Chapter 16
America's Gilded Age, 1870–1890
The Second Industrial Revolution
• The Industrial Economy
•
In the late nineteenth century, the United States experienced perhaps the fastest and most far-reaching
economic revolution in history. Abundant natural resources, a growing labor supply and market for
manufactured goods, and new capital for investment all fostered massive economic expansion. The federal
government also spurred industrial and agricultural development by enacting tariffs protecting U.S. industry
from foreign competition, giving land to railroads, and using the army to remove Indians from western lands
wanted by farmers and mining companies.
•
Every region except the South saw a rapid expansion of manufacturing, mining, and railroad construction,
ending an earlier America based on small farms and artisan workshops. By 1913, the United States produced
a third of the world’s entire industrial output. Half of all industrial workers labored in plants with more than 250
employees. By 1890, two-thirds of Americans worked for wages, making dreams of economic
independence—owning a farm or workshop—unattainable for most. Between 1870 and 1920, a new working
class developed, with 11 million Americans moving from farm to city and 25 million immigrating from
overseas. Most new jobs were in industrial cities, whose rapid growth was best symbolized by New York, a
city whose banks and stock exchange financed railroads, mines, and factories, thus sponsoring
industrialization and westward expansion. The Great Lakes region was the center of industrialization, with
iron, steel, machinery, chemicals, and food production in large cities like Pittsburgh and Chicago and
countless smaller cities.
Table 16.1 Indicators Of Economic Change, 1870–1920
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The Second Industrial Revolution
Railroads and the National Market
•
Railroads enabled the “second industrial revolution.” Private investment and huge grants of land
and money by federal, state, and local governments tripled the number of miles of rail between
1860 and 1880 and tripled it again over the next forty years. This opened vast new areas to
commercial farming and created a national market for manufactured goods. By the 1890s, five
transcontinental railroad lines carried western mine, farm, ranch, and forest products to markets in
the East, which in turn made factory goods for the West. Railroads were so critical to economic
growth and the national market that financial crisis in the rail industry directly shocked the entire
national economy.
•
An expanding population became an ever-larger market for mass production, mass distribution,
and mass marketing of goods, all of which are the basis of a modern industrial economy. National
brands, national stores, and mail-order firms, such as Sears, Roebuck & Co., emerged for the first
time.
Figure 16.1 Railroad Mileage Built, 1830–1975
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Map 16.1 The Rail Road Network, 1880
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Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
The Second Industrial Revolution
The Spirit of Innovation
•
Extraordinary technological innovations helped quicken communications and economic
expansion. Telegraph lines crossed the Atlantic to Europe, and the telephone, typewriter, and
handheld camera began to be used in the 1870s and 1880s. Thomas A. Edison’s inventions, such
as the phonograph, light bulb, and motion picture, revolutionized private life, public entertainment,
and economic activity. Edison also created systems for distributing electric power, and soon entire
cities had electricity for homes, factories, and streetcars. Electricity enabled industrial and urban
growth by providing a more dependable and useful source pf power than water or steam. The
newly invented electric motor harnessed the power of this innovation for industry and households.
Competition and Consolidation
•
Economic growth was remarkable but quite volatile. With markets inundated by goods and federal
monetary policies that removed money from the national economy and reduced prices, a series of
severe economic recessions and depressions occurred, notably in the 1870s and 1890s.
Businesses competed ruthlessly. To stabilize prices and profits, railroads and other companies
formed “pools” to divide markets and fix prices and “trusts” that allowed a single director to
manage the affairs of several competing companies. But the drive to compete often quickly
disintegrated such schemes. Competition led some firms to control their entire industry by buying
out the competition. Economic concentration culminated in the great merger wave from 1897 to
1904, in which 4,000 companies were incorporated into larger corporations that served national
markets and thus wielded immense power. Giant corporations appeared, such as Standard Oil,
International Harvester, and U.S. Steel, which was formed in 1901 by financier J. P. Morgan out of
eight large steel firms.
The Second Industrial Revolution
The Rise of Andrew Carnegie
•
With no personal or corporate income taxes, some businessmen accumulated massive wealth and economic
power. One such “captain of industry” was Andrew Carnegie, who emigrated from Scotland as a teenager and
labored as a factory worker and telegraph operator before he used a position with the Pennsylvania Railroad to
build a steel empire. During the 1870’s depression, Carnegie built a “vertically integrated” steel company—one that
controlled every stage of production, from raw materials to transportation, manufacturing, and distribution. By the
1890s, Carnegie dominated the steel industry and amassed a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars. His steel
factories at Homestead, Pennsylvania, were the most technologically advanced in the world. Although Carnegie’s
upbringing instilled in him a commitment to democracy, social equality, and charity, he ran his factories ruthlessly.
