Ch 17 Freedom’s Boundaries, at Home and Abroad 1890-1900

CH 17: Freedom’s Boundaries, at Home and Abroad 1890-1900 Focus Questions:  What were the origins and the significance of Populism?  How did the liberties of blacks after 1877 give way to legal segregation across the South?  In what ways did the boundaries of American freedom grow narrower in this period?  How did the United States emerge as an imperial power in the 1890s? The Farmers’ Revolt  In the South, the sharecropping system locked millions of tenant farmers, white and black, into perpetual poverty  The glut of cotton on the world market led to declining prices, throwing millions of small farmers deep into debt and threatening them with the loss of their land  In the West, farmers who had mortgaged their property to purchase seed, fertilizer, and equipment faced the prospect of losing their farms when unable to repay their bank loans  The Farmers’ Alliance, founded in Texas in the late 1870s, at first remained aloof from politics, attempted to improve rural conditions by the cooperative financing and marketing of crops  The Alliance proposed that the federal government establish warehouses where farmers could store their crops until they were sold  Since it would have to be enacted by Congress, the “subtreasury plan,” as this proposal was called, led the Alliance into politics The People’s Party  In the early 1890s, the Alliance evolved into the People’s Party (or Populists), the era’s greatest political insurgency which sought to speak for all the “producing classes” and achieved some of its greatest success in states like Colorado and Idaho, where it won the support of miners and industrial workers  Its major base lay in the cotton and wheat belts of the South and West  Although the Populists used the familiar language of nineteenth-century radicalism, they were hardly a backward-looking movement  They embraced the modern technologies that made large-scale cooperative enterprise possible—the railroad, the telegraph, and the national market—while looking to the federal government to regulate them in the public interest The Populist Platform  The platform spoke of a nation “brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin” by political corruption and economic inequality  It put forth a long list of proposals to restore democracy and economic opportunity, including: the direct election of U.S. senators, government control of the currency, a graduated income tax, a system of low-cost public financing to enable farmers to market their crops, and recognition of the right of workers to form labor unions  Populists also called for public ownership of the railroads to guarantee farmers inexpensive access to markets for their crops The Populist Coalition     In some southern states, Populists made remarkable efforts to unite black and white small farmers on a common political and economic program Unwelcome in the southern branches of the Farmers’ Alliance, black farmers formed their own organization, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance In general, southern white Populists’ racial attitudes did not differ significantly from those of their non-Populist neighbors The Populist movement also engaged the energies of thousands of reform-minded women from farm and labor backgrounds The Government and Labor  The severe depression that began in 1893 led to increased conflict between capital and labor and seemed to create an opportunity for expanding the Populist vote  Time and time again, employers brought state or federal authority to bear to protect their own economic power or put down threats to public order  In May 1894, the federal government deployed soldiers to disperse Coxley’s Army—a band of several hundred unemployed men led by Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey, who marched to Washington demanding economic relief Populism and Labor  In the state and congressional elections of 1894, as the economic depression deepened, voters by the millions abandoned the Democratic Party of President Cleveland  The revivalist atmosphere of many populist gatherings and the biblical cadences of Populist speeches were alien to the largely immigrant and Catholic industrial working class  Urban working-class voters in 1894 instead shifted en masse to the Republicans, who claimed that raising tariff rates (which Dems had recently reduced) would restore prosperity by protecting manufacturers and industrial workers from the competition of imported goods and cheap foreign labor Bryan and Free Silver  In 1896, Democrats and Populists joined to support William Jennings Bryan for presidency  He called for the “free coinage” of silver—the unrestricted mining of silver money and condemned the gold standard  Bryan’s demand for “free silver” was the latest expression of the view that increasing the amount of currency in circulation would raise the prices farmers received for their crops and make it easier to pay off their debts  He also was strongly influenced by the Social Gospel movement and tried to apply the teachings of Jesus Christ to uplifting the “little people” of the United States  Realizing that they could not secure victory alone, Populist party leaders endorsed Bryan’s candidacy  Bryan broke with tradition and embarked on a nationwide speaking tour, seeking to rally farmers and workers to his cause The Campaign of 1896        Abandoning the gold standard, Republicans insisted that it would destroy business confidence and prevent recovery from the depression by making creditors unwilling to extend loans, since they could not be certain of the value of the money in which they would be repaid The Republicans also nominated Ohio governor William McKinley, who as a congressman in 1890 had shepherded to passage the strongly protectionist McKinley Tariff The election of 1896 is sometimes called the first modern presidential campaign because of the amount of money spent by the Republicans and the efficiency of their national organization Bryan carried the South and West and received 6.5 million votes McKinley swept the more populous industrial states of the Northeast and Midwest, attracting 7.1 million