This lengthy tome is the latest book in the Oxford History of the United States. The series was planned in the 1950's by C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter. The first book was published in 1982. This is the ninth of twelve planned. They have not been in any particular order and two of the remaining three are about the colonial and revolutionary eras. Of those published to date, one has been about foreign policy, one about the Civil War and the rest cover epochs spanning 16 to 33 years. Three volumes received Pulitzers, one a Parkman and one a Bancroft.
"How the United States at the end of the nineteenth century turned out to be so different from the country that Lincoln conjured and Republicans confidently set out to create is the subject of this book." The martyred Lincoln was returned to the Midwest and it is the Midwest that dominates this era. Its people and mores are central to the story of the balance of the century. The guiding premise of the midwesterners was that free men working on their own behalf could build a home and raise a family steeped in the values of Lincoln and Springfield, Illinois.
Reconstruction stumbled out of the block because there was no plan per se, there was great uncertainty about what powers the federal government had after the war ended, and the new president was a border state Democrat. The South had been defeated, but the vast majority of southerners did not accept that outcome. The Black Codes passed in 1865 practically re-enslaved the freedmen. For many in the north, the passage of the 13th Amendment freeing the slaves was in and of itself the achievement of their goals. The markets would resolve all else. When Congress returned to Washington in December 1865, the Radical Republicans had different plans. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment followed, but to no avail. On the ground in the south, violence against the former slaves continued unabated. The impeachment of Andrew Johnson was the climactic battle between the Republicans and the southerners. By the time Grant was elected, most of the seceding states were back in the union. Reconstruction had achieved its legal goals, but not its practical ones. The blacks were now in a coercive labor system where they were tied to the land by contract. The 15th Amendment soon followed, but voting in the south was hope and not a reality for the freedman.
The author calls the conquest of the west the Greater Reconstruction. To facilitate the remaking of the west, the government authorized the transcontinental railroads, funded them by giving the various railroads 125 million acres of land, offered land and education to any settler who moved west and ordered the army to move the Indians out of the way. To a great extent, the west was conquered with the values of the midwest as a guide. But the path was torturous, as the Indians did not cooperate and the arid land west of the 100th parallel could not sustain the population density of the eastern half of the country. Massive ranches and farms took the place of smallholders and huge mining companies produced an overabundance of minerals for an economy that did not need all that was produced. Once again, ideals did not come to fruition.
In the first Grant administration, "free labor seemed to be working as intended, producing widespread prosperity and republican homes." Small factories as well as larger ones propelled the economy forward. However, there were chinks in the armor. The Republican desire to project their values of Protestantism, home and free labor ran afoul of the masses of immigrants pouring into the urban east. Many were Catholic and sold their labor by the hour. Wage labor was anathema to the Republican ideal, as was the eight-hour day and laborers "cooperating for mutual protection." Then came the Panic of 1873, which had as many international moving parts and unintended consequences as did our recent Great Recession. It featured countless closed businesses and banks, massive unemployment, foreclosures, the bankruptcy of most of the railroads, the first ever closure of the NYSE, and a depression that lasted five-and-a-half years. The Panic introduced a deflation that would haunt farmers for the balance of the century. "This was not the anticipated outcome of the triumph of free labor and contract freedom." The nation approached the centennial both divided and financially weaker that it had been before the war.
Rutherford B. Hayes succeeded Grant by promising the southerners on a special Electoral Commission that he would not enforce Reconstruction, thus breaking an apparent tie in the Electoral College. The Great Strike of 1877 started that summer on the Pennsylvania R.R. A feeder line's president declared a 10% dividend the same day he cut workers' wages 10%. The strike spread throughout Maryland and Pennsylvania, led to violence and destruction of company property and was met by all of the powers the railroads and the states could muster. Private militias were called out and the strikers fired upon. When this led to a general strike in Chicago, Hayes ordered in federal troops. Capital triumphed. The following decade elected Garfield and then Cleveland, the first Democrat in thirty years. The south remained walled-off economically, virtually free of immigrants, as the north and west grew. The political waters were muddied by issues of religious reforms, extreme anti-Chinese policies in California, public education, paper v metallic-based currency, negro emigration, tariff policy, endemic public corruption and civil service reform. The overcrowding of cities led to a decline in the health of the population. Life expectancy and adult height declined between the war and the end of the century. Air pollution joined dysentery, tuberculosis and malaria as the curses of urban America. Concurrently, the same cities were building skyscrapers, piping in clean water and electrifying transportation.
On May Day in 1886, a nationwide general strike far exceeded that of a decade earlier. "More than 600,000 American workers walked out of shops, factories and work sites." It was led by the Knights of Labor, a combination labor union and benevolent association that included anarchist laborers on the left and the Society of Locomotive Engineers on the right. At issue were both wages and work rules. Safety improvements were paramount in an industrial society that killed thousands per year. Chicago became the center of what is known as the Great Upheaval. Anarchists helped organize the rally that led to The Haymarket Riot, which frightened so many that the labor movement began to split. Reformers took to trying to sway the major political parties, but did so inconclusively. Whether it be tariff reform, public v Catholic education, temperance, women's suffrage, the status of immigrants, the power of the railroads or the many issues in the test between capital and labor, there were simply too many conflicts within America society to find common ground. Both parties floundered.
In the west, the government intervened aggressively and continually to correct mistakes previously made. "Nowhere was this truer than in the cattle industry." It was a heavily subsidized corporate industry that failed disastrously. It was financed from the UK, provided free land to graze upon by the US and shipped east in federal and state subsidized railroads. After a brutal winter that killed much of the herds in the northern plains, the federal government pulled the plug and tried to focus on smaller ranchers. For the American Indian, the closing of the frontier meant the end of their life on the plains and any hope for the future. Reduced to a handful of reservations on which they could barely scratch out a subsistence living, their last attempt at fighting back ended at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, ironically, at the hands of the 7th Cavalry.
The 1890's were not a preamble to the 'American Century', but rather a seemingly endless morass of insoluble problems. It saw an America that "doubted both the country's ability to absorb immigrants and whether the new immigrants were absorbable." The country on the whole had not yet absorbed and accepted its Germans and Irish. Italians from the southern half of the peninsula and Jews from Russia horrified the natives. Throughout the south, lynchings were up and the Jim Crow laws were enacted. Women were seeking rights, particularly the right to vote. Although the Columbian Exposition showed off Chicago and America in a bright light, the Panic of 1893 followed. Once again, the US imported a credit crisis from Europe, leading to railroad and bank failures and another depression. Labor troubles, strikes and boycotts followed. The US government which had failed for decades to protect the blacks in the south, never hesitated to protect the interests of the railroads, steel mills and manufacturers of the north and midwest. "The century was closing with a mad and seemingly destructive rush." The last election contested by a Civil War veteran was won by McKinley in 1896. It was a triumph of Republican activist government over Democratic minimalism and cast the die for the next thirty-six years.
Lincoln could not have envisioned his country three decades after his death. He and his memory were iconic. However, the land of small town Protestantism featuring free labor and the primacy of the individual home was no long center stage. Jane Addams wondered what he would think about the immigrants crowding around her Hull House in downtown Chicago as she looked at his statue in Lincoln Park. She wrote that he had secured "democratic government, associated as it is with all the mistakes and shortcomings of the common people, still remains the most valued contribution America has made to the moral if of the world."
I've taken away a clearer understanding of the issues that dominated the especially , how and why that Springfield ideal clashed with the reality of those immigrants who stayed in the northern cities. The author's focus on this theme has helped me understand how the battle between those with economic power and the unskilled laborers they needed to implement the industrial revolution would continue for generations.
