependent on the U.S. government for rations to survive.

Education was posited as another way to encourage Native people’s assimilation into White American society. Reformers established off-reservation boarding schools, especially for secondary education. Between 1880 and 1902, 25 such schools were established to educate between 20,000 and 30,000 Native American students. In addition to the basics, youth learned the English language, moral guidance, and vocational education. Although initially many families were coerced into placing their sons and daughters in the schools, over time some Native American families came to see these educational opportunities as a path to a viable future. For the poorest families, the schools were a means for their children to receive food and clothing and, hopefully, a chance at a better life (Stout, 2012).

After just 4 months at the Carlisle School, these Native American men were almost completely stripped of their heritage. Their hair and clothes were now styled like their White contemporaries, and they were taught to despise their culture.

The schools required a critical trade-off, however, because they suppressed or even denigrated traditional Native American practices and culture. Lone Wolf, a member of the Blackfoot tribe, recalled the initial shock of having his long braids, “the pride of all Indians” (as cited in Aitken, 2003, p. 98), snipped off and thrown on the floor upon his arrival at the Carlisle School. Typical Western-style pants and shirts replaced students’ native buckskin clothing. Merta Bercier, an Ojibwe student, recalled how she was taught to hate her culture: “Did I want to be an Indian? After looking at the pictures of Indians on the warpath—fighting, scalping women and children, and Oh! Such ugly faces. No! Indians were mean people—I’m glad I’m not an Indian, I thought” (as cited in Native American Public Telecommunications, 2006).

The Dawes Act and the assimilation movement spurred some Native Americans to engage in spiritual resistance. On New Year’s Day in 1889, for example, Wovoka, a Paiute prophet from Nevada, had a vision during a solar eclipse. He foresaw a time in the future when Native Americans would be reborn in freedom. He and his followers expressed joy through the performance of the Ghost Dance, a ceremony that lasted 5 days and included meditation and slow movements (Lesser, 1978).

The dancers yearned for the return of the buffalo and the retreat of the White settlers. The Ghost Dance celebrated traditional Native American culture and also promoted self-discipline, industriousness, and harmonious relations with Whites. However, government officials misunderstood it as a dangerous act of resistance. The ceremonies spread quickly through the tribal reservations, and, fearing a militant uprising, the U.S. government sought to squelch their messianic messages.

Two weeks after the death of Sitting Bull, the U.S. Army was called in to extinguish a particularly fervent Ghost Dance group that sparked alarm among nearby White residents, especially the reservation’s government agent. On the morning of December 29, 1890, at Wounded Knee Creek on the Lakota reservation in South Dakota, conflict between the Ghost Dancers and better armed military personnel resulted in a massacre of at least 250 Native Americans, many of whom were shot while fleeing. Native American bullets and crossfire from fellow military personnel felled more than two dozen U.S. soldiers. The Ghost Dances came to an end, and the Wounded Knee Massacre came to symbolize the end of frontier-era Native American resistance (see Figure 1.2) (Hittman & Lynch, 1998). The conflict that had stretched over more than 3 centuries lived on in cultural resistance, but the physical fighting ceased.

Figure 1.2: Native American Resistance

The original location of the various tribes of the Great Plains and Southwest appear here, along with major battles or conflicts between Native Americans and the U.S. Army.

A map of the major battles of the Native American resistance. The map also shows fort and reservation locations.

The “West” and the Frontier in American History

Exploring History through Film: Mythology of Buffalo Bill Cody

William "Buffalo Bill" Cody was a scout, buffalo hunter, and showman who is credited with popularizing the cowboy as an icon of the American West.

The death of Sitting Bull and the end of the Ghost Dance marked the cessation of Native American conflict and initiated a new chapter in the relationship between White Americans, Native Americans, and the ideal of the frontier and westward expansion. The idea of an exceptional and ever-expanding western frontier has long permeated American culture and was evident from the earliest European explorations of North America.

In 1890 the U.S. Census Bureau announced that because of the westward migration of Americans spanning more than 5 decades, it was no longer possible to find the “frontier” on a map of the United States because all land had been claimed or settled. This represented an important psychological and physical end to westward expansion. In his reflection on this startling pronouncement, in an article titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1893) declared the cultural significance of the American frontier to be its role as the “meeting point between civilization and savagery” (p. 3).

In his estimation the march of American settlement across the frontier was a triumph of national progress. In the late 19th century, most Americans agreed that conquering the frontier proved that their nation was exceptional and that the suppression of native cultures was natural and necessary to achieve that progress. Looking backward from the perspective of the 21st century, however, it is equally possible to identify the arrogance of a nation and the subjugation of native peoples that characterized colonial conquest.

By the late 19th century, the frontier continued to retain its mythic importance in American culture, largely because it represented the constant movement and changeability of the American spirit. According to prominent western historians, the West is about forward movement, about “getting there,” and the process of moving frontiers requires regular redefinition even today (Hine & Faragher, 2007).

American Lives: Andrew Carnegie

By the late 19th century, steel magnate and immigrant Andrew Carnegie was among the richest men in the world. His life story represents the ultimate rags-to-riches dream of success in America.

In March 1901 steel magnate Andrew Carnegie sold his vast business interests to industrialist and banker J. P. Morgan for a record $480 million. The sale made Carnegie, by some accounts, the richest man in the world, and it allowed Morgan to combine Carnegie’s holdings with his own to form U.S. Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation.

Carnegie was born in Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1835. There his father was displaced from his skilled occupation as a hand weaver when textile mills mechanized cloth production. He brought the family to America in 1848, and after reaching Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Carnegies—Andrew, his brother Tom, and his parents—squeezed into two rooms a relative provided them free of rent.

Since it was not possible to follow his father in the weaving trade, Carnegie took a messenger’s job at a Pittsburgh telegraph office. His earnest work and resourcefulness caught the attention of Thomas A. Scott, a superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who hired him as his personal telegrapher and private secretary at a salary of $35 a month, about $750 in today’s dollars.

Carnegie parlayed the connections he made through Scott into a series of business investments, little by little accumulating enough capital to strike out on his own. He eventually settled on steel manufacturing as his primary focus. Locating his first plant outside Pittsburgh, Carnegie contributed significantly to the shift from skilled to unskilled labor in the steel industry. In many ways he was responsible for creating a situation very like the mechanized textile mills that had pushed his father to leave their homeland in search of new ways to support the family.

Immigrant workers from southern and eastern Europe were drawn to Carnegie’s mills, where they hoped to realize their own success in America. In reality, though, the drive for profit and increased productivity meant that workers at Carnegie Steel faced low pay and increasingly difficult and dangerous working conditions. The average unskilled steel mill worker toiled 12 hours a day in hot and dangerous conditions for less than $2 a shift, about $45 in today’s dollars. When transitioning from day to night turns, which happened twice a month, workers endured a 24-hour shift, followed by a day off. Few experienced any of the upward mobility that characterized their employer’s immigrant experience. Instead, Carnegie fought against the workers’ unionization attempts and did little to assist workers injured on the job.

Carnegie became emblematic of a number of industrialists who grew rich at the expense of their workers around the turn of the 20th century. Somewhat ironically, later in life Carnegie turned toward philanthropy. He established the Carnegie Corporation of New York and endowed nearly 3,000 libraries across the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. Many were located in the same communities as his steel mills, but few of his workers could enjoy the leisure of visiting a library. Giving away almost all his fortune, Carnegie spent his last years in a quest for world peace and harmony. He died in 1919 (Rau, 2006).

2.1 The Immigrants

Between 1877 and 1900 industrialization, urbanization, and immigration reshaped American society. In that period 12 million immigrants flooded into the United States seeking jobs, opportunities, and a better life. Millions of rural Americans abandoned the countryside to seek employment in the cities as well, especially once the mechanization of agriculture reduced the need for farm labor. Arriving in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Birmingham, and other industrial centers, they found themselves amid a sea of unfamiliar faces from around the world.

Coming to America

Unlike earlier waves of immigrants from Ireland, England, Germany, and Scandinavia, many of these “new immigrants” hailed from areas of eastern and southern Europe, as well as from Asian countries like China and Japan. There the forces of industrialization, unemployment, food shortages, and forced military service served as push factors that sent millions across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Among the earliest to arrive were thousands of Italians fleeing an 1887 cholera epidemic. Russian and Polish Jews sought refuge from anti-Semitic pogroms in the 1880s. The majority left their homelands after industrial pressures left them few job opportunities. So many immigrants arrived that by 1890 nearly 15% of the American population was foreign born (see Table 2.1).

Table 2.1: Immigration to the United States, 1860–1900

Just as economic and political factors served to push immigrants from their European and Asian communities, pull factors in America attracted them. Better and cheaper transportation made the transoceanic passage affordable to many, but it was the lure of work that most often figured into the decision to emigrate. Although industrialization was a worldwide phenomenon, the United States was quickly growing to be the world’s largest industrial employer. A combination of new technology, capital investment, and especially abundant natural resources helped support the rise of natural resource extraction and manufacturing.

Transnationalism also serves to explain the flow of immigrants into the United States in the late 19th century. The global flow of capital, ideas, and resources among countries made the industrializing United States the natural temporary destination for immigrants hoping to take what they earned and skills learned in the United States and use it to increase their resources and possibilities back in their homeland. Many of the earliest immigrants were young, single men who possessed few job skills. Particularly among Greeks and Italians, some single men came with no intention of staying in America permanently. Called birds of passage, they arrived in the United States aiming to earn enough money to purchase land or make a start in a trade or business once they returned to Europe. They used connections in American ethnic communities to find employment and lodging but funneled resources home.

A Judge magazine cover shows two boats dumping immigrants at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY

Not everyone supported the idea of an immigration center on Ellis Island. This 1890 cover of Judge magazine shows immigrants being dumped at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Lady Liberty responds by saying, “If you are going to make this island a garbage heap, I am going back to France!”

Ellis Island

Europeans initially arrived at East Coast port cities, including Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The largest number landed at New York Harbor, where they were processed at Castle Garden at the Battery in Lower Manhattan. Before long, however, the rising numbers of immigrants made it useful to establish federal control over and unify the process. The Immigration Act of 1891 shifted immigration regulation from the states to the federal government and established the Office of Immigration (later the Bureau of Immigration) to oversee the process. With the increased influx of immigrants, Congress saw the measure as an important means to secure federal oversight and control. It also established an inspection process that aimed to exclude undesirable immigrants. Those who were seriously sick, mentally ill, or likely to come under the public charge were to be returned to their homelands.

In 1892, in order to accommodate the rising numbers of immigrants, the Office of Immigration opened a receiving center on Ellis Island, 1 mile south of New York City and virtually in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. The statue became an important symbol of hope for the new arrivals (Kraut, 2001). On it were words by poet Emma Lazarus that inspired many who came to America with the hope of a better life:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door! (as cited in Young, 1995)

At Ellis Island, new arrivals passed through a medical examination and were questioned about their destination and economic status. For the majority of immigrants, the entire process took no more than 7 hours, after which they were permitted to pass into the city. Less than 1% of immigrants were rejected, but for those separated from family and denied their dream of coming to America (most often those from southern and eastern Europe), the processing center became known as the “Island of Tears.” Nearly 12 million immigrants were processed at Ellis Island between its opening in 1892 and 1954, when it closed permanently.

The Immigrant Experience

Once they passed through Ellis Island, immigrants experienced a life very different from what many had imagined. One Italian immigrant famously observed:

I came to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here I found out three things: First, the streets weren’t paved with gold; second, they weren’t paved at all; and third, I was expected to pave them. (as cited in Puleo, 2007)

As more and more people immigrated to the United States, ethnic neighborhoods became common. Shown here is Little Italy in New York City around 1900.

Italians and other immigrants provided the labor for the growing industries and city construction. They built the New York subway system and worked 12-hour shifts in the steel mills of Pittsburgh and other northeastern cities. Many also worked as day laborers, launderers, and domestic servants.

The Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Russians, Greeks, Czechs, and others who came brought with them their own languages, lifestyles, and cultural traditions. Jews were most likely to emigrate in family groups, whereas many Irish arriving in the late 19th century were single women seeking employment as domestic servants. Although historians once believed that immigration was an alienating experience, more careful study has found that the new immigrants transplanted many facets of their former lives to their new homeland.

Immigrants’ cultural and ethnic values and experiences often determined their work patterns. Greeks, often birds of passage who planned to return to the Old World, took itinerant jobs on the railroads or other transient positions. Italians, whose culture valued much family time, preferred more sedentary and stable industrial work. Jews often operated as shopkeepers and peddlers or in the needle trades—occupations they transplanted from the Old World, where anti-Semitic regulations restricted their work choices. Some ethnicities, such as the Irish and Slovaks, encouraged women to work in domestic service, whereas others, including the Italians and Greeks, barred women from working outside the home (Gabaccia, 1995). Women in those groups often took in laundry or sewing work, and many cared for single young male immigrants who paid to board with established families.

Thousands traveled in patterns of chain migration, arriving in Pittsburgh or Buffalo to the welcome greetings of family or friends in an established ethnic neighborhood. In these tightly knit communities, new arrivals found many of the comforts of home, including newspapers in their native language, grocers specializing in familiar foods, and churches where their religious traditions were practiced. Many ethnic groups established self-help and benevolent societies. In New York City the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society assisted Jews, and the Polish National Alliance and the Bohemian–American National Council aided those groups in their transition to American life. In larger cities immigrant communities established their own theaters and concert halls, as well as schools to educate their children (Bodnar, 1985).