The Triumph of John D. Rockefeller
•
More associated with extraordinary wealth was John D. Rockefeller, who rose from being a merchant clerk to oil
industry titan. Through cutthroat competition he ruined rival oil companies, arranged deals with railroads, and fixed
prices and production. He mastered “horizontal integration,” in which one firm acquires competing firms, but soon
established a vertically integrated company, too, a monopoly that controlled the drilling, refining, storage, and
distribution of oil. By the 1880s, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company controlled 90 percent of America’s oil
industry.
•
Such figures and their wealth attracted the admiration and resentment of many Americans. While many rose from
modest circumstances, their wealth, and their methods for treating workers and conducting business alienated
many Americans, who thought their unregulated actions eroded political and economic freedom and damaging
democracy. In Wealth against Commonwealth, his 1894 exposé of Standard Oil’s manipulation of markets and
bribery of legislators, Henry Demarest Lloyd wrote that “liberty and monopoly cannot live together.”
The Second Industrial Revolution
Workers’ Freedom in an Industrial Age
•
The benefits of economic expansion were distributed highly unevenly. For a few workers, including skilled workers
with some control over production processes such as miners and iron and steel workers, high wages were the
norm. Most industrial workers, however, had semi-skilled jobs that required only managing a machine. These
workers had no control over production and were easily replaced and dismissed during a strike or economic
downturn. Regular and prolonged unemployment became widespread for these workers, some of whom became
“tramps,” taking to roads and rail to search for employment. Though American workers earned more than their
European counterparts, work was more dangerous in the United States. And because of the high unemployment
and use of public and private police, most strikes in America failed. Many workers were extremely poor and relied
on family to survive.
Sunshine and Shadow: Increasing Wealth and
Poverty
•
Class divisions became more visible in this period as more Americans became middle class and very wealthy. The
rich began to retreat to their own neighborhoods and built fantastic mansions and estates in the cities and
countryside. A growing number of urban middle-class professionals, office workers, and small businessmen
moved to urban and suburban neighborhoods and used new streetcars and commuter railways to get to central
business districts. By 1890, the richest 1 percent of Americans received the same total income as the bottom half
of the population and owned more property than the remaining 99 percent. Many wealthy Americans
conspicuously consumed an aristocratic lifestyle of luxury goods, exclusive clubs, colleges, and social events. Not
far from the homes of the wealthy were the slums of the urban poor. The difference between the two worlds was
captured in Matthew Smith’s 1868 best-seller, Sunshine and Shadow in New York, which began with an engraving
contrasting a $2 million dollar mansion with the slums. Two decades later, Jacob Riis published a book of
photographs, How the Other Half Lives, documenting the poor’s wretched existence in New York City.
The Transformation of the West
A Diverse Region
•
Capitalism advanced most quickly and dramatically in the trans-Mississippi West, whose lands
now became absorbed by white settlement and whose resources became available for
exploitation. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a lecture, “The Significance of
the Frontier in American History.” in which he argued that the frontier had forged American
culture’s distinctive qualities: individual freedom, political democracy, and economic mobility.
Turner argued that the frontier had been a “safety valve,” which drew away the dissatisfied in the
East, and therefore mitigated social unrest. Very influential at the time, Turner’s idea drew on
long-standing notions that the West offered economic opportunity and freedom to newcomers.
Many farmers, gold rush miners, and immigrants did find economic opportunity in the West, but
there the accuracy of Turner’s interpretation ended. Migrants to the West moved in groups,
usually families, not as individuals; the West was not an empty space but rather was inhabited by
Indians, who had to be dispossessed by whites for the frontier to be settled; and the West was not
a paradise of small farms, but an area with industrial mining and agriculture, landlords, railroads,
Chinese contract laborers, and, until the Civil War, African-American slaves.
