The American Promise – Lecture Notes
Chapter 20 – Dissent, Depression, and War – 1890-1900
I. The Farmers’ Revolt
A. The Farmers’ Alliance (Slide 2) Page 589
1. Confronting Economic Challenges—Farmers faced a banking system
committed to the gold standard; a railroad rate system that was capricious and
unfair; and rampant speculation that drove up the price of land.
2. Organizing Politically—Farmers had supported the Grange and Greenback
Labor Party during the 1870s; as the situation grew more desperate the following
decade, farmers came together into regional alliances starting in Texas,
Arkansas, and rural Louisiana; as the alliance movement grew, the farmer
groups consolidated into two regional alliances with more than 200,000
members: the Northwestern Farmers’ Alliance and the more radical Southern
Farmers’ Alliance.
3. Reaching African Americans—The Southern Farmers’ Alliance worked with
the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, an African American group founded in Texas in
the 1880s; attempted to forge a common cause.
4. Appealing to the Family—The political culture of the Alliance encouraged the
inclusion of women and children; used the family as its defining symbol; women
rallied to the Alliance banner along with their menfolk.
5. Alliance Meetings—Combined picnic, parade, revival, country fair, and political
convention; thousands attended Alliance meetings; distributed literature and
used lectures to reach out to the illiterate.
6. Farmers’ Cooperatives—At the heart of the Alliance movement stood a series
of farmers’ cooperatives that sought to negotiate better prices for their crops; met
with stiff opposition from merchants, bankers, wholesalers, and manufacturers,
who made it impossible for them to get credit; as the cooperative movement died,
the Farmers’ Alliance moved toward direct political action; demanded railroad
regulation, laws against land speculation, and currency and credit reform.
B. The Populist Movement (Slide 5) Page 590
1. The People’s Party—By 1892, advocates of a third party movement had
convinced members of the Farmers’ Alliance to form the People’s Party;
launched the Populist movement, which mounted a stinging critique of industrial
society.
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2. The Subtreasury—The Populists devised the idea of a subtreasury, a plan that
would allow farmers to store nonperishable crops in government storehouses
until market prices rose.
3. Land Reform—For the western farmer, Populists promised land reform;
championed a plan to reclaim excessive lands granted to railroads or sold to
foreign investors.
4. Currency Reform—farmers in all sections, hoping to make credit easier to
obtain, endorsed platform planks calling for currency reform in the form of free
silver and greenbacks.
5. Empowering the Common People—The Populist platform called for the direct
election of senators, the secret ballot, and other electoral issues; also supported
the eight-hour day and an end to contract labor; more than just a response to
hard times, Populism presented an alternative vision of American economic
democracy.
II. The Labor Wars
A. The Homestead Lockout (Slide 6) Page 591
1. Amalgamated Iron and Steel Workers—In 1892, steelworkers in Pennsylvania
squared off against Andrew Carnegie over the right to organize the Homestead
steel mills; Carnegie, once a champion of workers’ right to unionize, resolved to
crush the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers in order to protect
his profits and control the industry; the Amalgamated was denied renewal of its
contract.
2. Fort Frick—Carnegie did not want to be directly involved with the union
busting; sailed to Scotland and left Henry Clay Frick, a tough antilabor man, in
charge; Frick erected a fifteen-foot fence around the plant; hired 316 mercenaries
from the Pinkerton Detective Agency to defend what workers dubbed “Fort Frick.”
3. The Lockout and the Violence—On June 28, Frick locked the workers out of
the mills; they immediately rallied to the support of the union and blocked the
Pinkertons from entering the plant; gunfire broke out; with more than a dozen
Pinkertons and some thirty workers killed or wounded in the scuffle, the
Pinkertons retreated to their barges; workers and their families continued to
harass the Pinkertons on the barges; when they finally surrendered and came
ashore, they were met with verbal and physical violence.
4. Public Backlash—Battle ended in a dubious victory; workers took control of the
plant; at first, public opinion favored the workers; but the workers’ actions struck
at the heart of the capitalist system, pitting workers’ right to their jobs against the
rights of private property; yielding to pressure from Frick, the governor of
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Pennsylvania called out the National Guard to protect Carnegie’s mills; allowed
Frick to bring in strikebreakers.
5. Bitter Defeat—In a misguided effort to ignite a general uprising, Alexander
Berkman, a Russian immigrant and anarchist, attempted to assassinate Frick;
caused public opinion to turn against the workers, even though the Amalgamated
and the AFL denounced his action; after four and a half months, the workers
capitulated and returned to work to find their wages slashed, their workday
lengthened, and 500 jobs eliminated; another forty-five years would pass before
steelworkers, unskilled as well as skilled, successfully unionized; after
Homestead, Carnegie’s profits tripled.