In some cities tight-knit neighborhoods formed familiar cultural homes for multiple ethnic groups. In Pittsburgh, for example, the more than 12,000 Polish immigrants in that city in 1900 lived primarily in the Strip District, a narrow slice of land along the Allegheny River. There they found stores that catered to their food tastes and ethnic newspapers that reported news from Europe as well as from the local community. From this vantage point they could easily learn about job opportunities in many industrial shops, including Carnegie Steel. By the 1880s Pittsburgh’s Poles had established their own churches and begun to expand their neighborhood to the nearby hill district, still known by some as Polish Hill (Bodnar, Simon, & Weber, 1983).

Nativism and Anti-immigrant Sentiment

As ethnic communities grew and immigrants continued to transplant their cultures in America, a growing number of native-born Americans, especially White Protestants, grew concerned. Describing the new immigrants as distinct “races” from inferior civilizations, these nativists pointed to the newcomers’ cultural differences and willingness to work for low wages as causes for alarm. Some argued that they had inborn tendencies toward criminal behavior, and others claimed that the presence of so many foreigners threatened to make fundamental (and undesirable) changes in American society. As feelings of anti-immigrant sentiment increased, the “golden doorway of admission to the United States began to narrow” (Daniels, 2004).

The Chinese faced the most dramatic reaction. From the 1850s through 1870, thousands of Chinese entered the United States to work in western gold fields, on railroad construction, and in West Coast factories. Like their European counterparts in the East, Chinese immigrants built tightly knit ethnic communities to insulate themselves from personal and often violent attacks by nativists and to perpetuate their distinct culture. San Francisco’s growing Chinese quarter stretched six long blocks, from California Street to Broadway (Takaki, 1990).

In response to anti-Chinese concerns, in 1875 Congress passed legislation barring the entrance of Chinese women, and a total exclusion policy began to gain supporters. In the West a growing Workingmen’s Party movement, led by Denis Kearney, lashed out at Chinese laborers, claiming they unfairly competed with White American labor. Kearney delivered a series of impassioned anti-Chinese speeches, sparking violent attacks on San Francisco’s Asian citizens. Kearney was arrested in November 1877 for inciting a riot, but charges against him were subsequently dropped, and he continued his xenophobic campaign (Soennichsen, 2011).

As explained in Chapter 1, protests by Kearney and others led Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which established a 10-year ban on all Chinese labor immigration. Although law already barred non-Whites from becoming naturalized citizens, this marked the first time that race was used to exclude an entire group’s entrance into the United States. Congress renewed the restriction after 10 years and made the exclusion permanent in 1902. It remained in effect until 1943.

Despite the ban, some Chinese did still enter the United States. Merchants, diplomats, and the sons of U.S. citizens were permitted to immigrate. A trade in falsified citizenship records also allowed many so-called paper sons to pass through the system. Jim Fong, who arrived in San Francisco in 1929 with forged documents, recalled enduring 3 weeks of interrogation by immigration officials before eventually being admitted as a U.S. citizen, despite the fact that he spoke no English. After working as a fruit picker and dishwasher, Fong studied English at night and eventually succeeded as a restaurant manager. Under an amnesty agreement, he relinquished his fraudulent citizenship in 1966 and eventually became a naturalized citizen (Kwok, 2014).

Other nativist groups waged less successful attempts at restriction during the 1890s. The Immigration Restriction League, formed in Boston in 1894, sought to bar illiterate people from entering America. Congress adopted a measure doing so in 1897, but President Grover Cleveland vetoed it. Another guise to restrict immigrant rights came in the form of the secret or “Australian” ballot widely adopted in the 1890s. It ostensibly aimed to protect voter privacy, but it also served to bar the illiterate from receiving help at polling places.

At the Angel Island immigration processing center, Chinese and Japanese immigrants were often detained for weeks or months and were subjected to interrogations like the one shown here.

As steam ships carrying immigrants entered New York Harbor, passengers leaned over the rails to stare at the Statue of Liberty standing tall and proud. When they rounded Liberty Island, the immigrants beheld another marvelous spectacle: the grandiose buildings that made up the Ellis Island processing station.

Welcoming its first immigrants in 1892, Ellis Island served as the nation’s busiest processing station until 1924, when immigration laws reduced the tide of European immigrants to a trickle. Before it closed in 1954, 12 million immigrants passed through its buildings into the United States. For the vast majority, the immigrant processing center was a quick stop on their way to building a new life in America.

After stepping off their ships, men, women, and children, most of them from Europe, stored their luggage in the baggage room and lined up for processing. When it was their turn, they entered the Great Hall with its massive vaulted ceiling and mosaic tiled walls and floor. Although a daunting experience, the overall atmosphere was one of welcome.

Exploring History through Film: Chinese Immigrants and Angel Island

Most Asian immigrants entered the U.S. through California's Angel Island. Unlike immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, those arriving at Angel Island met with severe restrictions and prejudice.

Asian immigrants arriving on the Pacific coast found a very different experience. The Chinese Exclusion Act greatly slowed but did not completely stop Chinese nationals from entering the United States. Beginning in the 1880s a significant number of Japanese also crossed the Pacific.

An immigrant station opened in 1910 on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay to process those arriving from Asia. In sharp contrast to the Great Hall and opulent buildings of Ellis Island, Asian immigrants arrived at a series of wooden barracks, where furnishings consisted of wooden tables and benches and metal bunks for sleeping. The Chinese faced the most intense nativism of any immigrant groups; officials determined to isolate Chinese newcomers, whom they feared might conspire with residents of San Francisco’s growing Chinatown to slip into the city illegally.

Instead of mere hours, immigrants landing at Angel Island were often detained for weeks or even months, and a higher number—between 11% and 30%—were returned to Asia (compared to fewer than 1% at Ellis Island). Some were questioned at length about their backgrounds and asked about subjects of which they had no knowledge. While confined under adverse conditions, many Chinese immigrants scrawled words and poems on the walls reflecting their experience. One immigrant wrote: “Everyone says travelling to North America is a pleasure, I suffered misery on the ship and sadness in the wooden building. After several interrogations, still I am not done. I sigh because my compatriots are being forcibly detained” (Kraut, 2001). After processing several hundred thousand immigrants, the Angel Island processing center closed in 1940.

2.2 The City

Before the Civil War, America’s total urban population stood at 6.2 million, and most American cities, with the exception of a handful of large urban areas, boasted populations only in the tens of thousands. Luring residents from small towns, farms, and foreign countries, American cities increasingly became home to individuals and families seeking employment in the growing numbers of factories and mills. By the turn of the 20th century, the United States counted 30 million urban residents, and six cities had populations reaching half a million. Three cities—New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia—were home to more than a million residents. By 1920 more Americans lived in urban areas than on farms, and the city was established as a dominant force in economic, social, and cultural life.

City Dwellers and Changing Demographics

The exponential growth of cities came largely from migration and immigration, with almost half of the influx originating from the American countryside. Falling farm prices and increased mechanization meant fewer rural opportunities. These largely working-class Americans joined millions of European immigrants seeking to better their lives in the cities.

Social class differentiated residential areas within the cities. In New York, with its central Wall Street financial center, middle- and upper-middle-class men and women traded and shopped at fancy retail stores and worked in newly constructed office buildings. Most middle-class residents moved their homes outside the city center to the fringes to avoid the growing number of ethnic and working-class neighborhoods that straddled the new industrial zones. Surrounding Wall Street were rings of tenements and apartment buildings where rural migrants, immigrants and the city’s poorest residents sometimes packed their entire families into a single room (Shrock, 2004).

The Changing Shape of the City

The city was a place of contrasts in the era that became known as the Gilded Age. This satirical term was coined by Mark Twain to describe the period of rapid urban and industrial change from 1877 to about 1900. In his 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, Twain described a glittering society with serious problems beneath the surface. A city skyline itself was evoked as a breathtaking symbol of progress, featuring new buildings that crept ever higher toward the heavens. In New York, for example, the Manhattan Life Insurance building towered over the city at nearly 350 feet. The city’s second largest building, the American Surety Building, stood 21 stories tall and 312 feet upon its completion in 1894 (Korom, 2013). It appeared that the technological wonders of these new places knew no bounds.

But for all the examples of progress in the American city, the tragic realities of poor living conditions, ethnic prejudice, and unfair working environments significantly tainted the urban experience for many. The American city was a paradox, a place that exemplified hope for the future while at the same time demonstrating the worst that life had to offer.

The Tenement

In addition to stunning new skyscrapers, Gilded Age builders tried new construction techniques to enable cities to house more workers and their families. Construction of the dumbbell tenement house, so named because of its distinctive shape, dominated between 1879 and 1901. Typically, these were very tightly packed structures with only a couple of feet between them. The entrance hallway was a long passage, sometimes less than 3 feet wide, that reached 60 feet to the back of the structure. Each floor was divided, with seven rooms on each side (see see Navigating History: Tenement Housing feature). Only four of these rooms on each floor had ventilation or were reached by sunlight.

Tiny interior airshafts were supposed to provide ventilation, but the air between the buildings was so foul that residents often nailed their windows shut. Others used the shafts for garbage disposal, and the filth left to rot served as a breeding ground for disease. Privacy was impossible because the walls were paper-thin and windows often looked directly into the room of a neighbor.

An 1893 publication described the tenements in the following way:

The Tenements display the lowly side and often dark side of New-York life. . . . Tenement houses are as a rule great towering buildings, many of them squalid and in bad repair, and devoid of anything but the rudest arrangements for existence. They are packed with human beings. . . . Frequently half a dozen people eat, sleep, and somehow exist in a single room, and tenants who have two or three rooms generally keep boarders besides their own large families. . . . The landlords of these old tenement houses become very rich out of the needs of the poor tenants. (King, 1893, p. 220)

The buildings were also fire hazards with very few safety features. The bathroom facilities were primitive, generally just outhouses in the back alleys with poor sanitation. A very high percentage of the New York City population lived in these conditions. In 1901 the city had 3.4 million inhabitants, and 2.3 million lived in tenement houses (Veiller and New York State, 1903).

Reformers such as Jacob Riis worked to bring attention to the plight of those living in the tenements. In the middle of one night in 1888, Riis and a group of men slipped into a New York tenement building. Though most of the residents were still awake, no one stopped them from ascending the steps because no one possessed anything of value. The men entered an unlocked room that was dark and tiny with only one small window that opened to a clogged airshaft. Designed for a family of four, there were 15 immigrants living there, sleeping on every possible horizontal surface. The mysterious men set down some equipment, and one held what looked to be a gun. Before anyone said a word, a brilliant flash of light blinded the occupants, and while their eyes tried to adjust from the flash the men ran out.

Riis had taken his first of many images of tenement life and had begun his campaign to improve the tenements’ horrendous living conditions (Pascal, 2005). As a result of the work of Riis and others, city officials took small steps toward reform. For example, New York City’s 1901 Tenement House Act required more ventilation, windows facing outward, and indoor toilets (Dunbar & Jackson, 2005).

Getting Around in the New City

As immigrants adjusted to their new lives in the United States, cities began to grow to previously unimaginable sizes. Many aspects of city life changed to accommodate the influx of people and the growth of industry. Mass transportation was one of them, and some cities, including New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, began digging below the roads to construct vast networks of subways. Others built elevated train lines above the streets, and San Francisco developed cable cars in 1873. These lines largely served the middle and professional classes who could afford to move outside the industrial zones. Most laborers clustered in less desirable housing near the dirt and pollution of the mills and factories.

Although not all cities invested in expanded public transportation, all cities redefined the rules of the roads. In the Gilded Age, city streets were unstructured places where people, horses, bicycles, and eventually automobiles intermingled with few rules to govern them. By the 20th century the automobile emerged as the undisputed champion and earned the right of way in most all situations. People were relegated to sidewalks, and the cars dominated the central streets (Norton, 2008).

Entertainment in the City

During this time, cities became centers of culture and entertainment. However, entertainment required leisure time, and up until the late 19th century this did not exist for most city residents. Time spent working, caring for family, sleeping, and surviving left few hours free for amusement. Eventually, however, working hours in the factories declined—from 70 hours a week in 1860 to 60 hours a week in 1900. Workers began to enjoy at least 1 day free from work each week (Grover, 1992). City dwellers spent their newfound free time on a variety of activities that included playing sports, visiting zoos, and going to the circus. The middle and working classes often mingled together to watch a performance or a boxing match, which middle-class mores had previously judged taboo because of its violent nature.

Cities were the central location for the development of organized sports and public parks. Just about every major American sport had its birthplace in the city. Team owners organized, commercialized, and professionalized sports, and the inner cities were breeding grounds for athletes (Riess, 1991). By the late 19th century, baseball had become a professional sport, with the Cincinnati Red Stockings established as the first team in 1869. They played a series of nonprofessional teams until the formation of other professional clubs in succeeding years. James Naismith invented basketball in the 1890s while working at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. Football was more of an elite pastime because it emerged on college and university campuses across the East Coast. By the 1890s the Yale–Princeton game attracted 50,000 spectators each year.

Working-class men had long found release in the physical nature of boxing and other sports, and in the Gilded Age middle-class men increasingly found engaging in sports a viable means of asserting their masculinity. As more shifted their daily work regimes to sedentary clerk activities and desk work, playing baseball or watching boxing or other sports allowed men to gather to assert their physicality and thereby enhance their sense of manliness.