•
The West was also not a single area but rather was incredibly diverse, ranging from the Great
Plains to the Rocky Mountains, the desert Southwest, the Sierra Nevada, and the verdant coasts
and valleys of California and the Pacific Northwest. Its incorporation into the United States
required the federal government’s intervention. The government acquired Indian land by purchase
or force, regulated territories, and gave land and money to farmers, railroads, and mining
companies. Despite the myth of the West’s rugged individualism, the area became part of the
nation only by massive government activity.
The Transformation of the West
Farming on the Middle Border
•
More land came into cultivation in the thirty years after the Civil War than in the previous two and a half centuries
of American history. Settlers acquired farmlands through the Homestead Ac, and more bought land from
speculators and railroad companies that had been given public lands by the federal government. A vast
agricultural belt growing wheat and corn for national and international markets emerged in the Middle Border
(Minnesota, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas), with a diverse population of farmers who migrated from the
East, South, and Europe. Farming in this region was difficult, and much of the burden fell on women, who faced
severe isolation.
Bonanza Farms
•
The Middle Border’s arid land required irrigation and thus made family farming difficult, but despite the emergence
of a few large “bonanza farms” with thousands of acres and many agricultural wage workers, family farms
prevailed. These farms increasingly grew for national and international markets and specialized in one crop.
Railroads brought factory goods to rural farmers, who became more dependent on banks for loans, machinery,
and products and subject to the ups and downs of international agricultural prices. American farms thus became
part of a world market, in which farmers across the globe faced ongoing crisis as competition increased and prices
declined.
Large-Scale Agriculture in California
•
Western farming’s future was bound up with agricultural enterprises using irrigation, chemicals, and machines, all
of which required capital investments beyond the means of most family farmers. This future was on display in
California, where huge fruit and vegetable farms, owned by large corporations, were worked by migrant workers
from China, the Philippines, Japan, and Mexico who never themselves expected to own land.
The Transformation of the West
The Cowboy and the Corporate West
•
The decades after the Civil War also saw the golden age of cattle ranching and cowboys. Railroad
stations at Abilene, Dodge City, and Wichita, Kansas, became destinations for now-legendary
cattle drives from Texas. The cowboys who worked the drives, a diverse group of white, Mexican,
and black men, became icons of freedom and were immortalized in fiction and film. But their life
was far from romantic. They were mostly low-paid wage workers, and the long-distance cattle
drives ended by the 1880s, when farmers fenced in lands with barbed wire and severe winters
killed millions of cattle. The cattle industry that reappeared was dominated by large ranches close
to railroads.
•
The West was also urban, with large cities such as San Francisco, and the growth of other cities,
like Los Angeles, due to oil. Large corporate enterprises dominated the West, and particularly in
industries such as lumber and mining and as sheep farming in New Mexico, independent owners
and operators gave way to large, corporate firms.
The Transformation of the West
The Subjugation of the Plains Indians
•
The West’s incorporation in the American economy sealed the doom of the Plains Indians and their world. Their
lives had already been changed by the horse, and Indian migrants to the West helped form the nineteenthcentury’s great tribes: the Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Kiowa, and Sioux. Incessant warfare engulfed the tribes
and newcomers. Most whites moving to the Pacific Coast experienced little hostility from the Plains Indians, but
the settlement of lands there in the 1850s and later brought bloody conflict. Although President Grant declared a
“peace policy” in 1869, warfare soon resumed. Civil War generals like Philip Sheridan attacked the basis of the
Indian economy, destroying villages, horses, and the buffalo to end Indian resistance. By the 1880s, army
campaigns and buffalo hunters had nearly eradicated the buffalo in the West.
•
The army subjugated one tribe after another. In 1877, U.S. troops under former Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner
O. O. Howard forced the Nez Percé to surrender and relocate from Oregon to an Oklahoma reservation. Two
years later, Chief Joseph, that tribe’s leader, delivered a speech in Washington to president Rutherford B. Hayes
and other notables that protested the reservation policy and used the language of freedom strengthened by the
Civil War and Reconstruction: “Let me be a free man—free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where
I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for
myself . . .”
•
“Let Me Be a Free Man”
Indians sometimes inflicted great costs on American forces, most notably in 1876 at Little Bighorn, where Sioux
and Cheyenne warriors led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse killed General George A. Custer and 250 of his men.
In the Southwest, the Apache leaders Cochise and Geronimo attacked white settlers and resisted army units well
into the 1880s, when they surrendered. The Comanche, who had dominated other Indians in New Mexico and
Colorado, also fell to American power in the 1870s. This resistance only temporarily delayed the advance of white
soldiers, settlers, and miners. Between the end of the Civil War and 1890, eight new western states joined the
Union (Nebraska, Colorado, North and South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming). The Indians
were removed to reservations throughout the West, where they lived in poverty and were taken advantage of by
traders and government agents.