B. The Cripple Creek Miners’ Strike of 1894 (Slide 8) Page 594
1. Depression Leads to a Strike at the Mines—In the spring of 1893, less than a
year after the Homestead lockout, a panic on Wall Street touched off a bitter
depression; in the West, silver mines fell on hard times; when conservative mine
owners moved to lengthen the workday from eight to ten hours, the newly formed
Western Federation of Miners (WFM) protested; some mine owners settled with
the union, but others refused; provoked a strike in 1894.
2. Populist Support—The striking miners received help from many quarters; local
businesses and grocers sympathized with the strikers; the county sheriff called
for troops to put down the strike, but Populist governor Davis H. Waite refused,
instead serving as arbitrator in the dispute; showed the pivotal power of the state
in the nation’s labor wars; mine owners eventually capitulated, agreeing to an
eight-hour workday; but a decade later, mine owners, this time with support from
state troops, took back control of the mines; defeated the WFM and blacklisted
all its members.
C. Eugene V. Debs and the Pullman Strike (Slide 9) Page 594
1. The Model Town: Pullman—By 1894, the economic depression had swelled
the ranks of the unemployed to three million; workers were particularly
demoralized in the company town of Pullman on the outskirts of Chicago, where
workers were forced to pay high rents and lived under the constant threat of
eviction.
2. Wage Cuts—Workers saw their wages slashed five times in 1893, with cuts
totaling at least 28 percent, while their rent remained constant; at the heart of the
labor problems at Pullman lay not only economic inequity but also the company’s
attempt to control the work process; substituted piecework for day wages and
undermined skilled craftsworkers.
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3. Worker Revolt—Pullman workers rebelled, flocking to the ranks of the
American Railway Union (ARU), led by the charismatic Eugene V. Debs; George
Pullman responded to his workers’ grievances by firing three union leaders the
day after they led a delegation to protest wage cuts, leading 90 percent of
Pullman’s 3,300 workers to strike.
4. A Nationwide Boycott—The Pullman strikers appealed to the ARU for help and
the conflict quickly escalated; ARU membership voted to boycott Pullman cars,
and switchmen in other states refused to handle any train carrying Pullman cars;
prompted the General Managers Association (GMA) to recruit strikebreakers and
fire protesting switchmen; the boycott/strike spread to more than fifteen railroads
and affected twenty-seven states and territories.
5. Manipulating the Press—The strike remained surprisingly peaceful; however,
management distorted and misrepresented the strike; sent out press releases
describing the violence supposedly engaged in by the strikers.
6. The Government Breaks the Strike—In Washington, D.C., Attorney General
Richard B. Olney, a lawyer with strong ties to the railroad, convinced President
Cleveland that federal troops should intervene to protect the U.S. mails (the
governor of Illinois saw a peaceful boycott and refused to call out troops); two
Chicago judges issued an injunction that prohibited Debs from speaking in public
and made the boycott a crime punishable by jail sentence for contempt of court;
strategy worked; Cleveland called out the army, Debs was jailed, and in the
resulting violence, the strike was broken; Pullman hired new workers to replace
many of the strikers; Pullman strike demonstrated that workers had little recourse
when the government and courts sided with industrialists in defense of property
rights.
III. Women’s Activism (Slide 11) Page 597
A. Frances Willard and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
1. Temperance Politics—Lack of franchise did not mean women were apolitical;
the WCTU showed the breadth of women’s political activity in the late nineteenth
century; women felt particularly vulnerable to the effects of drunkenness, as they
were dependent on men’s wages and subjected to drunken, abusive husbands;
WCTU members used the singular woman to emphasize gender solidarity.
2. Willard’s Tactics—Frances Willard radically changed the direction of the
WCTU; moved it away from religiously oriented programs to a campaign that
stressed alcoholism as a disease rather than a sin and poverty as a cause rather
than a result of drink; joined with labor unions to press for better working
conditions for women workers.
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3. Mobilizing Women around a Women’s Issue—In a shrewd political tactic,
Willard capitalized on the cult of domesticity to move women into public life and
gain power to ameliorate social problems; using the concept of “home
protection,” Willard argued that women needed the vote to protect home and
family. Willard worked to create a broad reform coalition in the 1890s, embracing
the Knights of Labor, the People’s Party, and the Prohibition Party; WCTU had
over 200,000 members in the 1890s; gave women valuable experience in
political action.
B. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and the Movement for
Woman Suffrage Page 599
1. Division and Reconciliation—Unlike the WCTU, the organized movement for
woman suffrage remained small and relatively weak in the late nineteenth
century; Stanton and Anthony launched the National Woman Suffrage
Association in 1869, demanding the vote for women; a more conservative group,
the American Woman Suffrage Association, formed the same year, believed that
women should vote in local but not national elections; by 1890, the split had
healed, and the newly united National American Woman Suffrage Association
launched campaigns at the state level to gain the vote for women.