Women had athletic outlets as well, as they began enjoying the bicycle craze in the 1890s. The bicycle was culturally important for many reasons. Besides simply being fun, it initiated the idea of personal transportation. Bicycles also allowed women to explore new and freer types of fashion, because Victorian corsets were not conducive to riding.

This lithograph from 1898 advertises an upcoming performance of the Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth. The traveling circus was an event attended by city residents of all social classes.

Cities also brought nature and the exotic within their bounds with the introduction of the urban zoo. Philadelphia was the site of the first zoological park in the United States in 1874. Zoos soon emerged in other cities, and they quickly became popular leisure destinations as families took pleasure in seeing exotic animals up close. The federal government created the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., in 1889 for the “the advancement of science and the instruction and recreation of the people” (Rhees, 1901). It became part of the Smithsonian Institution 1 year later.

There were other important leisure-time activities in the cities. The Gilded Age represented the birth of the modern circus. Using the railroad to travel from city to city, promoters brought huge tents, animals, acrobats, and oddities of nature to audiences across the country. P. T. Barnum capitalized on this type of entertainment and became one of the most well-known showmen in the late 19th century. He became famous for sayings such as “There’s a sucker born every minute” (as cited in Saxon, 1989, p. 335). But to children, his demonstrations inspired awe and wonder at the “Greatest Show on Earth” (Saxon, 1989, p. 335).

The middle and professional classes enjoyed the most leisure time, including evenings, weekends, and even vacations, to experience these new activities and attractions. Sports and recreation offered some men and women an outlet for the social anxieties that the new social order brought. However, many in the middle class worried about the unruly behavior of working-class men and women at amusement parks, theaters, and ballparks and sought to reform and regulate commercial amusements. Through their own examples, they hoped to offer appropriate alternatives, but their efforts met with little positive response (Peiss, 1986).

2.3 Industrial Capitalism in America

Although increased leisure-time activities allowed different classes of people to intersect, Americans in the late 19th century began to witness and experience growing tensions between industrialists and workers. A small minority of men—such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan—became so wealthy that they struggled even to give all their money away. The freewheeling competitive capitalism and enormous profits of industrialists contrasted sharply with the low wages and limited mobility that most Americans faced. Although the U.S. economic system had thrived on the individual ownership of property from its inception and inequalities had always existed among Americans, in the Gilded Age industrialists developed new methods of business combinations, mergers, and cooperative solutions that made it possible for a few to grow tremendously wealthy and for the gap between them and everyone else to widen dramatically (Porter, 1992).

In the era of industrialization, millions of workers fought to simply have the right to work in safe conditions, earn a fair wage, and organize for protection. Though there were dramatic strikes, or work stoppages, the power of labor could not match the domination of the industrialists, and the unionization drives of the late 19th century failed. Men like Carnegie came to be derisively called robber barons because many believed they increased their wealth by robbing their workers of a fair wage and safe working conditions. Many historians argue that it was the power of big business and the rise of global capitalism that prevented the workers from advancing their cause.

Although American workers did make some advances in terms of wages, the disparity between industrialists such as Carnegie and the workforce accelerated. Real wages rose fairly consistently during the Gilded Age. The average income for nonfarm families rose from $375 a year in 1870 to $573 by 1900. This increase was much higher than in industrializing Europe and helped pull many immigrants to the United States. During the same time, however, the disparity between the richest and poorest in America expanded. By 1900 the richest 2% owned more than a third of the nation’s wealth, and the top 10% controlled roughly 75% (Long, 1960).

Despite the reality of growing inequality in the United States, the myth persisted around the world that the streets in America were paved with gold and that the nation offered boundless opportunities. Some came with the hope of realizing the American dream in the growing West, attracted by land offers the railroads provided. Most newcomers, however, entered the rapidly expanding American cities where new skyscrapers rose into the smoky skyline. The stunning success of men like Carnegie made many believe they, too, could prosper. This promise lured new waves of immigrants to the nation’s shores and brought scores of rural men and women into the cities.

A New Industrial Order

The industrial order that came to characterize America after 1877 was new and unfamiliar. Before the Civil War, industries centered on textile production and especially on processing agricultural products like grains or natural resources like timber. Factories produced goods for local and regional markets, and the nation also exported important commodities such as cotton. Most industrial pursuits were thus a natural extension of farming, which employed the largest segment of Americans.

After the war, heavy industries such as steel, oil, and rubber introduced new commodities such as steel rails, gasoline, and rubber tires to the national and world markets. The growth of new technologies, methods of manufacture, and theories of work organization spawned new systems of business organization and combination, ultimately leading to massive, impersonal corporations. The dominance of big business fundamentally altered the way of life for both Americans and newcomers. Giant corporations caused many to lose their faith in the competition and democracy that had long branded the nation as a place where individuals could rise on their own merits through hard work to wealth and accomplishment (Porter, 1992). The astounding rags-to-riches experiences of men like Andrew Carnegie quickly became an unattainable fantasy, and by the turn of the 20th century, big business would be seen as the root cause of many of society’s ills.

Gould, Vanderbilt, and the Railroads

As discussed in Chapter 1, railroads spread settlement westward to the Pacific coast through a combination of private corporate investment and government assistance, primarily in the form of massive grants of federal land. As important as the western connections were, however, the intense concentration of railroad lines across the Midwest and Northeast profoundly affected U.S. industrialization. After 1870 the nation’s railway mileage quadrupled, so that in 1900 the United States possessed more than 193,000 miles of track (see Figure 2.2) (Husband & O’Loughlin, 2004).

Figure 2.2: Railroads in 1900

By 1900 the nation boasted more than 193,000 total miles of railroad track including the well-known Transcontinental Railroad. The largest concentration of rail lines was in the Northeast.

From this dramatic growth, railroads emerged as America’s first industrial corporations. The Pennsylvania Railroad that employed a young Andrew Carnegie became the world’s largest private corporation, employing more than 55,000 workers in the 1870s (Schaefer & Solomon, 2009). The rapid expansion of other railroads made fortunes for a small handful of investors. Jay Gould, for instance, began life as a bookkeeper, but through a series of fortunate investments in the stock market he became a notorious speculator who controlled thousands of miles of track. Among his holdings was the Union Pacific Railroad, part of the initial transcontinental network completed in 1869.

Never one to be concerned about public opinion, Gould ruthlessly pursued business opportunities, practicing horizontal integration by secretly manipulating the market and buying up smaller railroads and the telegraph lines that were strung alongside them. Invented by Samuel F. B. Morse in the 1830s, the telegraph revolutionized communication and was especially important for business growth in the evolving industrial age, allowing for immediate and rapid communication. Gould gained control of the Western Union Company (by far the nation’s largest telegraph company) through a series of stock manipulations in 1879.

As the only real provider of telegraph service, Gould’s actions gave him monopoly, or exclusive control, over the nation’s most important means of communicating. Gould and other railroad magnates enhanced their wealth and strengthened their businesses by using secret agreements, pools that manipulated prices, and unethical means of consolidation (see Table 2.2). Through his actions and brashness, Gould especially characterized all that was unpopular with big business. He personified the image of the money-grabbing robber barons and came to be greatly despised throughout the nation.

Table 2.2: New business practices for an industrial age

Gould’s main rival, “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt, gained his wealth investing in a steamship line during the California gold rush and later transferred his main investments into railroads. The most visible of the railroad magnates, Gould and Vanderbilt each claimed fortunes of more than $100 million, roughly $2 billion in today’s dollars. The wealth held by industrialists in the railroad and other developing industries far eclipsed the affluence of the nation’s upper class before the Civil War and led many to criticize the growing income disparities. Others celebrated the new era of big business and the men that gained fortunes through the new industries.

Carnegie and Steel

The original iron railroads were brittle and could crack or break under stress or in bad weather. Railroad growth spurred a rush to expand production of more durable steel rails. The growth of American cities and the birth of the skyscraper also increased demand for steel beams. Steel was in high demand in Europe for similar reasons and thus formed an important basis for global trade.

As described at the beginning of the chapter, Andrew Carnegie led development in the American steel industry, building several mills near Pittsburgh. Others established important steel centers in Ohio and Alabama, and the discovery of a large iron ore deposit near Lake Superior in Minnesota gave a major boost to the industry. Although Britain had pioneered many of the steel methods used in the United States, a high tax, or tariff, on imported steel protected Carnegie and other American manufacturers from international competition. By the turn of the 20th century, U.S. manufacturers provided the bulk of steel to a growing international market.

Carnegie Steel quickly grew to be the largest corporation in the industry. Steel manufacturers employed many of the business combinations practiced in the railroad industry (see Table 2.2). Carnegie also regularly invested almost all the company’s profits in the latest steel-making technology, and his Edgar Thomson Steel Works, located on the Monongahela River outside Pittsburgh, was a model for the industry. This increased the company’s efficiency but often disappointed investors, who rarely realized a dividend.

Using the Bessemer process, a steel-making method he brought back from an 1872 visit to England, Carnegie’s mill and others increased the speed and efficiency with which raw iron ore could be converted to steel. Soon the furnaces were pouring as much as 10,000 tons a week, compared to the average of 70 tons before the new technology (Krass, 2011). The new manufacturing method also allowed Carnegie to dramatically reorganize his workforce. For instance, skilled steel puddlers, who literally stirred great vats of molten metal until they determined it free of impurities, were no longer needed. The Bessemer process required fewer skilled workers and made room for low-paid unskilled workers, which greatly reduced wage costs.

Profitability and growth were also realized as Carnegie moved to control all aspects of the production process through vertical integration. Investing in iron ore mines, railroad lines, and controlling the sale of the finished product, Carnegie Steel eliminated the need for outside business contracts or relations. Carnegie pushed his managers and mill hands to the limit of their abilities, pitting supervisors against each other in a competitive management arrangement. Wages for steelworkers remained as low as possible, and Carnegie pushed back hard when mill hands moved to unionize for better wages and working conditions. (See the discussion of the Homestead Strike later in this chapter.)

Coming to realize that wealth brought social obligations, in 1889 Carnegie penned an article titled “The Gospel of Wealth.” In it he argued that the wealthy have an obligation and a duty to aid those less fortunate in society through philanthropy and that men such as himself were best suited to determine how such wealth should be distributed. His sale of Carnegie Steel to the financier J. P. Morgan in 1901 allowed him to devote more time to his philanthropic goals. Morgan combined Carnegie’s holdings with his own to create U.S. Steel. Employing nearly 170,000, it controlled three fifths of the nation’s steel industry (Warren, 2001).

Rockefeller and Oil

Carnegie’s dominance in steel was superseded only by the hold that John D. Rockefeller had on the manufacture of petroleum products. Rockefeller’s wealth grew once oil was discovered in the Lima oil field in northwest Ohio in 1885. It quickly became the largest oil field in the nation, and drillers rushed to the region to pump thousands of gallons of the black liquid from wells reaching as far as 1,200 feet below the earth. Within 2 years of the first drilling, the Lima oil field was the world’s largest producer of the rich natural resource.

The need for oil grew along with other industries in the late 19th century. Prior to the invention of the gasoline engine and the automobile, petroleum was largely used to lubricate machinery and, when distilled as kerosene, for heating and lighting. Because construction of an oil refinery was inexpensive compared to a steel mill or textile factory, the industry grew quickly, with many small refineries serving local or regional markets.

Much like Gould and Carnegie, Rockefeller began his career as a clerk in a Cleveland merchant firm. The region also happened to include the nation’s largest number of oil refineries, and he invested in several of them through partnerships with other merchants. He ultimately set out to consolidate the industry under the auspices of the Standard Oil Company, which he incorporated in 1870. After accumulating and discarding several partners, the Standard Oil Company became Rockefeller’s sole vehicle for controlling the industry.

Through the practice of horizontal integration, Rockefeller focused solely on the refining process and bought out his competitors. He accelerated this process by taking advantage of an economic downturn among the railroads to demand deeply discounted shipping rates and rebates. Control of shipping rates allowed Rockefeller to put many of his competitors out of business. Most sold out to him, and Standard Oil’s near monopoly grew exponentially until by 1890 the corporation controlled 88% of the nation’s oil refining (Chernow, 1988).

In order to legitimize his company’s secret dealings, Rockefeller used a new form of corporate structure, the trust (see Table 2.2). Under this system, a board of nine trustees held the stock of other refineries “in trust” for Standard Oil’s stockholders. The board was empowered to manage the business holdings of all the companies in the trust. This gave Rockefeller and Standard Oil the power to coordinate policies, set prices, and above all buy out small competing refineries. Competition was quelled, and profits rose.

Controlling almost 90% of production and 85% of final sales, Standard Oil left no room for competitors in the industry. Its near monopoly also meant the corporation controlled the price that consumers paid for heating oil and gasoline. The Standard Oil trust was followed by similar arrangements in other industries, and soon an outraged public cried for government action against these monopolies.

Congress responded with the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, which outlawed the unfair trust practices that removed competition and controlled prices in an industry. Rockefeller merely shifted tactics. Creating a holding company, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, he organized all the competing companies under a single corporate umbrella. The holding company was incorporated but did not produce a product. Under this arrangement, Standard Oil could control competition without violating the antitrust statute. The action cemented Rockefeller’s monopoly, and Standard Oil grew to employ more than 100,000 workers as the world’s largest business.