Map 16.3 Indian Reservations, ca. 1890
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Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
The Transformation of the West
Remaking Indian Life
•
Indians’ idea of freedom, resting on preserving their cultural and political autonomy and control of ancestral lands,
clashed with the values and interests of most white Americans. Nearly all believed that the federal government
should persuade or force the Plains Indians to give up their land, religion, communal property, nomadic way of life,
and gender relations and adopt Christianity, private property, and small farming on reservations, where men would
work the fields and women would work in the home. In 1871, Congress ended the treaty system, in which the
government had negotiated agreements in which Indian tribes were regarded as independent nations. The Bureau
of Indian Affairs established boarding schools where Indian children, removed from their parents and tribes, were
given new names and educated in white ways.
The Dawes Act
•
In 1887, the Dawes Act was passed, which fragmented the lands of nearly all tribes into small parcels to be given
to Indian families, with the rest of the land to be sold to white buyers. Indians who accepted the farms and
“adopted the habits of civilized life” would be offered American citizenship. Though the policy led to the loss of
much tribal land and the erosion of Indian cultural traditions, whites benefited enormously, taking much of the best
Indian lands, including much of Oklahoma. In the fifty years after the Dawes Act’s passage, Indians lost 86 million
of the 138 million acres they had possessed in 1887. While many nineteenth-century laws and treaties offered
Indians the right to become citizens, few accepted, as most Indians wanted to retain their tribal identity. Western
courts and later the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments did not apply to Native
Americans. By 1900, about 53,000 Indians had become citizens by accepting land allotments. Most Indians would
not be granted citizenship until 1919, after they served in World War I, or in 1924, when Congress made all
Indians citizens.
The Transformation of the West
The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee
•
In the late 1880s, some Indians practiced the Ghost Dance, a religious movement to revitalize
Indian life. Ghost Dance leaders predicted that one day whites would disappear, the buffalo would
return, and Indians would resume their cultural practices free from the ills introduced by whites.
Large numbers of Indians gathered for singing, dancing, and religious ceremonies. When the
government, fearing a revolt, sent troops to the reservations, soldiers opened fire on Ghost
Dancers at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, killing as many as 200 Indians, mostly women
and children. The massacre at Wounded Knee ended four centuries of armed conflict between
native Americans and European settlers and their descendants. By 1900, the Indian population
had reached a nadir of 250,000. But Indians survived and their numbers grew in the twentieth
century.
Settler Societies and Global Wests
•
The conquest of the West was part of a worldwide phenomenon in which settlers moved into the
interior of regions in temperate climates all over the globe, bringing familiar crops and livestock
and starting mining and other industries. Argentina, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the
United States are thus called “settler societies” because immigrants from overseas rapidly
outnumbered and displaced original inhabitants, unlike in India and much of colonial Africa, where
only a few Europeans managed to dominate entire societies.
Politics in a Gilded Age
The Corruption of Politics
•
The period between 1870 and 1890 is the only time in American history described in a derogatory way—as the
Gilded Age, after the title of an 1873 novel co-authored by Mark Twain. “Gilded” means covered with a layer of
gold, suggesting that the golden surface deceptively obscures a core of little real value. The Gilded Age thus
referred to the extraordinary economic growth of the period and the corruption caused by corporate domination of
politics, as well as the oppression of others in the competition for riches.
•
Americans in this period, in a world in which only a few European governments extended universal male suffrage,
saw their nation as a beacon of democracy. Yet the power of corporations, which seemed removed from
democratic controls, raised unsettling questions for Americans’ belief that political freedom meant popular selfgovernment. Political corruption was pervasive. New railroad corporations wielded great influence in state
legislatures, and often legislators in the West held stock or directed mining and lumber companies. Urban politics
was often dominated by corrupt political machines, such as the Tweed Ring in New York, led by “Boss” William M.
Tweed, which both robbed the city of millions of dollars and built alliances with businessmen and labor, and also
provided aid to the urban poor and unemployed. In national politics, many lawmakers supported bills benefiting
companies in which they had invested or from which they received stock or salaries.