McKinley’s victory shattered the political stalemate that had persisted since 1876 and created one of the most enduring political majorities in American history The election of 1896 also proved to be the last presidential election with extremely high voter turnout The Redeemers in Power  The coalition of merchants, planters, and business entrepreneurs who dominated the region’s politics after 1877, who called themselves Redeemers, had moved to undo as much as possible of Reconstruction  New laws authorized the arrest of virtually any person without employment and greatly increased the penalties for petty crimes  Conditions in labor camps were often barbaric, with disease rife and the death rates high The Failure of the New South Dream  During the 1880s, Atlanta editor Atlanta editor Henry Grady tirelessly promoted the promise of a New South—an era of prosperity based on industrial expansion and agricultural diversification  While planters, merchants, and industrialists prospered, the region as a whole sank deeper and deeper into poverty  Since the main attractions for investors were the South’s low wages and taxes and the availability of convict labor, these enterprises made little contribution to regional economic development  Overall, the region remained dependent on the North for capital and manufactured goods Black Life in the South  Black farmers suffered the most from the region’s condition  By the turn of the century, most of the great plantations had fallen to pieces, and many blacks acquired land and took up self-sufficient farming  In southern cities, the network of institutions created after the Civil War—schools and colleges, churches, businesses, women’s clubs, and the like—served as the foundation for increasingly diverse black urban communities  The labor market was rigidly divided along racial lines The Kansas Exodus        Trapped at the bottom of a stagnant economy, some blacks sought a way out through emigration from the South In 1879 and 1880, an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 African-Americans migrated to Kansas, seeking political equality, freedom from violence, access to education, and economic opportunity—it was called the Kansas Exodus Those promoting the Kansas Exodus, including former fugitive slave Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, distributed flyers and lithographs picturing Kansas as an idyllic land of rural plenty Most African-Americans had little alternative but to stay in the region Most northern employers refused to offer jobs to blacks in the expanding industrial economy, preferring to hire white migrants from rural areas and immigrants from Europe Not until the outbreak of WWI in Europe in 1914 cut off immigration did northern employers open industrial jobs to blacks, settling in motion the Great Migration. Until then, the vast majority of African-Americans remained in the South The Decline of Black Politics  Blacks continues to cast ballots in large numbers, although Democrats solidified their control of state and local affairs by redrawing district lines and substituting appointive for elective officials in countries with black majorities  A few blacks even served in Congress in the 1880s and 1890s  Nonetheless, political opportunities became more and more restricted  For black men of talent and ambition, other avenues—business, the law, the church— increasingly seemed to offer greater opportunities for personal advancement and community service than politics  The National Association of Colored Women, founded in 1896, brought together local and regional women’s clubs to press for both women’s rights and racial uplift  By insisting on the right of black women to be considered as “respectable” as their white counterparts, the women reformers challenged the racial ideology that consigned all blacks to the status of degraded second-class citizens  Despite the limits of the Populists’ interracial alliance, the threat of a biracial political insurgency frightened the ruling Democrats and contributed greatly to the disenfranchisement movement The Elimination of Black Voting  Between 1890 and 1906, every southern state enacted laws or constitutional provisions meant to eliminate the black vote  The most popular devices used were the poll tax, literacy tests, and the requirement that a prospective voter demonstrate to election officials an “understanding” of the state constitution  Six states also adopted a grandfather clause, exempting from the new requirements descendants of persons eligible to vote before the Civil War (when only whites, of course, could cast ballots in the South)  The racial intent of the grandfather clause was so clear that the Supreme Court in 1915 invalidated such laws for violating the 15th amendment     Some white leaders presented disenfranchisement as a “good government” measure—a means of purifying politics by ending the fraud, violence, and manipulation of voting returns regularly used against Republicans and Populists Disenfranchisement led directly to the rise of a generation of southern “demagogues, who mobilized white voters by extreme appeals to racism As late as 1940 only 3% of adult black southerners were registered to vote Apart from the grandfather clause, SCOTUS gave its approval to disenfranchisement laws The Law of Segregation  Along with disenfranchisement, the 1890s saw widespread imposition of segregation in the South  In 1883, in the Civil Rights Cases, the Supreme Court invalidated the Civil Rights act of 1875, which had outlawed racial discrimination by hotels, theaters, railroads, and other public facilities  In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court gave its approval to state laws requiring separate facilities for blacks and whites  The Court upheld the Louisiana law in Plessy, arguing that segregated facilities did not discriminate so long as they were “separate but equal.”  