Rockefeller’s business practices made him a very wealthy man but did little for his public image. He especially came to symbolize all that was wrong with big business after muckraking journalist Ida M. Tarbell published a lengthy expose, “History of the Standard Oil Company.” She and fellow investigative journalists combed through the “muck” of business dealings to expose corruption and unfair practices. Appearing as 19 serial articles in the popular McClure’s Magazine, Tarbell’s findings chronicled Rockefeller’s illegal and unfair takeover of the oil industry (Tarbell, 2003). By the finish of the 3-year run of articles, John D. Rockefeller had lost all standing with the American public and epitomized monopoly and the failings of the Gilded Age. The government eventually ordered the dissolution of Standard Oil in 1911.

The popularity of Tarbell’s expose illustrates America’s frustration with the veneer of the Gilded Age. At the onset of industrialization, many cheered the industrial leaders they believed would bring prosperity and greater opportunities to society. By the turn of the 20th century, social critics such as Tarbell and reform politicians began to underscore the damages done by economic exploitation and political corruption. The opulent displays of wealth on the part of newly rich industrialists served to further inflame the ire of the American public.

Conspicuous Consumption

The business tactics of industrialists corresponded to novel cultural expressions among the newly wealthy. Sociologist Thorstein Veblen outlined the practice of conspicuous consumption in his 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. He argued that the affluent in society earn their status not by simply being rich, but by exhibiting their wealth (Blackshaw, 2013).

The Gilded Age witnessed amazing displays of affluence among the new industrialists. They built enormous homes, hosted lavish parties, and traveled in outrageous vehicles, openly flaunting the extreme differences between themselves and average Americans. One of the most expansive displays of snobbery was embodied in “Mrs. Astor’s 400,” a list of the only people that Lina Astor determined to be appropriate members of New York’s fashionable society. The wife of businessman William Backhouse Astor, Jr., Lina Astor held lavish parties, but only those who received her personal calling card could attend. Her guest lists tended to include the richest and most flamboyant displayers of wealth.

Many cities retain the physical evidence of the industrialists’ conspicuous consumption, particularly their homes. Rockefeller owned a mansion in Cleveland’s Millionaire’s Row, where he purchased the house next door and had it moved so that he could have a larger garden. Carnegie’s New York mansion was the first home to have a steel structure and an elevator. Vanderbilt’s family built massive homes in several states, including the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina, which at nearly 180,000 square feet is still the largest privately owned home in the United States (Hansley, 2011).

Social Darwinism

Conspicuous consumption on the part of the nation’s wealthiest citizens was in line with the popular theory of Social Darwinism, which emphasized the natural superiority of some members of society. Notions of physical or social superiority of some groups were not new in the Gilded Age; they had been applied to justify slavery and denigration of some immigrant groups before the Civil War. The philosophy originated with the ideas of British scientist Charles Darwin, whose 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, introduced readers to the theory of evolution, which posited that animal species that were better suited to an environment were more likely to adapt and survive.

This concept of survival of the fittest, or natural selection, came to dominate 19th-century scientific thinking and was adapted and applied to American society. Social Darwinists argued that giant corporations emerged because they were naturally stronger and fitter than small businesses. Similarly, the richest members of society represented a better quality of citizen than the laboring classes, who were responsible for their own lowly position.

The ideas of Social Darwinism influenced the amount and types of assistance doled out to the unemployed and working classes during economic downturns. For example, aid workers and reformers spent time trying to identify the most worthy among the poor, offering widows and orphans charity but leaving adult men to fend for themselves. During the Gilded Age and beyond, most cities offered little if any public relief outside of local poorhouses. Advocates of this philosophy believed that workers should be more frugal and hardworking and not look to the government for assistance.

2.4 The World of the Workers

Business consolidation, the conspicuous consumption patterns of the new rich industrialists, and Social Darwinism were not the only lasting changes of the Gilded Age. The growth of big business also reshaped the nation’s working class and brought a fundamental change in the very nature of work itself.

The Changing Nature of Work

Before the Civil War, the United States was a nation of artisans with craft skills who defined for themselves the structure of their day and the environment in which they worked. After the Civil War, however, these artisans began to fade away as large organizations realized that mechanization and the division of labor increased profitability and decreased the need to rely on such self-directed skilled laborers. For an entrepreneur and business owner, it was much more profitable to invest in advanced machinery tended by unskilled laborers than to share power and control with a skilled workforce. As a result, the artisans gave way to the new wage earner. This laborer was dependent on an employer for defining the structure of the job, hours worked, working conditions, and wages. Of course, not all skilled workers disappeared. Building and maintaining the nation’s industrial infrastructure required a high level of ability, but for the most part the new organization of labor undermined these skills.

The evolving work environment fostered many concerns, and one of the most pressing was health and safety. Undertaking repetitive tasks for 10 or more hours a day, 6 days a week, often led to accidents or chronic health problems. Many garment workers, for example, remained virtually motionless while hunched over a sewing machine and soon developed back problems. The large iron and steel mills were even more dangerous, and there were few considerations given to workplace safety. Temperatures inside the mills regularly exceeded 100°F, and sparks from the Bessemer converters could easily burn a worker’s skin or leave the worker blind. Little attention was given even to simple sanitary issues like restroom facilities, eating areas, or clean ventilation. Thousands died on the job each year.

Women and Children in the Workforce

Industrial America included the growth of factories and mills but also the division of labor that brought women and children into the workforce by allowing them to work from home.

The situation of many industrial workers required that all household members, including women and children, contribute to the family economy. A majority of families struggled to get by on low wages and unstable employment patterns. Among the 12 million families enumerated in the 1890 census, 11 million survived on less than $100 per month, around $2,500 in today’s dollars (Upchurch, 2009). The labor of women and children was essential to household maintenance and is included in this figure. Many women and children entered mill employment or took piecework in at home to contribute to the family economy.

Business owners employed at least 1.7 million children under age 16 in fields and factories during the Gilded Age (Hindman, 2002). Approximately 10% of all girls and 20% of all boys held jobs in unsafe conditions and worked very long hours. There were many examples of deplorable conditions. In Pennsylvania thousands of boys worked in the coal mines doing a variety of jobs. Boys as young as 9 worked as “breakers,” sitting over coal chutes and separating pieces of slate from the coal, sometimes for longer than 10 hours a day. If a boy extended his arms too far, he would be sucked into the fast-moving coal. One observer who investigated these conditions at the turn of the 20th century reported, “While I was there, two breaker boys fell or were carried into the coal chute, where they were smothered to death” (Freedman & Hine, 1998). It was not until 1906 that the federal government began to regulate working conditions for children (Whittaker, 2004).

Exploring History through Film: Child Labor in Coal Mines

It was common in the late 19th century for working class children to have jobs. One of the most dangerous occupations for children at the time was in the nation's coal mines. The pay was low, corporal punishment was common, and accidents occurred frequently.

Women’s employment increased dramatically during the period as well, accounting for as much as 15% of the labor force in some areas. In the post-Reconstruction South, textile mills became significant industrial employers and were as likely to hire women and young girls as men. As many as 92% of mill workers in the South lived in villages owned by the mill operators, who controlled all aspects of their workers’ daily lives (Hall, Murphy, & Leloudis, 1987). In the industrializing North, young women working in garment factories and other needle trades lived in cities, but many married women worked in the home. They took in sewing for which they were paid a piece rate, or they opened their homes to board single men who worked in nearby factories or mills. African American women, whose husbands generally earned the lowest pay at the most dangerous factory or mill jobs, found the new industrial economy to be especially taxing. They took in the laundry of others or worked outside the home as domestic servants. Like others among the working classes, African American children’s labor was often essential to family survival.

The Labor Movement

Before the transition to unskilled industrial labor, craft unions existed to protect the rights and interests of various skilled workers. These unions continued to exist in the Gilded Age, but they represented an increasingly smaller segment of the workforce, and most were organized at the local level and confined to a single trade. The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, for example, formed in New York City to protect the interests of skilled workers in those trades (Greene, 2004). Many unskilled workers sought to organize similar unions in order to temper the negative effects of industrial capitalism and improve their lives.

The first labor organization, or industrial union, that broadly represented the entire workforce regardless of skill or trade was the short-lived National Labor Union (NLU), which lasted from 1866 to 1873. Seeking to unite all existing trade unions and political activists clamoring for an 8-hour workday, it drew most of its support from skilled workers, especially those in construction trades who were less affected by the transition to industrial capitalism.

The NLU generally opposed strikes and supported the formation of a third political party to press for workers’ issues. Opening its membership to farmers and unskilled workers, it campaigned for the exclusion of Chinese immigrants in the West and was of little benefit to women or African American workers (Foner, 1947). Although the National Labor Union lasted only a few years, it was influential in pressuring Congress to implement an 8-hour workday for federal employees (Dulles & Dubofsky, 2004).

The Knights of Labor, founded by Uriah S. Stephens in 1869, waged a more substantial challenge to industrial capitalism. Its only qualification for membership was that a person “toiled.” This included almost all workers, except professionals such as bankers and lawyers. Like the NLU, the Knights of Labor campaigned to exclude Chinese immigrants because it feared their competition would further erode wages in the West. The Knights of Labor did, however, welcome women and African Americans (after 1878) to its membership, making it the most inclusive national union until the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935.

The Knights of Labor sought to end child labor and more generally called for more control by the workers over the economy itself. Members struggled to enact a cooperative or socialistic system to share power and economic control among workers, and they used the technique of organized strikes to achieve their demands. For example, in 1884 the Knights of Labor successfully protested wage cuts for workers on Jay Gould’s Union Pacific Railroad with a series of strikes and boycotts that affected thousands. This victory against one of the robber barons was a boon for the organization, which counted 15,000 local assemblies by 1886, representing between 700,000 and a million workers (Fink, 1985).

Skilled workers sustained their own drives to form craft unions as their position and control at the top of the labor hierarchy slipped. To combine the interests of skilled workers, delegates representing various trades met in Columbus, Ohio, in 1886 to organize the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Aiming to support the interests of the better paid and skilled laborers in industries transformed by industrialization and the changing nature of work, the AFL grew rapidly. Samuel Gompers, the federation’s first president and its leader until 1924, represented the Cigarmakers’ International Union, but many of its affiliates formed among iron and steelworkers in the expanding mills owned by Carnegie and others.

The AFL used the strategy of collective bargaining, or contract negotiation, to achieve its goals of improved wages, hours, and working conditions. Between 1898 and 1904 membership grew from 280,000 to 1.6 million, but it protected only White men (Greene, 2004). The AFL represented the elite craftsmen fighting to hold on to their skilled positions, but overall their burgeoning membership amounted to only a small percentage when compared to the growing workforce of unskilled laborers.

Workers Fight Back

Skilled and unskilled workers used their organizations to fight back against rapid changes in the workplace. The last 2 decades of the 19th century witnessed hundreds of strikes. Some were organized under the control of union leadership, but many more were spontaneous wildcat strikes that broke out when laborers responded impulsively to conditions on the job.

The Great Strike of 1877

The first nationwide strike began on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad when workers in rural West Virginia stopped work in protest of a proposed wage cut. The telegraph lines that followed the railroad made it easy for word to reach workers far and wide, and the strike spread rapidly as workers on other railroads and related industries walked off the job. In a week’s time half a million workers from coast to coast demanded better pay and working conditions.

Pent-up anger from enduring years of unfair treatment and poor working conditions led some strikers to lash out violently against their employers and work property. Their actions were fueled by unstable job security, high unemployment, and loss of control over their lives. Many were forced to travel and work long hours without extra compensation. Industrialists and those of the upper class viewed the strike as a revolution from below (Bellesiles, 2010). Although the upper class controlled the economic system on which the workers depended, without their labor the income of industrialists would cease along with the transportation of goods across the nation.

The railroad operators reacted swiftly and established a pattern that became common in the Gilded Age. Instead of negotiating with the workers, employers responded with force, calling on local police and hiring private “detective” agencies to bring workers under control. Workers responded to force with force. The ensuing chaos resulted in more than 100 deaths and millions of dollars in property damage stretching across at least four states. When the private police forces failed to end the strike, industrialists turned to the government for aid. Pennsylvania Railroad superintendent Thomas A. Scott (Andrew Carnegie’s former boss) and other railroad executives called on Republican president Rutherford B. Hayes, whose recent contested election and inauguration ceremony they had generously supported.

The president ordered federal troops to various strike sites across the nation (Bellesiles, 2010). The army quickly scattered the remaining workers, and the strike ended about 45 days after it began. Industrialists and many middle-class Americans applauded the use of force against the strikers. A new pattern of using state power to crush labor activism had been established, which helped cement the growing relationship between industrialists and the Republican Party. In preparation for future labor strife, states organized militias, and National Guard armories were well stocked.

The Haymarket Incident

For at least 2 years workers had made a concerted effort to secure an 8-hour workday, which spurred a surge in membership for the Knights of Labor. A confederation of union organizations called for a national general strike beginning May 1, 1886, to demand a shortened workday. The 8-hour movement spread to cities and towns across the nation, and in some places spontaneous protests drew large crowds. The leadership of the Knights of Labor actually opposed the unorganized protests, but at the local level many Knights were active participants.

Labor activists (from top left) August Spies, Albert Parsons, Louis Lingg, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer were accused of being anarchists for supporting an 8-hour workday. They were sentenced to death even though there was no evidence to support their involvement in the Haymarket Incident.