•
The most famous cases of corruption unfolded during the Grant administration. In the Crédit Mobilier scandal, a
corporation formed by Union Pacific Railroad stockholders made contracts with itself, at government expense and
for huge profits, and gave stock to influential politicians. And the Whiskey Ring in the Grant administration united
Republicans officials, tax collectors, and whiskey manufacturers in a scheme that defrauded the federal
government of millions in tax dollars.
Politics in a Gilded Age
The Politics of Dead Center
•
The Civil War’s legacy powerfully shaped national politics and elections. Republicans found
support in the North, Midwest, and agrarian West and among members of revivalist churches,
Protestant immigrants, and blacks. Union veterans’ organizations were a strong Republican base.
By the 1890s, pensions for Union soldiers and their widows and children was the largest item in
the federal budget. After 1877, Democrats dominated the South and found support among
Catholics, especially Irish-Americans, in cities.
•
The parties were closely divided, and in most presidential elections between 1876 and 1892, the
margin separating the major candidates was less than 1 percent of the popular vote. In 1874,
Democrats won control of the House of Representatives, which started a period of political
stalemate in which little new legislation was passed for twenty years. Only briefly did either party
control both the Congress and the White House. One-term presidents followed: Rutherford B.
Hayes in 1876, James A. Garfield in 1881 (succeeded by Chester A. Arthur after his assassination
that year), Grover Cleveland in 1884, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and Cleveland again in 1892.
American politics, with high numbers of eligible voters voting and contested elections, seemed
healthy in a number of ways.
Map 16.4 Political Stalemate, 1876-1892
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Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
Politics in a Gilded Age
Government and the Economy
•
Yet the political structure could not effectively confront rapid growth and economic transformation. The federal
government remained small and had limited regulatory power, compared to today. Both parties became controlled
by party managers closely aligned with business interests. Republicans supported a high tariff to protect American
industry and pursued a fiscal policy based on reducing spending, paying off the nation’s debt, and withdrawing
from circulation all greenbacks—the paper money issued during the Civil War. The Democrats opposed a high
tariff, but because the leadership was still tied to New York banks and finance, they opposed demands from their
agricultural base for an increase in the money supply. In 1879, the United States returned to the gold standard
(paper currency could again be exchanged for gold at a fixed rate). Republican economic policies, which reduced
foreign competition in manufacturing and left banks, not the government, to regulate the money supply, favored
eastern industrialists and bankers and disadvantaged southern and western farmers, who had to pay high prices
for factory goods while prices for their crops dropped.
Reform Legislation
•
There were a few reforms in the Gilded Age. In 1883, the Civil Service Act substituted a merit system for federal
employees, which replaced political appointments with competitive examinations. In 1887, responding to protests
against unfair railroad practices, Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission to ensure that rates
charged to farmers and merchants were “reasonable.” The ICC was the first federal agency to regulate the
economy, but it could not itself set rates, and thus had little effect. Though Congress soon passed the Sherman
Antitrust Act, which banned combinations and practices restraining free trade, its language was too vague for its
laws to be enforced and it also had little effect.
Politics in a Gilded Age
Political Conflict in the States
•
Though national politics offered few solutions to economic problems, politics was vibrant and fluid
at the state and local levels. After the Civil War, northern state governments expanded their role in
the economy by launching public works programs that created jobs, and they assumed more
responsibility for public health, education, and welfare. Third parties experienced some success.
The Greenback-Labor Party, which proposed that the federal government keep greenbacks in
circulation, thus leaving money for investment and giving the government control over the money
supply, led some local governments in the 1870s.
•
Protests over railroad policies among farmers and local merchants suffering very high freight rates
led to the formation of the Patrons of Husbandry, known as the Grange. Founded in 1867, the
Grange established cooperatives for storing and marketing farm goods in order to force railroads
to lower their prices. In some states the Grange pressured state legislatures to investigate railroad
rates and, in some cases, regulate them. A resurgent labor movement also called for economic
regulation, in the form of eight-hour laws limiting the workday. Although a few state legislatures
passed these laws, they lacked means of enforcement and had little effect.
Freedom in the Gilded Age
The Social Problem
•
As the nation industrialized, Americans tried to understand the ways in which their society was changing. Debates
over political economy engaged millions of Americans, not just economists, politicians, and academics, and
thousands of books and pamphlets were published regarding the ethical and social consequences of
industrialization and highly technical issues such as currency reform and land taxation. Many Americans believed
that something was terribly wrong in the nation’s social development, and their talk of “better classes” and
“dangerous classes” became the rule as labor strife was recurrent. A number of states and even Congress
established committees to investigate the changing relations between labor and capital, and many were shocked
to learn that employers and workers distrusted each other and that workers complained of abuse and poverty.
