History of the USA

aftermath. Southerners had learned lessons in the effectiveness of a strong

central government and realized the impossibility of continuing the old

ways of the antebellum period. Former Whigs in the South, often called

Conservatives, pushed eagerly to build industry and commerce in the Yankee

style. Meanwhile, reconstructed southern state governments enacted many

reforms, establishing free public schools for all, popular election of all

officials, more equitable taxes, and more humane penal laws.

Republican Ulysses S. Grant was elected president in 1868 with electoral

votes gained in occupied southern states. Democrats alleged that Radical

Reconstruction was not genuinely concerned with aiding black people, but

with using southern black votes to keep the Republicans in power in

Congress and to retain their protective tariffs and other aids to

industrialists. When evidence of corruption surfaced during the Grant

administration, Democrats declared that it proved that the outcome of

Republican friendliness to capitalists was graft and plunder.

By 1870 the antisouthern mood that had supported Radical Reconstruction had

faded, as had the surge of concern for southern blacks. New domestic

problems were pushing to the fore. A resurgence of white voting in the

South, together with the use of violence to intimidate blacks and their

white sympathizers, brought southern states back into Democratic hands.

Northerners, awakened to economic questions by the great depression that

began in 1873 and lasted for 5 years, tacitly agreed to return the race

issue to the control of southern whites.

After the disputed election of 1876, amid evidence of electoral corruption,

the Republican presidential candidate promised to withdraw the last federal

occupation troops from the South. The election was decided by a

congressional electoral commission, and Rutherford B. HAYES became

president. As promised, he withdrew (1877) the troops; Reconstruction was

over.

THE GILDED AGE

The era known as the GILDED AGE (1870s to 1890s) was a time of vigorous,

exploitative individualism. Despite widespread suffering by industrial

workers, southern sharecroppers, displaced American Indians, and other

groups, a mood of optimism possessed the United States. The theories of the

English biologist Charles Darwin--expounded in The Origin of Species (1859)-

-concerning the natural selection of organisms best suited to survive in

their environment began to influence American opinion. Some intellectuals

in the United States applied the idea of the survival of the fittest to

human societies (SOCIAL DARWINISM) and arrived at the belief that

government aid to the unfortunate was wrong.

Industrialization and Large-Scale Exploitation of NaturalResources

During the Gilded Age ambitious and imaginative capitalists ranged the

continent looking for new opportunities. Business lurched erratically from

upswings to slumps, while the country's industrial base grew rapidly.

Factories and mines labored heavily through these years to provide the raw

materials and finished products needed for expansion of the railroad

system. In 1865 (as construction of the first TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD was

underway; completed 1869) approximately 56,000 km (35,000 mi) of track

stretched across the United States; by 1910 the total reached about 386,000

km (240,000 mi) of interconnected uniform-gauge track. By 1890 the United

States contained one-third of the world's railroad trackage.

After new gold and silver discoveries in the late 1850s, until about 1875,

individual prospectors explored the western country and desert basins in

search of mineral riches. Then mining corporations took over, using hired

laborers and eastern- trained engineers. Indians were either brutally

exterminated or placed on small reservations. Warfare with the Great Plains

Indians broke out in 1864; these INDIAN WARS did not entirely subside until

after the slaughtering of the buffalo herds, the basis of Indian life,

which had occurred by the mid-1880s. Through the DAWES ACT of 1887, which

forced most Indians to choose 160-acre (65-ha) allotments within their

reservations, reformers hoped to break down tribal bonds and induce Indians

to take up sedentary agriculture. Unallocated reservation lands were

declared surplus and sold to whites.

Cattle ranching was the first large-scale enterprise to invade the Great

Plains beginning in the late 1860s. By the 1880s, however, the open range

began to give way to fenced pastureland and to agriculture, made possible

by the newly invented barbed- wire fence and by "dry farming," a technique

of preserving soil moisture by frequent plowing. Millions of farmers moved

into the high plains west of the 100th meridian. So huge was their grain

output that slumping world prices beginning in the mid- 1880s put them into

severe financial straits. Meanwhile, the vast continental sweep between

Kansas and California became filled with new states.

By the early 1900s the nation's economy, tied together by the railroads

into a single market, was no longer composed primarily of thousands of

small producers who sold to local markets. Rather, it was dominated by a

small number of large firms that sold nationwide and to the world at large.