In Chicago, radicals, including anarchists, who opposed any form of government, coordinated the 8-hour movement. On May 1 some 80,000 people marched peacefully through the city streets, but 2 days later a dispute between workers and police occurred during a strike at the McCormick Reaper Works. Police officers were beaten, and two unarmed strikers were killed. Peaceful protesters gathered on May 4 in Haymarket Square to express their outrage, but when police arrived to break up the crowd a bomb exploded, killing seven officers. Although the bomb’s origin is still not known, eight anarchists were convicted of the crime. Ultimately, four were executed and one committed suicide (Green, 2006).

The Haymarket Incident sparked a new anxiety among the middle and upper classes that spread beyond disapproval of labor organizations to a general suspicion of immigrants, radical socialists, Communists, and anarchists. The sheer numbers of dispossessed among the working class led many to speculate about a looming worker’s revolution. Big business reacted with a sustained campaign to crush the 8-hour movement and to amplify fears of labor militancy. Employers moved to hire workers from different ethnic and racial backgrounds, believing that a judicious mixture in the workplace would discourage collective action. Mills and factories fired strikers and locked out those who joined unions.

Industrialists also relied on the power of the government to keep workers quiet. Criminal charges—including trespassing, intimidation, and inciting a riot—came into regular use against unionists. Court injunctions prohibiting picketing and declaring strikes illegal became commonplace. In the aftermath of Haymarket and the antiunion backlash, support for the Knights of Labor collapsed, so that by 1890 only 100,000 members remained. Although the organization continued its activities well into the 1890s, it was the skilled trades unions and the AFL that came to be the loudest voices pressing for changes in the workplace, leaving unskilled workers all but silenced.

The Homestead Strike

Carnegie Steel’s response to worker demands was to employ a private police force, the Pinkerton Detective Agency, to infiltrate labor organizations and provoke militancy that could then be brutally crushed. At the massive Homestead Steel Works, outside Pittsburgh, skilled members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, the nation’s largest trade union and AFL affiliate, enjoyed wages a third higher than those at neighboring mills. Holding on to old traditions, the steelworkers took pride in their work and believed that unionization was a fundamental civil right. Carnegie disagreed. In order to increase the corporation’s profits, he and his manager, Henry Clay Frick, sought to break the union.

In June 1892, while Carnegie was conveniently away on vacation in Scotland, Frick cut off negotiations with the Amalgamated Association over a new contract, and on July 2 he locked out all 3,800 workers, shutting down the mill. He announced that the mill would reopen with nonunion labor. Workers mobilized in opposition, taking control of the town of Homestead and all outside access to the mill, save for the Monongahela River. A barge loaded with 300 Pinkerton detectives floated up the river to the mill site to dislodge the workers, and on July 6 an infamous battle left three Pinkertons and seven workers dead. Facing workers determined to continue their resistance, the remaining Pinkertons retreated.

The strike at the Homestead Steel Works was of such significance that Harper’s Weekly made the retreat of the Pinkertons the cover story of its July 16, 1892, issue.

The standoff ended a few days later when 8,500 Pennsylvania National Guardsmen, ordered in by the governor at the company’s request, restored order to the town and retook the mill. The lockout turned into a strike when the men refused to work without union protection. Strikes spread to other Carnegie mills. The Amalgamated Association held out for several months, but with cold weather approaching, the workers finally surrendered on November 20. More than 100 were indicted on charges of treason, murder, and aggravated riot. The few trials held resulted in no convictions, but the events at Homestead had a devastating impact on organized labor. Those involved in the strike were fired, and the Amalgamated Association union was shattered (Krause, 1992).

It was a blow to all skilled unionists, who were quickly coming to realize that their once powerful organizations were no match for the combined power of industrial capitalists and state and federal governments. At the close of the conflict, Frick sent a telegraph to Carnegie. It read: “Our victory is now complete and most gratifying. Do not think we will ever have any serious labor trouble again” (as cited in Harvey, 2002, p. 172). In fact, it would be 40 years before steelworkers again enjoyed union protection.

The Pullman Strike

Punctuating nearly 2 decades of labor strife, a disturbance that began with Pullman Company employees in mid-1894 once again threatened to stall the nation’s rail commerce. Located outside Chicago, the company-owned town of Pullman was home to many of the employees who toiled in George Pullman’s railroad car manufacturing plant. Pullman cars were the luxury coaches of passenger rail and were often occupied by the wealthiest travelers. The porters servicing the cars were exclusively African American and highly trained to provide excellent customer service.

The dispute began when Pullman reduced wages and laid off many workers but did not reduce the rent on their company-owned housing. Unlike Carnegie’s steelworkers, many railroad employees were represented by the American Railway Union (ARU), formed by labor leader Eugene V. Debs (see Chapter 6) in 1893. Pullman workers did not enjoy the benefit of union membership because Pullman refused to recognize the union or enter in negotiations with the ARU, even after Pullman workers went on strike. Using his power across the national rail system, Debs called on all railroad workers to boycott any train pulling a Pullman car.

The massive boycott spread to almost every rail line west of Detroit and stopped trains in 27 states. More than a quarter million employees were affected. The General Managers Association of railroad owners banded together in opposition and brought in private police to stop the boycott. The violence that ensued over the 2-month period resulted in more than 30 deaths and as much as $80 million in property damage. Siding with the railroad owners, President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to stop the strikers and boycotters from obstructing train commerce. The strike soon collapsed, and Debs was charged and convicted of inciting the incident and violating a court order. The ARU, one of the few unions open to workers regardless of skill level, was dissolved. As the new century approached, few workers in the railroad or steel industries enjoyed union protection.

3.1 Gilded Age Politics

The rollback of civil rights gains in the late 19th century was part of a series of political realignments occurring as various groups in society struggled for position in the age of industrialization. African Americans fought to stave off further Jim Crow laws. Industrial workers and farmers made a concerted effort to use politics to challenge the advancing capitalist system. Southern advocates tried in vain to catch up with the industrializing North. Democrats moved to consolidate political control of the South and reclaim a footing for their party on the national stage. Republicans redefined their alliances, more often than not siding with business and ignoring the plights of African Americans and workers. Women accelerated their demands for a place at the political table and especially for suffrage rights.

Political realignments in the late 19th century caught the attention of American novelist Mark Twain, famous for literary characters such as Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. With his friend and fellow novelist Charles Dudley Warner, Twain authored a book called The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, which satirized the greed and political corruption of the late 19th century. The novel follows the lives of a Tennessee family that seeks to gain a fortune through the sale of land. They fail, however, and a major theme of the novel is the American lust for getting rich quick, in this case through speculation in land sales. Twain and Warner bemoaned the fact that American greed permeated social and political life (Twain & Warner, 1904). The novel quickly became the symbol for the graft, corruption, and materialism of industrializing America, so much so that the era has forever after been called the Gilded Age.

National Politics

The Gilded Age failed to produce a president with a dominating character, noble charisma, or even a strong individual political agenda. Following the weak presidencies of Johnson and Grant, Congress emerged as the strongest of the three government branches. Rutherford B. Hayes (1877–1881), James A. Garfield (1881), Chester A. Arthur (1881–1885), Grover Cleveland (1885–1889), Benjamin Harrison (1889–1893), Cleveland again (1893–1897), and finally William McKinley (1897–1901) each shared power with Congress and even state legislatures to an extent unheard of before the Civil War.

Presidential and congressional elections tended to be close races—1% of the popular vote divided the candidates in three presidential elections of the era (see Table 3.1), and no party controlled a majority large enough to pass substantive legislation (Summers, 2004). Although such close races suggest a hotly divided electorate, in reality Democrats and Republicans were hardly distinguishable or unique on policy matters. This political system often failed to address the needs of many Americans and the changes of a modernizing society. Throughout the period various segments of society searched for alternatives to the mainstream parties.

Table 3.1: U.S. Presidential elections, 1876–1900

Republicans defined their party in opposition to the Democrats. Claiming a role as the party of moral ideas, they believed that government power could be used to make people behave better and adopt standards of Protestant virtue. A party of ordered progress, it became natural for them to align with industrialists against disruptive workers, and with antialcohol, or temperance, activists against immigrant saloon keepers. They cheered on the industrialization of America, supporting development through protective tariffs, supportive monetary policies, and grants of land to railroad developers.

Republicans also sometimes “waved the bloody shirt” to argue that they had always been the party of Union, blaming Democrats for the massive loss of American life in the Civil War. Republicans began as a northern-based regional party, and although they heavily courted the African American vote in the South (until the Jim Crow system all but completely disenfranchised southern African American voters), their strength remained in the Northeast, Midwest, and Far West.

Democrats styled themselves as the party of reunion, claiming that the divisions of the Civil War were in the past, but they tended to support a vision of the nation that excluded African Americans. Although they embraced liberty rather than financial progress, it was a liberty that extended almost exclusively to White men, which they believed was in line with the vision of the founders (Summers, 2004).

In urban areas, Democrats supported the rights of immigrants and Catholics, because their opponents did not. Democrats saw a chance to increase their political power with the growing voting block of ethnic Americans. They defended immigrants and their cultural traditions (some of which embraced alcohol consumption) against the abuses of industrial employers and the Republican Protestant temperance reformers. In the South, where the Democratic Party controlled every state government after 1877, they supported the rise of Jim Crow laws, such as the one Homer Plessy and his fellow activists challenged in 1892.

Until the 1890s both Democrats and Republicans operated primarily as state or regional entities, responding to the needs of their individual constituents. Representatives from farming districts might favor railroad regulation; those from cities with heavy immigrant populations would likely oppose bills prohibiting or limiting alcohol sales and consumption. Reacting to local needs, Republicans and Democrats regularly espoused similar positions on important or controversial issues. Most politicians of both parties embraced laissez-faire economics, believing that the government should take a hands-off approach in most economic matters. Serving industrial leaders well, this philosophy argued that government intervention in the economy would inhibit all important progress.

Despite this local focus, there were issues of national importance that divided Democrats and Republicans in the Gilded Age. Among the most significant were the tariff and the currency.

The Tariff

Republicans supported a tax on imports, called a tariff, to protect businesses and farmers from foreign competition. Tariffs raised the prices of imported goods, thus preventing them from underselling domestically produced goods. During the Civil War, when Republicans dominated Congress, they enacted a high tariff to protect the Union interests and fund the war. Southerners and westerners generally objected to the tariff after the war. Both regions relied more heavily than the North on imports because manufacturing concentrated in the Northeast, and the tax raised the prices they paid. Other nations also began to retaliate by taxing American farm exports and purchasing smaller quantities of wheat and corn, hurting farmers.

Democrats, who were strongest in the South and West, likewise generally objected to the Republicans’ tariff policy. However, support for tariffs became a complicated matter, and legislators often accommodated local interests. Depending on the industry, Democrats could come out in favor of specific tariffs. Additionally, since the elimination of the income tax in 1872, tariffs, along with excise taxes on commodities like liquor and tobacco, provided vital revenue for the federal government.

Currency

The nation’s currency was another complicated issue occupying the political parties in the Gilded Age. During the Civil War the U.S. government printed more than $450 million greenbacks, paper money backed only by the faith of the government. This was controversial because paper currency was traditionally supported with deposits of specie—gold or silver—that would guarantee its value.

Political propaganda from the 1870s issued by the Greenbacker party. The image reads, “Negro the only issue! Have the people no other interest worth looking after? Status of political parties.” The document portrays “Republicans in the field” as carrying African Americans on their shoulders, while it portrays the “Democratic party looking for a candidate,” with a Democrat riding on the shoulders of an African American. Beneath the images are the words “Spectacular entertainment to attract the attention of the people while politicians pick their pockets by means of National Banks and Treasury Rings.”

Greenbacker political propaganda during the 1870s accused Republicans and Democrats of using racial politics to divert attention from issues of the economy, specifically the use of gold and silver to back American currency.

After the war debate arose over the removal of the greenbacks from circulation. Resumptionists, largely Republicans concerned about reducing federal spending and the national debt, wanted to return the nation to the gold standard, which would reduce the amount of paper currency in circulation until those traded had the backing of specie in the vaults. This conservative move would severely restrict the amount of money in circulation, making it difficult to obtain credit and causing prices to fall. Businessmen and industrialists in stable segments of the economy supported a return to the gold standard so that business transactions would occur at the highest currency. Other industrialists, especially those small farmers and workers who owed large debts, opposed returning to the standard, fearing it would worsen the economy.

Greenbackers went further, advocating printing even more paper currency without the backing of gold. They argued that leaving greenbacks in circulation would make more funds available for investment and place control of currency in the hands of the federal government, not independent bankers. On this issue, as with the tariff, Republicans and Democrats divided depending on their local constituencies. Moderates in both parties supported some currency inflation, but not necessarily unlimited greenbacks. Many came to suggest a compromise of adding less valuable silver as well as gold to the specie standard to introduce a little more flexibility in the currency market.

Controversy stirred after Congress passed the Coinage Act of 1873, barring the use of silver to back the nation’s currency. Western mining interests, including those mining hundreds of pounds of silver at Nevada’s Comstock Lode and other sites, were outraged and called the bill the “Crime of ‘73.” Defenders of gold, however, feared that a flood of silver would devalue the nation’s currency and lead to wild speculation and lost profits for banks and northern industrialists. The Greenback-Labor Party, later called the Greenback Party, formed briefly to fight the resumption of the gold standard, but in 1879, $300 million in greenbacks were converted to gold (Ritter, 1997). Support for silver remained strong, however, especially as the economy fluctuated, and it would return as a major issue in the presidential election of 1896.