Freedom, Inequality, and Democracy
•
The emergence of a permanent class of wage-earners challenged traditional American ideas of freedom. Did
America still offer opportunities to ordinary citizens to gain economic independence? To many, it seemed that
wage labor was no longer a temporary condition on the way to economic autonomy, nor did the West seem a
refuge from deprivation in the East. Many Americans saw the concentration of wealth in this period as natural and
a sign of progress, however, and mainstream economics held that wages were determined by supply and demand
and should not be artificially changed by government or labor unions. The link between freedom and equality
forged in the Revolution and strengthened by the Civil War no longer seemed relevant. Reformers in the Liberal
Republican movement, which challenged Grant in the 1872 elections, even argued that universal male suffrage
was a mistake, as the poor and workers might use the vote to threaten property. Instead, they urged a return to
property qualifications for the vote.
Freedom in the Gilded Age
Social Darwinism in America
•
The idea that some groups were superior to others, once based in racialized slavery, now
reappeared in a scientific guise as a means to explain the success and failure of individuals and
entire social classes. In 1859, British scientist Charles Darwin published On the Origins of
Species, in which he posited a theory of evolution where plants and animals best able to adapt to
their environment supplanted those less adaptable. Different thinkers simplified Darwin’s theory
and used his language of “natural selection,” “the struggle for existence,” and “the survival of the
fittest” to address social problems.
•
According to this school of thought, termed Social Darwinism, evolution was a natural process in
both nature and society. Government could only corrupt society by regulating the society or
economy to the advantage of the poor or workers, who simply were less able to adapt to changing
conditions. Social Darwinists believed giant corporations had evolved to become dominant in the
economy because they had better adapted and to restrict their operations would be to reverse
progress. The depressions of the 1870s and 1880s did not dislodge popular opinion that the poor
were responsible for their own poverty. In Gilded Age America, nearly half of all local governments
offered no poor relief. Poverty, it was believed, was caused by a lack of character or absence of
self-reliance. Thinkers such as Yale’s William Graham Sumner argued that no one in a free
society could make a claim for help from any other person, including through government
assistance.
Freedom in the Gilded Age
Liberty of Contract
•
Social Darwinism helped spread a “negative” definition of freedom, limited government and unrestrained free
markets, which became popular among business and professional classes in the late nineteenth century. The idea
of contract was central to this definition of freedom. Labor contracts reconciled freedom and authority in the
workplace, and as long as independent individuals freely contracted with each other, neither government nor
unions had a right to interfere with working conditions. Nor could Americans legitimately complain that they had
lost any freedom. Workers’ demands that government enforce an eight-hour day or provide unemployment relief
struck liberals as a perversion of governmental authority that threatened liberty. The old idea of free labor as a
celebration of the independent small producer in a society of equality and harmony became a defense of the
unrestrained capitalist market.
The Courts and Freedom
•
The courts played an important role in making liberty of contract essential to ruling definitions of freedom. The
Fourteenth Amendment allowed the federal government to overturn state laws that violated citizens’ rights. By the
1880s, liberty of contract, not equality before the law regardless of race, came to define the meaning of this
amendment. State and federal courts regularly struck down state laws that regulated business, such as maximum
hour laws, as an illegal interference with the rights of employers to use their property as they saw fit and the rights
of employees to choose the conditions of their work. Initially, the Supreme Court accepted laws regulating firms
that represented a “public interest,” such as railroads. But the Supreme Court reversed itself, leading to the
formation of the Interstate Commerce Committee (ICC), which lost many of its cases when they were taken to the
court. The courts generally favored businesses whenever they complained of a loss of economic freedom, struck
down laws granting workers rights, and limited the reach of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Most famously, in Lochner
v. New York (1905), the Supreme Court struck down a state law establishing maximum hours for bakers, arguing
that it interfered with the right of contract between employers and employees.