With great size, however, came large and complex problems. In 1887,

Congress created the INTERSTATE COMMERCE COMMISSION to curb cutthroat

competition among the railroads and to ensure that railroad rates were

"reasonable and just." In 1890, on the other hand, Congress attempted to

restore competition through passage of the SHERMAN ANTI-TRUST ACT, which

declared illegal trusts and other combinations that restrained trade. The

U.S. Supreme Court favored laissez-faire and consistently blocked both

federal and state efforts to regulate private business. The so-called

robber barons and their immense fortunes were practically unscathed as they

exploited the nation's natural resources and dominated its economic life.

New Social Groupings: Immigrants, Urbanites, and UnionMembers

In 1890 the American people numbered 63 million, double the 1860

population. During these years the nation's cities underwent tremendous

growth. Many new urbanites came from the American countryside, but many

others came from abroad. From 1860 to 1890 more than 10 million immigrants

arrived in the United States; from 1890 to 1920, 15 million more arrived

(see IMMIGRATION). Most were concentrated in northern cities: by 1910, 75

percent of immigrants lived in urban areas, while less than 50 percent of

native-born Americans did so. In the 1880s the so-called new immigration

began: in addition to the Germans, Scandinavians, Irish, and others of the

older immigrant groups, there came such peoples as Italians, Poles,

Hungarians, Bohemians, Greeks, and Jews (from central and eastern Europe,

especially Russia). Roman Catholics grew in number from 1.6 million in 1850

to 12 million in 1900, producing a renewed outburst of bitter anti-Catholic

nativism in the 1880s. The large cities, with their saloons, theaters,

dance halls, and immigrant slums, were feared by many native American

Protestants, who lived primarily in small cities and the rural countryside.

The outbreak of labor protests from the 1870s on, often characterized by

immigrant workers opposing native-born employers, intensified the

hostility. In 1878 the KNIGHTS OF LABOR formed, opening its ranks to all

working people, skilled or unskilled. The Knights called for sweeping

social and economic reforms, and their numbers rose to 700,000 in 1886.

Then, as the organization broke apart because of internal stresses, the

American Federation of Labor, under Samuel GOMPERS, formed to take its

place. Concentrating on skilled craftworkers and tight organization, it

endured.

Domestic Politics

Gilded Age politics became a contest between evenly balanced Republicans

and Democrats. Winning elections by small margins, they alternated in their

control of Congress and the White House. Five men served as Republican

presidents: Hayes; James A. GARFIELD (1881); Chester A. ARTHUR (1881-85),

who succeeded Garfield on his assassination; Benjamin HARRISON (1889-93);

and William MCKINLEY (1897-1901). Their party regarded industrial growth

and capitalist leadership with approval, believing that they led to an ever-

widening opening of opportunity for all.

Grover CLEVELAND rose from obscurity to become Democratic governor of New

York in the early 1880s and then U.S. president (1885-89; 1893-97; although

he won a popular-vote plurality in the election of 1888, he lost to

Harrison in the electoral college). Reared a Jacksonian Democrat, he

believed that society is always in danger of exploitation by the wealthy

and powerful. A vigorous president, he labored to clean up government by

making civil service effective; took back huge land grants given out

fraudulently in the West; and battled to lower the protective tariff.

In the Great Plains and the South, grain and cotton farmers, suffering from

falling crop prices, demanded currency inflation to raise prices. By 1892 a

POPULIST PARTY had appeared, to call for free coinage of silver to achieve

this goal. Cleveland resisted, stating that such a monetary policy would

destroy confidence, prolong the great depression that began in 1893, and

injure city consumers. In 1896 the Democrats, taken over by southern and

western inflationists, ran William Jennings BRYAN on a FREE SILVER

platform. Ethnic voters surged into the Republican ranks--for the

depression was a disastrous one and the Republican party had always urged

active government intervention to stimulate the economy. In addition, as

city dwellers they feared inflation. William McKinley's election began a

long period of one-party (Republican) domination in the northern states and

in Washington.

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

During the period known as the Progressive Era (1890s to about 1920) the

U.S. government became increasingly activist in both domestic and foreign

policy. Progressive, that is, reform- minded, political leaders sought to

extend their vision of a just and rational order to all areas of society

and some, indeed, to all reaches of the globe.