Reform and Realignment

Politics in the Gilded Age took two forms. The traditional party system of Republicans and Democrats, in which male voters dominated and political operatives and officeholders doled out patronage positions, continued with only minor changes from the prewar era. The period also saw the rise of a new form of political voluntarism and activism in which women began to demand voting rights and workers and farmers organized to put their cause above customary party alliances.

The Spoils System and Machine Politics

It is not surprising that Gilded Age politics came under criticism and scorn for its corruption. Elected officials from the local level to the president enjoyed the advantage of the spoils system, which allowed them to dole out patronage in the form of jobs and minor political offices. In fact, the president’s time was heavily occupied with the demands of making thousands of political appointments. For instance, the president appointed Native American agents to oversee western tribes and even local postmasters, many of whom were inept or corrupt. Executive correspondence was flooded with letters requesting patronage, and sorting it all out diverted time from effective governance.

Whether at the local or federal level, the beneficiaries of patronage were loyal to those elected officials who put them in their jobs, perpetuating a culture of political corruption. With their livelihoods directly linked to party affiliation and personal alliances, government employees had a strong incentive to vote in favor of one party and to encourage others to do the same. It was even common for candidates to pay voters for their support in close elections. Newspapers were also highly partisan and presented a slanted view of events. In some cities and states, well-organized political machines controlled almost all aspects of government operations by controlling the patronage and voting systems.

Most famously, New York’s Tammany Hall machine mobilized and controlled Democratic voters, many of whom were immigrants and recently naturalized citizens. The Society of St. Tammany began in New York in 1788 as an organization of craftsmen, and its primary function was to assist many of the immigrants who came to America to find a better life. Tammany Hall, as it was known, helped them to gain citizenship, and the immigrants returned the favor by offering their lifelong support at the ballot box.

Over time Tammany Hall gained extraordinary political power for the Democrats, especially in the mid-19th century under the leadership of William “Boss” Tweed. The political machine courted the votes and support of the city’s workers and immigrants, offering in return assistance to immigrant families, minor jobs, and low-level political appointments. But with power came corruption, as was shown in the contract to build the Tweed Courthouse. Construction began in 1858 and was still not complete in 1870. In 1873 the New York courts tried and convicted Tweed for grand larceny due to outrageous overspending associated with the project (Dunbar & Jackson, 2005).

Civil Service Reform

To address the corruption inherent in machine politics, reformers on both sides of the party system began to call for an end to the spoils system and the implementation of a testing system for public employees. In an era of industrialization and technology, many aspects of society began to professionalize, including fields such as architecture and engineering, and reformers sought similar professionalization in the public sector. Reform of the civil service slowly gained popularity with both Democrats and Republicans. However, removing the power of patronage appointments would also reduce the power of the executive branch, so this important realignment faced stiff resistance from some quarters.

The assassination of a president finally turned the tide of support for civil service reform, exposing in the most horrific way the potential abuses of the spoils system and the climate of ineptitude it fostered. In 1881, less than a year into his presidency, James A. Garfield was shot and fatally wounded by Charles Guiteau, a disappointed office seeker. The new president, Chester A. Arthur, himself a longtime recipient and supporter of patronage, was faced with a scandal in the postal service and the public trials of several high-level officials, which led him to abandon the spoils system and support reform.

At Arthur’s urging Congress passed the Pendleton Act in 1883, creating the independent Civil Service Commission and implementing a competitive examination process for federal employees (Cashman, 1993). At first the act covered only a few federal jobs and did little to reduce corruption. Over time, however, more appointed positions funneled into the examination system. Through a ratchet provision, outgoing presidents could protect their political appointees by transferring positions into the civil service system, thereby ensuring employment continued beyond the president’s term. The law applied only to federal positions, however, and did nothing to curb the corruption of machine politics at the state and city levels.

Voluntarism and Popular Politics

The problems of industrializing society, including political corruption and scandals, overcrowded cities, massive influxes of immigrants, and a general sense of moral decline, extended well beyond the civil service, however, and sparked political interest from segments of society outside the political mainstream.

A black-and-white etching showing a woman on horseback carrying an ax. Along with other women, she is smashing barrels of alcohol. There are two banners carried in the background. One reads, “In the name of God and Humanity,” and the other reads, “Temperance League.”

Culver Pictures/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY

This 1874 Currier and Ives print titled, “Woman’s Holy Warrior” depicts a woman waging a battle against the consumption of alcohol. It was etched the same year that the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union formed.

Traditionally seen as a masculine calling, the public sphere of politics was technically off limits to women. Although a national movement for women’s rights had been active from the middle of the 19th century, in the Gilded Age women began to organize themselves into voluntary associations in order to engage in politics more directly. Voluntary associations eventually came to blur the lines between the domestic sphere, partisan politics, and the movement for woman suffrage, or the right to vote. However, by recruiting mainly educated middle-class women, many organizations continued to reflect the biases of the White Protestant mainstream.

Organized in 1873 to curb the abuse of alcohol, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) offers a clear example of this political evolution. The brainchild of Frances Willard, the WCTU grew to become one of the largest women’s political organizations of the 19th century and eventually spread internationally. It endorsed the vote for women, allied with the nation’s leading labor unions, and campaigned against child labor and in favor of the 8-hour workday. Boasting more than 150,000 members and dozens of local chapters by the 1890s, the organization forced politicians to respond to their agenda as they advocated prison reform, public morality, literacy, and improving the conditions of workers (Tyrell, 1991).

Challenges to the political status quo emanated from those supporting the agenda of the laboring classes as well. Economist Henry George, the author of Progress and Poverty (1879), a best-selling examination and critique of the industrial system, ran against the Tammany Hall candidate for New York mayor in 1886. George endorsed the Knights of Labor and advocated taxing property and redistributing the wealth so that American workers could live in comfort. He gained broad appeal among ethnic New Yorkers—including the Irish and German Americans who formed the backbone of the city’s labor movement—and of Tammany’s usual electoral base (Moss, 2008).

Tammany activists destroyed thousands of ballots cast in his favor, but George still finished second. His candidacy served as a warning to New York’s powerful political machine. Under pressure from its constituents, mostly laborers and immigrants, Tammany adopted a pro-labor stance and pushed for labor reform. In these ways and others, new constituencies forced traditional political parties and institutions into realignments that were more responsive to the needs of a modern industrial society (Welch, 2008).

Critics of the System

Other challenges to partisanship came from third parties. Historian Mark Wahlgren Summers (2004) argues that between the Civil War and the turn of the century, the two-party system was “more like a two-and-a-half party system” (p. 28). A number of regional and national third parties arose during the Gilded Age, some of which gained enough strength to put forward presidential candidates.

Those opposing a return to the gold standard formed the Greenback Party in 1876. Disaffected farmers ran candidates in the Midwest, while New England farmers and workers formed the Labor Reform Party. Workingmen’s parties in multiple localities, two of which managed to field presidential candidates in 1888, drew support from disaffected workers and their allies. The Prohibition Party ran candidates who promised to go further than the established parties to ban the sale of alcohol, earning it the endorsement of the WTCU (Summers, 2004).

Few of these political movements won much electoral success, but they demonstrated that the existing major parties were failing to meet the needs of a rapidly changing electorate. The proliferation of third parties also reflected a lack of confidence in the Democrats and Republicans to tackle the important issues of the day. Movements such as the Greenbackers and Prohibitionists did not reject the idea of party organization; their concern was that the existing parties failed to address concerns over the money supply and inflation, as well as social problems such as drunkenness.

Critics existed within the parties as well, and in some cases, particularly at the state level, a faction garnered enough support to swing an election from one major party to another. During the presidential election of 1884, for example, a group of Republicans known as mugwumps (a Native American word for “war leader”) bolted from their party to support Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland. Arguing that James G. Blaine, the Republican nominee, was too closely associated with the spoils system and financial corruption, they chose morality over party loyalty. Possibly due to the mugwumps’ support in New York State, Cleveland won one of the tightest elections in history, with a plurality of fewer than 30,000 votes (Cashman, 1993).

When the dominant political parties failed to meet the needs of reformers, they sought new means of making their voices heard, and the loudest voices urging political realignment and reform came from the newly emerging professionals and middle class.

3.2 The New Cultural Order

A growing middle class of professionals with expanded knowledge, new skills, and social concerns accompanied the rapid industrialization of U.S. society. These groups included established professions such as doctors and lawyers, but also the newly professionalizing occupations of teachers, social workers, and eventually sociologists, psychologists, and other college-educated academics. Their ranks were joined by new types of white-collar workers, middle managers, and corporate employees who increasingly occupied a middle stratum between laborers and industrialists. They formed a movement that sought change through both intellectual study and grassroots activism (Cashman, 1993).

Gilded Age Social Philosophy

The impulse to remedy the social and political conditions of the Gilded Age inspired a number of social thinkers to suggest a host of solutions. For example, Henry George, the author of Progress and Poverty, moved many followers with his economic philosophy known as Georgism, which suggested that people own the value of their own labor and of the things they create and that nature and land belong to all humanity. Most famously he advocated a “single tax” on land only, not on the structures or improvements to the land, to prevent the formation of land monopolies (George, 1886).

Socialism offered another path to reform. Many Americans found their first introduction to socialism through Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000–1887, a utopian science-fiction novel in which the main character, Julian West, awakens in the year 2000 and finds himself in a Socialist paradise. The government owns the industries, and the citizens all receive an equal distribution of wealth and resources. Bellamy’s ideas, which he called “nationalism,” inspired dozens of clubs whose members hoped his vision could reshape the industrial United States (Lipow, 1982). His followers believed that the gap that seemed to be ever widening between the wealthy and poor could still be bridged and that there might be a compromise whereby material gain could exist while economic inequality was muted.

Women’s Activism

Exploring History through Film: Settlement Houses Respond to Social Problems

Starting with Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago, settlement houses sought to address the needs of immigrants and the working class. These houses were centers of philanthropy, community education, and advocacy.

The growing profession of social work offered a different and more grounded response to the problems of a modernizing society. Although it would not fully flourish until after the turn of the 20th century, the reform agenda of social workers brought many middle-class women to the forefront of activism in the late 19th century. Until that time middle-class women, though often well educated, could follow few career paths other than teaching. The most prominent among the new social workers was Jane Addams, who, along with Ellen Starr, founded the nation’s first settlement house, called Hull House, in Chicago to offer English classes and other services to the city’s growing population of recent European immigrants.

Modeled after comparable facilities in Great Britain, Hull House sparked a national movement. By the end of 1891, there were at least six similar organizations in other American cities, and within a few years there were more than two dozen (Brands, 1995).

The settlement houses combined intellectual study with community-based activism. Addams’s philosophy aimed to serve the needy among the immigrant working class through classes and lectures on literature, the arts, and practical domestic activities such as sewing and food preservation. At the same time, she and fellow social workers collected data in the interest of developing a scientific understanding of the causes of poverty and dependence. Florence Kelley, who lived at Hull House from 1891 through 1899, was among the first to use the settlement house as the focal point for studying urban problems, eventually publishing a six-volume survey of urban conditions in Chicago that became important ammunition for social reformers (Cashman, 1993).

Addams and other settlement house workers realized that urban reform required legislation, and they were confident that once women—especially middle-class women—possessed the right to vote, their moral force would bring it about (Traxel, 1998). Social workers’ campaigns against child labor and for the reform of urban sanitation and industrial working conditions thus strengthened the movement for woman suffrage. As the goals of social reformers and settlement house workers began to merge with those of longtime woman suffrage advocates, they reflected yet another attempt at political realignment in the Gilded Age.

Woman Suffrage in the Gilded Age

Emanating from the pre–Civil War abolition movement, advocates of women’s voting rights gained strength after 1870. The previous year woman suffragists had split into factions.

One group, including Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe, formed the American Woman Suffrage Association, which worked toward gaining the vote state by state. Shying away from controversial issues, the organization focused on an incremental push for woman suffrage. The group maintained ties with the Republican Party and sought the aid of men in their cause. Early success came in 1869 when the Wyoming territory granted women the right to vote. After it became a state in 1890, Wyoming also had some of the earliest female officeholders. Before the Gilded Age ended, other western states followed suit: Idaho, Utah, and Colorado granted women the right to vote in statewide elections (Baker, 2005).

The more radical woman suffrage advocates, led by longtime activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, formed the National Woman Suffrage Association. Also organizing in 1869, this group condemned both the 14th and 15th Amendments, believing their exclusion of women in citizenship and voting rights was a mistake. Seeing suffrage as an important first step to achieving political and civil equality with men, these women argued that voting was a natural right.

They focused their campaign on the benefits of suffrage. Women could work toward an improved America once they held the power of the ballot. They could work for a revision in laws that barred them from universities; revise marriage, child custody, and divorce laws; and clean up the cities and the corrupt political system. In 1876 Anthony argued, “Woman needs the ballot as a protection to herself; it is a means and not an end. Until she gets it she will not be satisfied, nor will she be protected” (as cited in Baker, 2005, p. 8).

Women did not gain the right to vote nationally in the Gilded Age, but the suffrage movement did win growing support. Stanton and Anthony were particularly visible, traveling the country to speak to hundreds of audiences large and small about the benefits of woman suffrage. Realizing their common cause, the two organizations merged in 1890 to create the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Millions were drawn to the cause, but support for the ideal of expanded citizenship was waning for women just as it would for African Americans. The existing political system was unwilling to respond to the modern demands of women, and their suffrage cause temporarily stalled. For women, the era’s political realignments would fall short.