2. New Era for Woman’s Rights Movement—Suffragists won victories in
Colorado in 1893, as well as Idaho and Utah in 1896; although it would take
another two decades for all women to gain the vote with the ratification of the
Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, the unification of the two woman suffrage
groups in 1890 signaled a new era in women’s fight for the vote.
IV. Depression Politics
A. Coxey’s Army (Slide 12) Page 600
1. Unemployed March to Washington—In the spring of 1894, masses of
unemployed Americans marched to Washington, D.C., to call attention to their
economic plight and to urge Congress to enact a public works program to end
unemployment; Jacob S. Coxey from Massilon, Ohio, led the most publicized
contingent; Coxey’s “army” started in Ohio with one hundred men, swelling as it
marched east through the Allegheny Mountains; on May 1, Coxey’s army arrived
in Washington and defiantly marched onto the Capitol grounds; they were met by
police using nightsticks; Coxey was jailed for his efforts, and by August, the
leaderless, tattered armies of the unemployed dissolved.
2. Plight of the Unemployed—Coxey’s army brought attention to the plight of the
unemployed; though unsuccessful in forcing federal relief legislation, it called into
question the underlying values of the new industrial order; demonstrated how
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ordinary citizens turned to means outside the regular party system to influence
politics in the 1890s.
B. The People’s Party and the Election of 1896 (Slide 13) Page 602
1. Threat to Party Unity—The People’s Party captured more than a million votes
in the presidential election of 1892, a respectable showing for a new party; but
sectional and racial animosities threatened party unity, especially Populists’
willingness to form common cause with black farmers, which made them hated in
the white South.
2. Cries for Reform—As the presidential election of 1896 approached, the
depression intensified cries for reform not only from the Populists, but throughout
the electorate; when the Republicans nominated Ohio governor William McKinley
on a platform pledging the preservation of the gold standard, western advocates
of free silver representing miners and farmers walked out of the convention; open
rebellion also split the Democratic Party as vast segments in the West and South
repudiated President Grover Cleveland because of his support for gold.
3. Nominating Bryan—The spirit of revolt animated the Democratic National
Convention as thirty-six-year-old William Jennings Bryan whipped the crowds
into a frenzy with his “Cross of Gold” speech, a passionate call for free silver; the
People’s Party met a week later, and many western Populists urged the party to
ally with the Democrats and endorse Bryan; but the Democrats’ vice presidential
candidate, Arthur M. Sewall, a railroad director and bank president, posed
significant obstacles to Populists who advocated fusion with the Democrats; to
deal with the issue of fusion, the People’s Party convention selected the vice
presidential candidate, Tom Watson of Georgia, before selecting the presidential
candidate; nomination of Watson undercut opposition to Bryan’s candidacy, and
the fusionists triumphed when the People’s Party convention nominated Bryan
for president.
4. A Fierce Election—Republican McKinley, backed by wealthy industrialists and
party boss Mark Hanna, squared off against the underfunded but energetic and
eloquent Bryan in the fiercely fought and highly emotional presidential election of
1896; Bryan delivered more than six hundred campaign speeches in three
months.
5. Sectional Divisions—As election day approached, the silver states of the
Rocky Mountains lined up for Bryan, while the Northeast stood solidly for
McKinley; much of the South, with the exception of the border states, abandoned
the Populists and returned to the Democratic fold; midwestern farmers, less
receptive to the call for free silver, and eastern workers, who would not gain
many benefits from the inflation that free silver would bring, did not rally behind
Bryan, costing him crucial votes.
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6. Populist Agenda—In an election marked by unprecedented voter turnout,
McKinley won twenty-three states and 271 electoral votes to Bryan’s twenty-two
states and 176 electoral votes; biggest losers in the election of 1896 turned out to
be the Populists; the People’s Party was crushed, and with it died the agrarian
revolt, but Populism nevertheless set the domestic political agenda for the United
States in the next decades; highlighted issues such as banking and currency
reform, electoral reform, and an enlarged role for the federal government in the
economy.
V. The United States and the World (Slide 16) Page 605
A. Markets and Missionaries Page 606
1. Economy and Expansion—The depression of the 1890s provided a powerful
impetus to American commercial expansion, as American businesses looked
abroad for profits.
2. Religious Zeal—Business interests alone did not account for the new
expansionism that seized the nation in the 1890s; American missionaries were
intent on spreading the gospel of Christianity to the “heathen.”