The lone dissenter, John Marshall Harlan commented, “Our constitution is color blind” and insisted that whites were convicted that they were the “dominant race” and it violated the principle of equal liberty Segregation and White Domination  States reacted to Plessy by passing laws mandating racial segregation in every aspect of southern life, from schools to hospitals, waiting rooms, toilets, and cemeteries  Despite the “thin disguise” (Harlan’s phrase) of equality required by the Court’s “separate but equal” doctrine, facilities for blacks were either nonexistent or markedly inferior  Also, in some parts of Mississippi where Chinese laborers had been brought in to work the fields after the Civil War, three separate school systems—white, black, and Chinese —were established  In California and Texas, although Mexicans were legally considered “white,” they found themselves barred from many restaurants, places of entertainment, and other public facilities The Rise of Lynching  In every year between 1883 and 1905, more than fifty persons, the vast majority of them black men, were lynched in the South—that is, murdered by a mob  Lynching continued well into the twentieth century  Law enforcement authorities made no effort to prevent the lynching or to bring those who committed the crime to justice  Although many countries have witnessed outbreaks of violence against minority racial, ethnic, or religious groups, widespread lynching of individuals over so long a period was a phenomenon unknown elsewhere Politics, Religion, and Memory    In popular literature and memoirs by participants, at veterans’ reunions and in public memorials, the Civil War came to be remembered as a tragic family quarrel among white Americans in which blacks played no significant part Slavery increasingly came to be viewed as a minor issue, not the war’s fundamental cause, and Reconstruction as a regregettable period of period of “Negro rule” when former slaves had power thrust upon them by a vindictive North Southern governments erected monuments to the Lost Cause, a romanticized version of slavery, the Old South, and the Confederate experience New Immigration and the New Nativism  Despite the prolonged depression, 3.5 million newcomers encountered the United States during the decade, seeking jobs in the industrial centers of the North and Midwest  The new immigrants were widely described by native-born Americans as members of distinct “races,” whose lower level of civilization explained everything from their willingness to work for substandard wages to their supposed inborn tendency toward criminal behavior  Found in 1894 by a group of Boston professionals, the Immigration Restriction League called for reducing immigration by barring the illiterate from entering the United States  Several states ended the 19th century practice of allowing immigrants to vote before becoming citizens and adopted stringent new residency and literacy requirements  None of these measures approached the scope of black disenfranchisement in the South or the continued denial of voting rights to women  But suffrage throughout the country was increasingly becoming a privilege, not a right Chinese Exclusion and Chinese Rights  Leaders of both parties expressed vicious opinions regarding immigrants from China  In 1875, Congress excluded Chinese women from entering the country  Beginning in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act, Congress abrogated the Burlingame Treaty ratified during Reconstruction and temporarily excluded all immigrants from China from entering the country  Chinese in the United States were required to register with the government and carry identification papers or face deportation  On the West Coast, the Chinese suffered intense discrimination and periodic mob violence  Drawing on legislation of the Reconstruction era, Chinese victims sued local governments for redress when their rights were violated and petitioned Congress for indemnity  Not until 1947 did California repeal the law authorizing separate schools for the Chinese  The justices also affirmed the right of Congress to set racial restrictions on immigration The Emergence of Booker T. Washington  Booker T. Washington’s widely praised speech, titled the “Atlanta Compromise,” at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition that urged blacks to adjust to segregation and abandon agitation for civil and political rights  Washington urged blacks to try to combat segregation and advised his people to seek the assistance of white employers who, in a land racked by labor turmoil, would prefer a docile, dependable black labor force to unionize whites The Women’s Era  The 1890s launched what would later be called the “women’s era”—three decades during which women, although still denied the vote, enjoyed larger opportunities than in the past for economic independence and played a greater and greater role in public life  Founded in 1874, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) grew to become the era’s largest female organization, with a membership by 1890 of 150,000  It moved from demanding prohibition of alcoholic beverages to a comprehensive program of economic and political reform, including the right to vote  With increasing frequency, the native-born, middle-class women who dominate the suffrage movement claimed the vote as educated members of a “superior race”  The president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association suggested extending the vote to native-born white women would help to counteract the growing power of the “ignorant foreign vote” in the North and the dangerous potential for a second Reconstruction in the South Becoming A World Power The New Imperialism  In world history, the last quarter of the 19th century is known as the age of imperialism, when European empires carved up large parts of the world among themselves  For most of this time period, the United States remained a second-rate power  Eventually, the natives would be accorded the right of self-government, although no one could be sure how long this would take  In the meantime, “empire” was another word for “exploitation” American Expansionism  In the 1890s Americans were increasingly aware of themselves as an emerging world power  There was persistent talk of acquiring Cuba, and President Grant had sought to annex the Dominican Republic, only to see the Senate reject the idea  The last territorial