Labor and the Republic
“The Overwhelming Labor Question”
•
Public debate in the late nineteenth century, more than any other point in American history, divided along class
lines. The shift from debates over slavery and the status of former slaves to what one politician called “the
overwhelming labor question” was clear in 1877, when Reconstruction ended and the first national strike began—
the Great Railroad Strike. Railroad workers protesting pay cuts paralyzed rail traffic in much of the country, militia
units tried to force them back to work, and after troops fired on strikers and killed twenty in Pittsburgh, workers
rioted and burned property and strikes spread to other workplaces. General strikes brought Chicago and St. Louis
to a halt. The events showed a new solidarity among workers and close ties between the Republican Party and a
new class of industrialists. In the aftermath, the federal government built armories in major cities to help crush
future uprisings.
The Knights of Labor and the “Conditions
Essential to Liberty”
•
There was a new wave of labor organizing in the 1880s and the Knights of Labor stood at its center. The Knights
were the first labor group to organize unskilled workers as well as skilled, women and men, and blacks as well as
whites (although the Knights on the West Coast excluded Asian immigrants). In its peak year, 1886, the Knights
had around 800,000 members and involved millions of workers in strikes, boycotts, and political, social, and
educational activities. Labor reformers in this era presented a wide range of hopes and demands, from anarchism
and socialism to the eight-hour day and a desire for a “cooperative commonwealth.” They all agreed that new
social conditions were highly unequal and required drastic change. The labor movement challenged the prevailing
definition of freedom as liberty of contract, arguing that Americans had lost control over their livelihoods and their
government.
Labor and the Republic
Middle-Class Reformers
•
Not just workers were dissatisfied with social conditions. A sense of alarm at social changes wrought by industrial
capitalism spread through all classes. Social thinkers offered many different ideas and blueprints for change, and
at the end of the nineteenth century, an unprecedented number of utopian and dystopian novels were published,
including Caesar’s Column, by Ignatius Donnelly, in which civilization was destroyed in a brutal war between
workers and businessmen. The most popular books offering remedies for the unequal distribution of wealth were
Progress and Poverty (1879), by Henry George, The Cooperative Commonwealth (1884), by Laurence Gronlund,
and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888). All three books were best-sellers and spoke to the growing belief
that American society was deeply flawed.
Progress and Poverty
•
Progress and Poverty had no direct influence on policy, but it attracted more attention than any other book on
economics in American history. In the 1850s and 1860s, Henry George had witnessed the monopolization of land
in California. His book suggested that the major problem facing America was the growth of poverty alongside
material progress, and his solution was the “single tax,” which would replace all other taxes with a tax on increases
in land values. The single tax would be so high that it would prevent land speculation in the city and countryside.
Although not all embraced his solution, many people were stirred by his identification of the social problem.
Labor and the Republic
The Cooperative Commonwealth
•
•
•
Gronlund’s book, The Cooperative Commonwealth, was the first to popularize socialism for an American audience.
Socialism—the idea that private control of economic enterprises should be replaced by government ownership in
order to ensure a fairer distribution of the benefits of the wealth produced—was a major political force in western
Europe in the late nineteenth century. But in the United States, where private property was seen as essential to
individual freedom, socialism was mostly confined to immigrants, whose foreign language writings reached few
people. Gronlund was the first to Americanize socialism. While Karl Marx had predicted that socialism would be
achieved through a working-class revolution, Gronlund believed it would be achieved by peaceful evolution, and
thus made it seem more acceptable to middle-class Americans terrified by class conflict and the prospect of social
revolution.
Bellamy’s Utopia
Socialism was not popular until the early twentieth century, but Gronlund’s work prepared an audience for
Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which promoted socialism, even as Bellamy eschewed that term by calling his
socialism “nationalism.” In Bellamy’s utopian novel, a man falls asleep in 1888 and awakes in the year 2000, in a
world in which cooperation has replaced class conflict and economic competition and in which inequality and
liberty as defined by liberty of contract had been banished. Bellamy insisted freedom was a social condition,
resting on interdependence, not autonomy. Bellamy’s highly authoritarian utopia—everyone would be conscripted
into a Great Industrial Army controlled by a single, government operation—is chilling today, but it inspired
hundreds of Nationalist clubs, whose members sought the abundance of industrial capitalism without its
inequalities.
A Social Gospel
The clergy also became a source of criticisms of Social Darwinism and laissez-faire notions of freedom. While
most Protestant preachers continued to attack individual sin, a new Social Gospel took shape in the writings of
men like Walter Rauschenbausch, a New York Baptist minister, and Washington Gladden, a Congregational
clergyman in Columbus Ohio. They argued that freedom and spiritual self-development required an equalization of
wealth and power and that unregulated capitalism degraded Christian brotherhood. Adherents tried to minister to
the needs of the urban poor and attacked child labor and promoted better working-class housing and health and
safety laws.