The Social Gospel

The work of female social workers and the WCTU found support in the Social Gospel movement. Ministers in the movement—which was strongest among Unitarians, Episcopalians, and Congregationalists—sought to make their denominations more appealing to the urban poor, particularly immigrant workers. Proponents of the Social Gospel denied the tenets of Social Darwinism (see Chapter 2) that declared society’s economic inequalities were a natural reflection of the superiority of some individuals over others. Influenced by social philosophers of the era, they argued that poverty was not simply an unavoidable result of misfortune or incompetence, but was a social problem that could be treated (Cashman, 1993).

Proponents of the Social Gospel believed they had a divine mandate to perform benevolent ministry, especially in the growing cities. Combining religious dogma, secular social science, and politics, they set about to reform society. Some created committees to study urban poverty; others formed home missions to work directly with the poor. Although historians have long focused on the role of men (especially ministers) in the Social Gospel movement, more recent scholarship confirms that women such as Frances Willard of the WCTU worked jointly with men to build a just society and ameliorate the era’s shocking urban and industrial conditions (Edwards & Gifford, 2003).

3.3 The New South

Women’s reform movements and proponents of the Social Gospel concentrated most of their efforts in the Northeast, where industrialization and immigration were bringing rapid change. The southern states attracted few immigrants, and efforts there concentrated on hurrying to catch up with the industrial North. When the final federal troops were removed from the South in 1877, the region entered into an era of rebuilding and redefining its economy and its social system. In this so-called New South, investors put their money into sawmills, textile mills, and coal mines. Railroads connected cities and countryside, and advocates hoped that new technologies would bring the region closer to the modern transformation occurring in the North (Ayers, 2007).

New South Industry

The New South witnessed an explosion of industrial activity. In 1860 there were just over 20,000 manufacturing firms in the South. By 1880 there were almost 30,000, and by the end of the century there were nearly 70,000. Most of these were textile mills, tobacco factories, or steel mills located in a southern industrial belt that extended from the mineral fields around Birmingham, Alabama, to the Carolina Piedmont region.

As before the war, southern industry focused largely on the processing of the region’s agricultural products. In 1880 just 8.7% of the region’s population lived in an urban area; by the start of the 20th century, this had increased to 20%. The economic devastation the region suffered during the war, however, meant that there was not sufficient regional capital to support industrialization. With the exception of tobacco manufacture, most New South industries depended on northern investors. Encouraging northern investment was essential to building an industrial South, but it also left key decision making and planning in the hands of investors from outside the region.

Steel mills figured prominently in the New South’s industrial growth. In 1880 Virginia and Alabama produced 205,000 tons of pig iron, a commodity in high demand because of the nationwide expansion of railroads. Rich deposits of iron ore in north Alabama made that state a natural location for the industry. With demand increasing, the southern mineral belt expanded production to more than 1.5 million tons by 1892.

Even capitalists in the North began to take notice of the progress and promise of southern industrialization. As steel magnate Andrew Carnegie observed in 1889, “The South is Pennsylvania’s most formidable industrial enemy” (as cited in Ayers, 2007, p. 110). In fact, northern investors controlled much of the industry, and men like Carnegie manipulated the prices of southern steel to protect his Pittsburgh plants and retain northern customers.

The steel mills were magnets for rural African Americans, who migrated to southern cities such as Birmingham to seek employment. Filling as many as 90% of the unskilled positions, African Americans regulated the flow of molten iron in the furnaces, used heavy sledges to break up iron globules, and hauled iron bars weighing up to 100 pounds. African Americans performed the most dangerous, hot, and dirty tasks in the mills, but the industry still became an important conduit for them to escape rural poverty.

Mill owners recruited skilled White workers from the North to fill the more skilled and supervisory jobs and encouraged animosity between the races. Fearing that industrialists might substitute African Americans in their skilled positions, boilermaker lodges and other union organizations barred African Americans from membership. One Birmingham lodge advertised its membership was open to only “white, free-born male citizens of some civilized country” (Zieger, 2007, p. 21).

To promote their textile mills as safe and respectable places to work, and to lessen concerns of race mixing, mill owners excluded African American workers.

Textile mills were even more central to the New South economy. Taking advantage of the abundance of water power and the nearby supply of raw materials, especially in the North Carolina Piedmont, textile mills produced cotton thread, sheeting, and other fabrics. Unlike in the steel industry, however, African Americans could not gain a foothold even in the cotton mills’ unskilled positions. Employers preferred poor Whites who migrated from the surrounding countryside. Many mill owners advertised the work as being suitable for White women, many of whom had never worked outside the home (Hall et al., 1987). They emphasized that the new mills were safe, respectable, and modern; any chance of building a female- or family-dominated workforce required the exclusion of African Americans.

Late in the 19th century African Americans temporarily gained the favor of mill operators after union activism threatened to disrupt production. Believing African Americans to be more loyal than Whites and less likely to strike, some mills began hiring African American operatives. One newspaper editor remarked, “the colored man is now knocking at the door of cotton mills asking for work at lower wages than white men would think of” (as cited in Zieger, 2007, p. 21). However, amid a rising climate of racial tensions, including fear of miscegenation, or race mixing, White textile workers objected strenuously to the introduction of African Americans. Ultimately, African American employees performed only the most menial of tasks.

Despite some real advances, the industrial development of the New South failed to compete with the far greater scale of development in the North, and the region remained largely agricultural. Although some capital investment brought industry to the South, with the exception of a few pockets—such as Birmingham’s steel mills—development remained linked with the agricultural economy. Textile mills depended on cotton production. Furniture making relied on timber harvesting. Racial divisions also contributed to the slower pace of industrialization, as the color line continued to divide workers and prevented the organization of the southern labor force.

Politics of the New South

Politically, as in most other facets of life, the South divided along racial lines: Most Whites were loyal Democrats, whereas African Americans supported the party of Lincoln and remained steadfast Republicans. The conservative Democrats who came to dominate politics in the region included members of the former planter class and the new entrepreneurs and industrialists who pushed for economic growth. Southern Democrats supported White domination of politics and society, and they reacted against the civil rights gains of Reconstruction by cutting taxes and reducing public services, including education. Their intention was to keep African Americans at the lowest rung of society, thereby ensuring both White supremacy and maintaining a dependent labor force.

A White member of Virginia’s Readjuster Party courts the vote of an African American man. A biracial political party, the movement lasted well past Reconstruction, bringing voters together on important issues such as public debt and education.

The South was not immune to the third-party coalitions such as those formed by discontented citizens in the North and West, however (Cashman, 1993). The sharecropping system that tied people to the land ensnared both White and African American farmers in cycles of debt and left them desperate for relief. And though southern African Americans experienced racial discrimination after Reconstruction, the Jim Crow system of segregation that Homer Plessy and others protested did not instantly materialize upon the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. In some cases White farmers crossed racial lines to form political alliances with African Americans. Occurring in each state of the former Confederacy, these alliances threatened the status quo that had always defined Whites as superior regardless of their economic position in society.

A particularly important biracial coalition, the Readjuster Party, gained control of Virginia politics between 1879 and 1883, electing a governor, two U.S. senators, and representatives in 6 of the state’s 10 congressional districts. This partnership of African American and White Republicans and White Democrats sought to readjust (lower) that state’s debt and support public education (Dailey, 2000).

Readjusters also supported African American suffrage, officeholding, and jury service, thus providing a dangerous example in the eyes of those who sought to reclaim the South for the White majority. Historian Jane Dailey (2000) argues that the success of groups such as the Readjusters inspired a movement to exclude African Americans from public influence by the end of the Gilded Age. The rise of Jim Crow and the escalation of violence against African American southerners “grew out of white southerners’ specific and concrete encounters with black social, economic, and political power” (Dailey, 2000, p. 2).

The Supreme Court and the Rise of Jim Crow

In the turmoil of the post-Reconstruction era, African Americans’ alliances with Whites were deliberately undermined to divide the southern working class, and the New South came to espouse virulent racism. Simultaneously, in a series of important decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court made it easier for White southerners to roll back the civil rights gains of Reconstruction. The court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had guaranteed equal access in public accommodations. Its rulings in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) further declared that neither the 13th nor the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution empowered the federal government to protect African Americans from the actions of individuals.

Those amendments applied, according to the court, only to discrimination by state or local governments. The federal government had no ability to protect African Americans from discrimination practiced by individuals or businesses. Southern business owners quickly responded, enacting new Jim Crow policies to prevent African Americans from riding in railcars with Whites and separating the races in restaurants, schools, hospitals, and even public toilet facilities. “Whites Only” signs began to appear across the region and would be sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court 13 years later.

The challenges that Homer Plessy and others brought to the advancing policies of legal segregation brought no change in the Gilded Age and may have actually sped the advance of Jim Crow. The 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson made “separate but equal” possible across the South and enabled the introduction of even more restrictive segregation. The decision became a landmark case, one that sets a legal precedent by which other rulings are measured. Three years after the decision, the court applied the separation policy to public schools in Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education, allowing states and districts to establish separate schools for African American and White children even where facilities for African American students did not exist.

The voting rights of African American men came under attack across the South as well. Even before the Plessy decision, Southern states enacted literacy tests and imposed poll taxes aimed at restricting the franchise to Whites. Literacy tests required potential voters to read and interpret documents as a qualification for voter registration. Poll taxes required voters to pay a certain sum, usually $1, before voting, a hurdle that disproportionately affected African Americans. Poor and illiterate Whites were exempted from the laws through the implementation of a so-called grandfather clause: Those whose grandfather had voted were entitled to maintain the right without qualification. The supporters of grandfather clauses aimed not just to stop African Americans from voting, but also to dissuade poor Whites from finding allies across the color line.

The Supreme Court upheld the legality of the poll tax and literacy test in 1898. Support for racial discrimination even spread outside the South, with a number of states outside the region passing legislation separating African Americans and Whites in schools and many public settings and banning interracial marriage.

Additionally, some areas of the United States deprived African Americans of equal rights through customary, or de facto, segregation policies. Although not codified in law, de facto discrimination could be a powerful restriction on the lives of African Americans. In some northern regions African Americans were subjected to residential segregation, forced to cluster in the poorest housing. Residential segregation often led to school segregation, even in communities without formal segregation policies.

Ida B. Wells and the Antilynching Campaign

Those opposing African American rights argued that allowing African American political participation would lead to miscegenation, and they expressed the need to protect “White womanhood.” As the 20th century approached, violence against African Americans grew exponentially.

Race riots were not uncommon. One of the more infamous occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina, in November 1898. Aiming to oust the mayor, who supported African American voting rights, and to rid the city of a biracial city council, more than 1,000 White Democrats attacked African American businesses and citizens, resulting in several deaths. In the aftermath more than 2,000 African Americans fled the city, and those who remained were disfranchised (Cecelski & Tyson, 1998).

As industry attracted workers, many of them single African American men, into growing cities, fear of crime and vice exacerbated racial tensions. Violence against African Americans took the lives of hundreds as White southerners, facing the economic and political disruptions of the era, increasingly lashed out. Lynching, a race-specific murder perpetrated by an individual or a group, was of special and growing concern because many Whites saw it as necessary retribution against the decay of society. These horrific crimes could include hangings, severe beatings, physical torture, and often mutilation or burning of the victim’s body.

Lynchings were also often public spectacles. Announced in newspapers, they would attract hundreds of onlookers, including middle-class and upper class families. Even when carried out privately by small groups of vigilantes, participants often took photographs, which were shared as evidence of what many southern Whites believed to be “divinely sanctioned acts” (Wood, 2009). In the late Gilded Age, especially after 1892, more than 100 African Americans were lynched each year.

Ida B. Wells, an African American newspaper editor from Memphis, Tennessee, led the campaign against lynching. Dismayed when a mob lynched three successful African American businessmen in Memphis, including a close friend, Wells penned an editorial condemning the violence. Her outspoken activism led to death threats and her eventual move to the North, where she began to collect data on lynching and grew alarmed at its increasing frequency.

She traveled across the United States and Europe, educating audiences about the insidious crime through speeches and pamphlets. She persuaded British activists to form an antilynching organization and gained the respect of important African American leaders, including Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and T. Thomas Fortune, the publisher of the nation’s leading African American newspaper, the New York Age (Barnes, 2012).

Wells argued that the myth of African American men raping White women, often used to justify lynching, hid the reality that mob violence against African Americans was closely related to shifting economic and social structures of the New South. Her carefully assembled data proved that very few victims were actually accused of rape. Like her friend in Memphis, many lynching victims had committed no crime at all, save for representing a challenge to the all-embracing system of racial domination.

Wells demonstrated that southern White men used lynching to make up for their loss of control over African Americans at the end of slavery and that it was a means to maintain the region’s patriarchal control over White women and African American men. Compiling statistics to back her assertions, Wells was the first activist to gain a broad audience on the subject. Lynching did not end in Wells’s lifetime, but she did articulate the issue, bringing it to the attention of the nation (Bay, 2009). Her campaign for a federal antilynching law earned the respect of many reformers on both sides of the color line.