America Looks Outward

During the 1890s, U.S. foreign policy became aggressively activist. As

American industrial productivity grew, many reformers urged the need for

foreign markets. Others held that the United States had a mission to carry

Anglo-Saxon culture to all of humankind, to spread law and order and

American civilization. In 1895 the United States intervened bluntly in the

VENEZUELA BOUNDARY DISPUTE between Venezuela and imperial Britain, warning

that, under the Monroe Doctrine, American force might be used if Venezuela

were not treated equitably. A Cuban revolution against Spain, begun in

1895, finally led to the SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR (1898), undertaken to free

Cuba. From that war the United States emerged with a protectorate over Cuba

and an island empire consisting of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam.

The United States also annexed the Hawaiian Islands in 1898, completing a

bridge to the markets of the Far East. In 1900 the American government

announced the OPEN DOOR POLICY, pledging to support continued Chinese

independence as well as equal access for all nations to China's markets.

William McKinley's assassination brought Theodore ROOSEVELT to the

presidency in 1901. A proud patriot, he sought to make the United States a

great power in the world. In 1903 he aided Panama in becoming independent

of Colombia, then secured from Panama the right for the United States to

build and control a canal through the isthmus. In 1904, in the Roosevelt

Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, he asserted the right of the United

States to intervene in the internal affairs of Western Hemisphere nations

to prevent "chronic wrongdoing." The following year his good offices helped

end the Russo-Japanese War. Having much strengthened the navy, Roosevelt

sent (1907) the Great White Fleet on a spectacular round-the-world cruise

to display American power.

Progressivism at Home

Meanwhile, the Progressive Era was also underway in domestic politics. City

governments were transformed, becoming relatively honest and efficient;

social workers labored to improve slum housing, health, and education; and

in many states reform movements democratized, purified, and humanized

government. Under Roosevelt the national government strengthened or created

regulatory agencies that exerted increasing influence over business

enterprise: the Hepburn Act (1906) reinforced the Interstate Commerce

Commission; the Forest Service, under Gifford PINCHOT from 1898 to 1910,

guided lumbering companies in the conservation of--and more rational and

efficient exploitation of--woodland resources; the Pure Food and Drug Act

(1906; see PURE FOOD AND DRUG LAWS) attempted to protect consumers from

fraudulent labeling and adulteration of products. Beginning in 1902,

Roosevelt also used the Justice Department and lawsuits (or the threat of

them) to mount a revived assault on monopoly under the Sherman Anti-Trust

Law. William Howard TAFT, his successor as president (1909-13), drew back

in his policies, continuing only the antitrust campaign. He approved

passage of the 16TH AMENDMENT (the income tax amendment, 1913), however; in

time it would transform the federal government by giving it access to

enormous revenues.

Republicans were split in the election of 1912. The regular nomination went

to Taft, and a short-lived PROGRESSIVE PARTY was formed to run Theodore

Roosevelt. Democrat Woodrow WILSON (1913-21) was therefore able to win the

presidency. Attacking corporate power, he won a drastic lowering of the

tariff (1913) and establishment of a Tariff Commission (1916); creation of

the FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM (1913) to supervise banking and currency; a

broadened antimonopoly program under the CLAYTON ANTI-TRUST ACT (1914);

control over the hours of labor on the railroads (Adamson Act, 1916); and

creation of a body to ensure fair and open competition in business (Fair

Trade Commission, 1914).

During the Progressive Era, southern governments imposed a wide range of

JIM CROW LAWS on black people, using the rationale that such legalization

of segregation resulted in a more orderly, systematic electoral system and

society. Many of the steps that had been taken toward racial equality

during the Reconstruction period were thus reversed. The federal government

upheld the principle of racial segregation in the U.S. Supreme Court case

PLESSY V. FERGUSON (1896), as long as blacks were provided with "separate

but equal" facilities. In the face of the rigidly segregated society that

confronted them, blacks themselves were divided concerning the appropriate

course of action. Since 1895, Booker T. WASHINGTON had urged that blacks

should not actively agitate for equality, but should acquire craft skills,

work industriously, and convince whites of their abilities. W. E. B. DU

BOIS insisted instead (in The Souls of Black Folk, 1903) that black people

ceaselessly protest Jim Crow laws, demand education in the highest

professions as well as in crafts, and work for complete social integration.

In 1910 the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE

(NAACP) was founded to advance these ideals.