Labor and the Republic
Labor and Politics
•
The social conflicts of the age seemed to culminate in the great labor uprisings of 1886. Western railroad unions’
successful strike against lines controlled by Jay Gould, a powerful financier, inspired workers to join the Knights of
Labor by the hundreds of thousands. On May 1, 1886, 350,000 workers across the country went on strike and
protested for the eight-hour day. May 1, known as May Day, thereafter became an annual holiday of parades and
protests by workers around the world.
•
In Chicago, where a vibrant labor movement brought together radical socialists and anarchists, immigrant workers,
and native-born antimonopoly laborites, a strike by iron moulders at the giant McCormick plant that produced
agricultural machinery turned violent. Company strikebreakers and private police battled the strikers, and on May
3, 1886, four strikers were killed by police. A rally held the next day to protest their deaths ended in a bomb
explosion—to this day, no one knows the identity of the bomber—and police opened fire, leading to the deaths and
injury of more police and bystanders. Police in Chicago and elsewhere used the bombing as an opportunity to
arrest and suppress labor radicals. The McCormick strike ended in defeat, and eight anarchists, mostly
immigrants, were charged with the bombing. With little evidence and flawed proceedings, they were convicted.
Four were hanged, one committed suicide, and the remaining three were imprisoned until their sentences were
commuted several years later. The “Haymarket martyrs” soon became symbols of labor’s bloody struggle for rights
in America.
•
The Haymarket Affair
The Haymarket affair took place amid multiple efforts across the country by workers, mostly in the Knights of
Labor, to run candidates and organize worker-based parties at the local and state levels. The most celebrated
campaign took place in 1886 in New York, where Henry George ran for mayor on the United Labor ticket and
almost defeated the Democratic candidate. The events of 1886 suggested that labor might become a powerful
political force. In fact, the Knights of Labor quickly declined after 1886, unions began to avoid politics, and the
Democrats and Republicans proved successful at winning workers’ votes. Nevertheless, the events of the Gilded
Age marked a contest over freedom and its social conditions between the forces of Social Darwinism and laissezfaire and those who supported collective efforts to establish industrial freedom.
Additional Art for Chapter 16
A quilt created by a Sioux woman
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The dedication of the Statue of Liberty
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The Strike, an 1886 painting by the
German-born artist Robert Koehler
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Building railroads in the West required
remarkable feats of engineering
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
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Travel became globalized in the
second half of the nineteenth century.
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The cover of the 1897 Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog.
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Thomas Edison’s laboratory at Menlo Park
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The Electricity Building at the Chicago World’s
Fair of 1893
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Map 16.2 U.S. Steel: A Vertically Integrated Corporation
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Next!, a cartoon from the magazine Puck
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A turn-of-the-century photograph of the Casino Grounds
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The opening image in Matthew Smith’s book
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Baxter Street Court
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The family of David Hilton on their Nebraska
homestead in 1887.
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An engraving from the early 1880s
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California Harvest Scene
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In the late 1800s, California tried to attract immigrants
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Albert Bierstadt’s 1863 painting
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Hunters shooting buffalo as the Kansas-Pacific
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Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé Indians in 1877
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The Battle of the Little Bighorn
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Boys from the Lakota tribe on their arrival
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An 1893 photograph depicts the land rush
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A 1911 poster advertising the federal government’s
sale of land formerly possessed by Indians.
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The Bosses of the Senate
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A political cartoon shows Grover
Cleveland leading the Democratic Party
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Laying Tracks at Union Square for a Railroad
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Detail from Capital and Labor.
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The Ironworkers’ Noontime
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Ruins of the Pittsburgh Round House
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An engraving from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
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The Great Labor Parade of September
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Edward Bellamy, author of the utopian
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A cartoon from the 1880s depicts radicals as foreigners
attempting to destroy the foundations of American society
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In this pro-labor cartoon from 1888
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Norton Lecture Slides
Independent and Employee-Owned
This concludes the Norton Lecture Slides
Slide Set for Chapter 16
Give Me Liberty!
AN AMERICAN HISTORY
THIRD EDITION
by
Eric Foner