Wells’s activism during the Gilded Age also offers another important example of women’s political activism. Her crusade sparked the growth of voluntary associations among African American women, namely the National Association of Colored Women, which championed woman suffrage and fought against lynching and Jim Crow laws. Like the WCTU and other White women’s associations, the National Association of Colored Women came to fight for education and social improvements, eventually garnering 300,000 members.

3.4 The Populist Movement

Despite the dramatic growth of American cities in the late 19th century, most of the nation still lived a rural, agrarian lifestyle. However, life on the farm—the place that best represented the nation’s heritage—seemed to present new challenges and threats every day. Many farmers faced debt and bankruptcy due to economic panic, overproduction, and steep declines in prices, and they looked to the government for support. When none came, they decided to take their political future into their own hands by forming a new political party. As the United States stood on the cusp of a transition from its agrarian past to an industrial future, the farmers of America joined with workers to speak out against an unresponsive government and the crises of the 1890s.

The Roots of Populism

The expansion of settlement into the West extended land ownership to more Americans, but it also resulted in a more competitive farm economy. In terms of simple supply-and-demand economics, the increase in agricultural output drove down prices, which in turn decreased farm earnings. To make up for lost profits, farmers planted even more, further glutting national and international markets for wheat, corn, and especially cotton. In the South the merchants who controlled land and credit pushed small tenant farmers further and further into debt as they planted additional cotton in an attempt to free their families from debt peonage.

In the Midwest and Great Plains, farmers became dependent on the railroad to ship their commodities to distant markets, but rail lines often charged smaller producers higher transportation fees, offering only large farmers discount rates for shipping in higher volume. The inequities in the economy and especially the agricultural sector fostered a populist movement that brought farmers and others together in a crusade to make the advancing capitalist system more responsive to their needs.

The Rise of the Populist Coalition

This populist, or people’s, movement grew quickly in the 1880s, soon developing into the largest grassroots political insurgency in U.S. history. It began with anger over the crop lien and sharecropping systems in the South. Poor White and African American farmers came together in a cooperative organization called the Southern Farmers’ Alliance, which demanded freedom from the exploitive interest rates charged by merchants. Farmers’ Alliances formed in dozens of communities and helped spread the populist message.

The message quickly gained momentum in the rural farming belt of the Great Plains, where organizations such as the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry protested high shipping rates. Although some organizations experienced a decline in membership, by 1890 the movement coalesced into a political movement with a national platform (Holmes, 1994).

The Grange

The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, or the Grange, was one of the most important community organizations to come to the farmers’ aid. A Granger was any farmer who sought improvement in his working conditions. The Granger movement, which reached its peak in the Gilded Age, focused on the key drivers of agrarian discontent: abusive railroad practices, unfair businessmen who organized monopolies, and corrupt politicians (Nordin, 1974). Like their southern counterparts, the Grangers created cooperatives or alliances that allowed small farmers to combine the sale and shipping of their crops.

They also struck back at the railroads through both the ballot box and the court system. Grangers put candidates forward in many Midwest political contests and championed a political platform that was strongly against laissez-faire economics and what they called the “do-nothing” policies of the government. They sought protection for all laboring classes against the growing power of capitalists, and they believed that political cooperation would help them achieve their agrarian goals. In 1868 there were 10 Granges in America; just 7 years later, there were more than 1,000, with nearly 1.5 million members (Woods, 1991).

The Grangers focused their reforms at the state level, seeking laws that would establish maximum railroad shipping and grain storage rates. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a series of rulings between 1876 and 1877 called the Granger Cases, which upheld several important challenges that made state railroads offer fair rates to all shippers. In some states railroads skirted court rulings and intimidated farmers through discriminatory policies (Cashman, 1993). Moreover, the Grangers were unable to challenge the monopolistic national railroads. Despite their successes, the Grange rather quickly fell into decline as cooperatives failed and many farmers suffered financially and became disillusioned.

Railroad Regulation

Even as the Grange faded, however, ongoing demands for railroad regulation cemented the populist coalition. The importance of railroads to the growing U.S. economy made regulation not just a regional farmers’ issue, but a national concern, and it united Gilded Age voters. More than 30 regulatory bills were introduced between 1874 and 1885, but all failed in the face of conservative courts that sided with the railroads. The failure offered another example of a political system more responsive to the needs of industry than the demands of the American people.

Momentum for regulation increased, however, after the Supreme Court reversed its ruling in one of the Granger Cases, Wabash v. Illinois, in 1886. Declaring that state laws could not control the traffic of a railroad that passed through more than one state, the court ruling spurred a new movement for reform. The first federal legislation came the following year, when Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act. The law created the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), which aimed to oversee railroad regulation, ensure fair rates, and eliminate rate discrimination against small shippers.

However, as courts shifted toward a probusiness interpretation of the law, and Republican and Democratic politicians remained deeply divided on the issue of regulation, the ICC proved an ineffective vehicle for ending discriminatory practices (Cashman, 1993; Calhoun, 2010). For example, it could not stop the railroads from raising prices and then offering substantial rebates to large shippers. The legislation did set an important precedent for later reform, though, as the tide of public opinion would continue to press for regulation.

The People’s Party

Even though the Granger movement declined and railroad regulation failed to make significant headway, the impulse for economic and social reform continued to thrive. In 1890 the leaders of several important chapters of the Farmers’ Alliance met in Ocala, Florida, and agreed to some basic principles for a new third-party movement.

Up to this point, Farmers’ Alliance members had operated by bringing their unique issues to play within the established political parties. Members of the Southern Alliance tended to work through the Democratic Party, whereas midwestern alliances favored the Republicans. Likewise, alliance members ran for political positions throughout the United States as both Republicans and Democrats. Working through the parties this way, alliance members became governors in six states and senators in three, and they held 50 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Although most of these victories were among those running as Democrats, it was clear that the alliances were gaining increasing political power in both parties (Goodwyn, 1979).

On the heels of this success, the strongest political activists among the alliances, the Knights of Labor, and the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance met in St. Louis in 1892 and formed a distinct political party with the express aim of fielding a populist presidential candidate. They called themselves the People’s Party, and their supporters the Populists. As the 1,300 Populist delegates endorsed the movement and its party, they stood beneath a banner that read simply, “We do not ask for sympathy or pity. We ask for justice” (as cited in McMath, 1992, p. 161). Their platform included a call for an 8-hour workday, immigration restriction, a graduated income tax, and government ownership of railroads, banks, and telegraph lines (McMath, 1992).

Convening a larger convention at Omaha, Nebraska, in July, the People’s Party nominated James B. Weaver of Iowa, a former Union officer, as its candidate in the 1892 presidential election. To balance the ticket, Confederate veteran James Field of Virginia filled the vice president’s spot. The convention produced the Omaha Platform, which called for a wide range of social and economic reforms. Provisions called for an 8-hour workday, direct election of U.S. senators, single terms for president and vice president, and nationalization of the railroads. A major plank called for the free and unlimited coinage of silver and abandonment of the gold standard altogether.

More than a million Americans voted for the People’s Party, which was greater than 8.5% of the popular vote. Weaver received more than 50% of the vote in Nevada, Idaho, Colorado, North Dakota, and Kansas, many of which were silver mining states. Though Weaver lost the presidential election, the results gave the party some incentive to continue its work, and in succeeding years it successfully elected 10 representatives, 5 senators, and 3 governors.

Through the remainder of the 1890s, though, it became increasingly difficult for the varied and sometimes divergent interests of farmers and industrial workers to unite on policy directions. For example, the needs of a Knights of Labor union member were far different from those of a small farmer. Other disagreements occurred among the Populists in the South. Some of the more progressive members wanted to let African Americans into the party, but others staunchly opposed it.

Apart from these growing differences, the party’s showing in 1892 was significant. Winning 22 electoral votes (a first for any third party since the Civil War), the Populists may have swayed the election in favor of former Democratic president Grover Cleveland, who won a second term over incumbent Republican Benjamin Harrison.

The Panic of 1893

Farmers and industrial workers were not the only Americans experiencing economic distress in the 1890s; the once booming railroad industry continued to suffer as well. A frenzy of stock market speculation in the 1880s drove railroad stock prices to wild heights (Steeples & Whitten, 1998). The first sign that the railroad industry was not as strong as investors believed came in February 1893, when the Philadelphia and Reading railroads declared bankruptcy. Similar speculation happened around the world as stock and currency markets rose and then collapsed, leading to crises in such far-flung locations as Argentina, Italy, and Australia (Bryan, 2010). Just before Cleveland’s second inauguration, the U.S. economy fell into a similar panic.

The Panic of 1893 inspired this 1896 Broadway production, The War of Wealth. According to the advertisement, the run on the bank depicted in the play is “the most animated & realistic scene ever shown on the stage.”

One of Cleveland’s first acts of his term was to convince Congress to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which restricted the amount of inexpensive silver in the currency flow. When the economy failed to recover immediately, Americans rushed to remove their deposits from banks. Multiple banks failed as a result, and the Populists used the crisis to gather support for their movement, declaring that the Panic of 1893 was the fault of industrialists and bankers (Wicker, 2000).

In addition to bank failures, the stock market declined precipitously. Before the economic catastrophe ended, 74 railroads, 600 banks, and 15,000 businesses collapsed. The panic turned into a nationwide depression that lasted for 4 years and left more than a million industrial workers (or 20% of the workforce) unemployed. Families starved and in the winter had no money for heat. Many more lost their homes to foreclosure and stole rides on trains, looking for work in whatever city was next on the tracks. Farmers struggled to survive as prices for crops plummeted.

The depression in Europe further worsened the conditions in the United States, and the panic and depression demonstrated how closely tied the entire U.S. economy was to global markets. It seemed that for the first time, there was no escaping the failing economy. Whether someone farmed the land or toiled in industry, everyone suffered together.

American Experience: Coxey’s Army

The hunger, hardship, and desperation initiated by the Panic of 1893 caused social unrest throughout the nation. One of the best examples of this began in Massillon, Ohio, where Jacob S. Coxey decided that the government should help those left penniless by the economy. Coxey was a well-off owner of a sand quarry and a farm in Ohio, and a breeder of racehorses in Kentucky. After hearing a Populist speak in Chicago about the need for government to take responsibility for public works projects to boost the economy, he became convinced of the importance of the idea. He could not get local officials to take him seriously, and the only way he thought that he could get the president listen to him was through a dramatic march from Ohio to Washington, D.C. Those who followed him there became known as Coxey’s Army.

As he gathered his army, Coxey prohibited weapons of any kind, though he did create symbols that designated “officers” of various ranks. The members of the group left Ohio in a cold rain on Easter morning, March 25, 1894, and by May 1 they had walked the entire way to the nation’s capital. Over that distance the marchers had swelled in numbers from 100 to 500. Nearly 20,000 people awaited their arrival, but the end was not what they had hoped for—police arrested Coxey and other leaders for walking on the grass of the Capitol lawn. They spent 20 days in jail and were denied an opportunity to present their ideas to Congress.

Despite the disappointment, Coxey brought attention to the plight of the unemployed and preached a message that if society had caused suffering, the government should assume responsibility for providing aid (Folsom, 1991). This idea of national welfare would come to the forefront again in the 20th century. For the 1890s Coxey’s Army was an important indication that neither the government nor the third-party movements of the Gilded Age would or could do much to solve the economic problems facing the nation.

Election of 1896

A campaign poster shows William McKinley standing on a gold coin that is held up by his supporters. McKinley holds an American flag in one hand and his top hat in the other. In the background is the slogan “Prosperity at home, prestige abroad.” The words “commerce” and “civilization” appear over images of ships and buildings, respectively.

In the midst of the depression and massive unemployment, the nation elected a new president. In many ways the election of 1896 was a referendum on the silver question and marked an important crisis year in modern U.S. history. The election pitted gold-standard advocate William McKinley, an experienced politician and former governor of Ohio, against 36-year-old William Jennings Bryan, a charismatic and controversial champion of free silver, the populist movement, and the Social Gospel. His candidacy linked the traditional Democratic Party and the People’s Party when he earned the presidential nomination of both of them. His popularity elevated the ire of his opponents, who characterized him as a Socialist radical and predicted the downfall of America should he be elected.

Bryan’s dual nomination came after he made bimetallism and particularly the coinage of silver the centerpiece of his campaign. This made him widely popular with workers, farmers, and those struggling with debts and reduced credit. At the 1896 Democratic National Convention, he delivered his impassioned Cross of Gold speech in which he decried the restrictions the gold standard placed on the economy: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold” (as cited in Kazin, 2007, p. 47). Opponents seized his bold words and turned them against him, calling him the Antichrist and publishing political cartoons ridiculing both Bryan’s speech and the free silver movement.

McKinley won the election with just over 50% of the popular vote and a margin of 95 electors. The election seemed to form a referendum on the People’s Party and the populist movement’s ability to achieve lasting economic reform. It seemed that the nation could not swallow such a dramatic political realignment. In many ways McKinley’s election settled the fears of the middle and upper classes that disgruntled farmers and workers might overtake the United States.

The currency question was put to rest in the Gold Standard Act of 1900, which firmly returned the nation to the more conservative metal. The Populists disbanded and the voice of dissent was silenced. A series of international crop failures brought a new demand for food, which American farmers happily rushed to fill. As the prices for their products increased, they slowly climbed their way out of debt. Banks once again were solvent, and the economy began to improve (H. W. Morgan, 2003). In decades to come Americans would look back to the Populists and their demand for a social safety net to protect average Americans in times of economic downturn and depression. It would take the Great Depression of the 1930s before such reforms were realized.