acquisition before the 1890s had been Alaska, purchased from Russia by Secretary of State William H. Seward in 1867  Most Americans who looked overseas were interested in expanded trade, not territorial possessions The Lure of Empire  One group of Americans who spread the nation’s influence overseas were religious missionaries, thousands of whom ventured abroad in the late nineteenth century to spread Christianity, prepare the world for the second coming of Christ, and uplift the poor  In Our Country (1885), Josiah Strong, a prominent Congregationalist clergyman, sought to update the idea of manifest destiny and spread Anglo-Saxon institutions and values to “inferior races”        Naval officer Alfred T. Mahan in The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), argued that no nation could prosper without a large fleet of ships engaged in international trade, protected by a powerful navy operating from overseas bases Hawaii’s economy was dominated by American-owned sugar plantations that employed a workforce of native islanders and Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino laborers under longterm contracts Early in 1893, a group of American planters organized a rebellion that overthrew the Hawaiian government of Queen Liliuokalani On the eve of leaving office, Harrison submitted a treaty of annexation to the Senate After determining that a majority of Hawaiians did not favor the treaty, Harrison’s successor, Grover Cleveland withdrew it In July 1898, in the midst of the Spanish-American War, the United States finally annexed the Hawaiian Islands By the late 1890s, papers like William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World—dubbed the “yellow press” were selling a million copies each day by mixing sensational accounts of crime and political corruption with aggressive appeals to patriotic sentiments The “Splendid Little War”  Ten years of guerrilla war had followed a Cuban revolt in 1868  The movement for independence resumed in 1895  Demands for intervention escalated after February 15, 1898, when an explosion— probably accidental, a later investigation concluded—destroyed the American battleship U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor, with the loss of nearly 270 lives  The yellow press blamed Spain and insisted on retribution  After Spain rejected an American demand for a cease-fire on the island and eventual Cuban independence, President McKinley in April asked Congress for a declaration of war  The war lasted only four months and resulted in fewer than 400 American combat deaths Roosevelt at San Juan Hill  The most highly publicized land battle of the war took place in Cuba  This was the charge up San Juan Hill, outside Santiago, by Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders  With the army still segregated, he excluded blacks from his regiment  Ironically, when the Rough Riders reached the top of San Juan Hill, they found that black units had preceded them An American Empire  In the treaty with Spain that ended the war, the United States acquired the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the Pacific island of Guam  As for Cuba, before recognizing its independence, McKinley forced the island’s new government to approve the Platt Amendment to the new Cuban constitution which authorized the United States to intervene militarily whenever it saw fit  American interest in its new possessions had to do more with trade than gaining wealth from natural resources or large-scale American settlement   In 1899, soon after the end of the Spanish-American War, Secretary of State John Hay announced the Open Door Policy, demanding that European powers that had recently divided China into commercial spheres of influence grant equal access to American exports The Open Door referred to the free movement of goods and money, not people The Philippine War  Filipinos had been fighting a war against Spain since 1896  After Dewey’s victory at Manila Bay, their leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, established a provisional government with a constitution modeled on that of the United States  But once McKinley decided to retain possession of the islands, the Filipino movement turned against the United States  Today, the Philippine War is perhaps the least remembered of all American wars Citizens or Subjects?  In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, nationalism, democracy, and American freedom emerged more closely identified than ever with notions of Anglo-Saxon superiority  In a series of cases decided between 1901 and 1904 known as the Insular Cases, SCOTUS held that the constitution did not apply to the territories recently acquired to the United States—a significant limitation of the full scope of American freedom  The Spanish-American War established a precedent for American intervention in the affairs of other countries, especially those in the Western Hemisphere Drawing the Global Color Line  The turn of the twentieth century was a time of worldwide concern about immigration, race relations, and the “white man’s burden,” all of which inspired a global sense of fraternity among “Anglo-Saxon” nations  One “lesson” these countries learned from the United States was that the “failure” of Reconstruction demonstrated the impossibility of multiracial democracy “Republic or Empire?”  The emergence of the United States as an imperial power sparked intense debate  Opponents formed the Anti-Imperialist League which believed that American energies should be directed at home, businessmen fearful of maintaining overseas outposts, and racists who did not wish to bring non-white populations into the United States  At the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States seemed poised to take its place among the world’s great powers  In 1900, many features that would mark American life for much of the 20th century were already apparent  The United States led the world in industrial production  The North and South had achieved reconciliation, while rigid lines of racial exclusion— the segregation of blacks, Chinese exclusion, Indian reservations—limited the boundaries of freedom and citizenship