3. The Boxer Rebellion—Increased missionary activity and Western enterprise
touched off a series of antiforeign uprisings in China that culminated in the Boxer
uprising of 1900; Boxers terrorized missionaries and Christian converts
throughout northern China; in August 1900, 2,500 U.S. troops joined an
international force sent to rescue foreigners besieged in Beijing; put down the
rebellion the following year; in the aftermath of the Boxer uprising, missionaries
voiced no concern at the paradox of bringing Christianity to China at gunpoint.
B. The Monroe Doctrine and the Open Door Policy Page 607
1. Protecting American Hegemony—Emergence of the United States as a world
power pitted the nation against other colonial powers, particularly Germany and
Japan, which posed a threat to the twin pillars of American’s expansionist foreign
policy: the Monroe Doctrine and Open Door policy; American diplomacy worked
to buttress the Monroe Doctrine’s assertion of American hegemony in the
Western Hemisphere.
2. American Business in Central America—Americans risked war with Great
Britain over America’s role in a conflict between Venezuela and British Guiana; in
Central America, American business triumphed in a bloodless takeover that saw
French and British interests routed by behemoths such as the United Fruit
Company of Boston.
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3. The U.S. in the Far East—While warning the European powers to stay out of
the Western Hemisphere, the United States was competing with the colonial
powers for trade in the Eastern Hemisphere; risked war with Germany to
maintain dominance over the harbor at Pago Pago in the Samoan Islands.
4. An Open Door to China—The biggest prize in Asia remained the China
market; in 1899–1900, Secretary of State John Hay wrote a series of notes to
Britain, Germany, Russia, France, Japan, and Italy, calling for an “open door”
policy; would ensure access to all and maintain Chinese sovereignty; by insisting
on the Open Door policy, the United States secured access to Chinese markets,
expanding its economic power while avoiding the problems of maintaining a farflung colonial empire on the mainland of Asia.
C. “A Splendid Little War” (Slide 19) Page 609
1. The Cuban Rebellion—The Spanish-American War began with moral outrage
over the treatment of Cuban revolutionaries, who had launched a fight for
independence against the Spanish colonial regime in 1895; as the Cuban
rebellion dragged on, pressure for U.S. intervention mounted.
2. Yellow Journalism—Newspapers fueled public outcry at Spain; circulation war
raged in New York City between William Randolph Hearst’s Journal and Joseph
Pulitzer’s World; sensational stories called yellow journalism, named for the
colored ink used in a popular comic strip.
3. Economic and Territorial Interests—American interests in Cuba were
considerable; American business had more than $50 million invested in Cuban
sugar; American trade with Cuba, a brisk $100 million a year before the rebellion,
had dropped to near zero; to expansionists such as Theodore Roosevelt, more
than Cuban independence was at stake, because war with Spain opened up the
prospect of expansion into Asia as well—Spain controlled not only Cuba and
Puerto Rico but also Guam and the Philippine Islands.
4. The Maine—President McKinley slowly moved toward intervention; in a show
of American force, he dispatched the armored cruiser Maine to Cuba; a
mysterious blast destroyed the ship, killing 267 crew members and prompting
cries for war back home.
5. A Brief War in Cuba—Congress declared war in April, and five days after
McKinley signed the war resolution, the U.S. Navy, under Commodore George
Dewey, destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay; war in Cuba ended almost as
quickly as it began.
6. Roosevelt’s Rough Riders—Made Theodore Roosevelt a bona fide war hero;
he formed the Rough Riders, a regiment composed of Ivy League polo players
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and western cowboys; played a role in the decisive battle of San Juan Hill;
brought Roosevelt to the attention of prominent independent Republicans.
D. The Debate over American Imperialism (Slide 22) Page 611
1. The American Empire—After a few brief campaigns in Cuba and Puerto Rico
brought the Spanish-American war to an end, the American people found
themselves in possession of an empire stretching halfway around the globe,
including Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.
2. The Fate of Cuba—Cuba, though freed from Spanish rule, had not gained full
autonomy; the United States directed the writing of a new constitution in 1900;
included the so-called Platt Amendment, which granted the United States the
right to intervene in Cuban affairs, oversee Cuban debt, and keep a naval base
at Guantánamo.
3. The Treaty of Paris and War in the Philippines—The formal Treaty of Paris
that ended the war with Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States along
with Spain’s former colonies in Puerto Rico and Guam; Filipino revolutionaries
bitterly fought American troops, engaging the United States in a nasty guerrilla
war that lasted seven years.
4. The Politics of Imperialism—At home, a vocal minority, mostly Democrats and
former Populists, resisted the U.S. foray into empire, judging it unwise, immoral,
and unconstitutional; anti-imperialists were soon drowned out by cries for empire,
justified by social Darwinism and missionary zeal.
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