Intervention and World War

President Taft continued to stress the economic aspects of Roosevelt's

interventionist spirit. Under Taft's foreign policy (called dollar

diplomacy) U.S. firms were encouraged to increase investments in countries

bordering the Caribbean in the hope that the American economic presence

would ensure political stability there. President Wilson went a step

further, seeking not simply to maintain order, but to advance democracy and

self-rule. In 1915 he sent troops into Haiti to put an end to the chaos of

revolution--and to protect U.S. investments there--and in 1916 he did the

same in the Dominican Republic; the two countries were made virtual

protectorates of the United States. With Nicaragua he achieved the same end

by diplomacy. In hope of tumbling the Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta,

Wilson at first denied him diplomatic recognition, then in April 1914 sent

troops to occupy the Mexican port city of Veracruz and keep from Huerta its

import revenues. The Mexicans were deeply offended, and in November 1914,

Wilson withdrew American forces. The bloody civil war that racked Mexico

until 1920 sent the first large migration of Mexicans, perhaps a million

people, into the United States (see CHICANO).

After the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Wilson sought vainly to

bring peace. In early 1917, however, Germany's unrestricted use of

submarine attacks against neutral as well as Allied shipping inflamed

American opinion for war (see LUSITANIA). Wilson decided that if the United

States was to have any hope of influencing world affairs, it was imperative

that it enter the war and fight to protect democracy against what he called

German autocracy.

America's entry into the war (April 1917) was the climax of the Progressive

Era: Wilson's aim was the extension of democracy and the creation of a just

world order. In January 1918 he issued his FOURTEEN POINTS as a proposed

basis for peace: freedom of the seas and removal of all barriers to trade;

an end to secret diplomacy; general disarmament; self-government for the

submerged nationalities in the German and Austro- Hungarian empires; and a

league of nations. The addition of more than a million American troops to

the Allied armies turned the balance against the Germans in 1918, and an

armistice on November 11 ended the war. At the PARIS PEACE CONFERENCE,

however, Wilson failed in much of his program, for the other Allies were

not interested in a "peace without victory." The British would not agree to

freedom of the seas; tariffs did not tumble; self-determination was often

violated; key negotiations were kept secret; but in the end Wilson obtained

his greatest objective, establishment of the League of Nations to provide

collective security against future aggression. Many at home, however,

preferred to return to America's traditional isolation from world affairs.

When Wilson tried imperiously to force the Senate to accept the entire

treaty, he failed. The United States never became a member of the League of

Nations.

THE UNITED STATES TURNS INWARD: THE 1920S AND 1930S

After its participation in the conflagration then known as the Great War,

the American nation was ready to turn inward and concentrate on domestic

affairs (a "return to normalcy," as 1920 presidential candidate Warren

Harding called it). Private concerns preoccupied most Americans during the

1920s until the Great Depression of the next decade, when increasing

numbers turned, in their collective misfortune, to government for solutions

to economic problems that challenged the very basis of U.S. capitalistic

society.

The 1920s: Decade of Optimism

By the 1920s innovative forces thrusting into American life were creating a

new way of living. The automobile and the hard- surfaced road produced

mobility and a blurring of the traditional rural-urban split. The radio and

motion pictures inaugurated a national culture, one built on new, urban

values. The 19TH AMENDMENT (1920) gave women the vote in national politics

and symbolized their persistence in efforts to break out of old patterns of

domesticity. The war had accelerated their entrance into business,

industry, and the professions and their adoption of practices, such as

drinking and smoking, traditionally considered masculine. So, too, young

people turned to new leaders and values and sought unorthodox dress,

recreations, and morals.

Traditional WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) America fought the new

ways. The adoption of PROHIBITION in 1919 (with ratification of the 18TH

AMENDMENT) had been a victory of Yankee moral values over those of

immigrants, but now many of the great cities practically ignored the

measure. The Russian Revolution of 1917 sent a Red Scare shivering through

the country in 1919-20; suspicion centered on labor unions as alleged

instruments of Moscow. The KU KLUX KLAN, stronger in the northern

Republican countryside than in the South, attacked the so-called New Negro,

who returned from the fighting in France with a new sense of personal

dignity (the HARLEM RENAISSANCE expressed this spirit through the arts),

and the millions of Roman Catholics and Jews who had been flooding into the

country since the 1890s. The Immigration Law of 1924 established a quota

system that discriminated against all groups except northern and western

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