Transcript File

James L. Roark ● Michael P. Johnson
Patricia Cline Cohen ● Sarah Stage
Susan M. Hartmann
The American Promise
A History of the United States
Fifth Edition
CHAPTER 20
Dissent, Depression, and War,
1890-1900
Copyright © 2012 by Bedford/St. Martin's
I.
The
Farmers’
Revolt
A. The Farmers’ Alliance
1. Confronting economic challenges
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faced a banking system committed to the gold standard; a railroad rate system
that was capricious and unfair; and rampant speculation that drove up the price
of land.
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as the alliance movement grew, the farmer groups consolidated into two
regional alliances with more than 200,000 members: the Northwestern
Farmers’ Alliance and the more radical Southern Farmers’ Alliance.
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2. Organizing politically
3. Reaching African Americans
Southern Farmers’ Alliance worked with the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, an
African American group founded in Texas in the 1880s; attempted to forge a
common cause.
4. Appealing to the family
5. Alliance meetings
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picnic, parade, revival, country fair, and political convention; thousands
attended Alliance meetings; distributed literature and used lectures to reach out
to the illiterate.
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Alliance movement stood a series of farmers’ cooperatives that sought to
negotiate better prices for their crops; met with stiff opposition from
merchants, bankers, wholesalers, and manufacturers, who made it impossible
for them to get credit; as the cooperative movement died, the Farmers’ Alliance
moved toward direct political action; demanded railroad regulation, laws
against land speculation, and currency and credit reform.
6. Farmers’ cooperatives
I. The Farmers’ Revolt
B. The Populist Movement
1. The People’s Party
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advocates of a third party movement had convinced members of
the Farmers’ Alliance to form the People’s Party; launched the
Populist movement, which mounted a stinging critique of
industrial society.
2. The subtreasury
devised the idea of a subtreasury, a plan that would allow farmers
to store nonperishable crops in government storehouses until
market prices rose.
3. Land reform
championed a plan to reclaim excessive lands granted to railroads
or sold to foreign investors.
4. Currency reform
endorsed platform planks calling for currency reform in the form
of free silver and greenbacks.
5. Empowering the common people
called for the direct election of senators, the secret ballot, and
other electoral issues; also supported the eight-hour day and an
end to contract labor; more than just a response to hard times,
Populism presented an alternative vision of American economic
democracy.
II. The Labor Wars
A. The Homestead Lockout
1. Amalgamated Iron and Steel Workers
2. Fort Frick
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Carnegie did not want to be directly involved with the union busting; sailed to
Scotland and left Henry Clay Frick, a tough antilabor man, in charge; Frick
erected a fifteen-foot fence around the plant; hired 316 mercenaries from the
Pinkerton Detective Agency to defend what workers dubbed “Fort Frick.”
3. The lockout and the violence
June 28, Frick locked the workers out of the mills; they immediately rallied to
the support of the union and blocked the Pinkertons from entering the plant;
gunfire broke out; with more than a dozen Pinkertons and some thirty workers
killed or wounded in the scuffle, the Pinkertons retreated to their barges;
workers and their families continued to harass the Pinkertons on the barges;
when they finally surrendered and came ashore, they were met with verbal and
physical violence.
4. Public backlash
workers took control of the plant; at first, public opinion favored the workers;
but the workers’ actions struck at the heart of the capitalist system, pitting
workers’ right to their jobs against the rights of private property; yielding to
pressure from Frick, the governor of Pennsylvania called out the National Guard
to protect Carnegie’s mills; allowed Frick to bring in strikebreakers.
5. Bitter defeat
Alexander Berkman, a Russian immigrant and anarchist, attempted to
assassinate Frick; caused public opinion to turn against the workers, even
though the Amalgamated and the AFL denounced his action; after four and a
half months, the workers capitulated and returned to work to find their wages
slashed, their workday lengthened, and 500 jobs eliminated; another forty-five
years would pass before steelworkers, unskilled as well as skilled, successfully
unionized; after Homestead, Carnegie’s profits tripled.
II. The Labor Wars
B. The Cripple Creek Miners’ Strike of 1894
1. Depression leads to a strike at the mines
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spring of 1893, less than a year after the Homestead lockout, a
panic on Wall Street touched off a bitter depression; in the West,
silver mines fell on hard times
when conservative mine owners moved to lengthen the workday
from eight to ten hours, the newly formed Western Federation of
Miners (WFM) protested
some mine owners settled with the union, but others refused;
provoked a strike in 1894.
2. Populist support
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striking miners received help from many quarters
local businesses and grocers sympathized with the strikers
the county sheriff called for troops to put down the strike, but
Populist governor Davis H. Waite refused, instead serving as
arbitrator in the dispute; showed the pivotal power of the state in
the nation’s labor wars
mine owners eventually capitulated, agreeing to an eight-hour
workday; but a decade later, mine owners, this time with support
from state troops, took back control of the mines; defeated the
WFM and blacklisted all its members.
II. The Labor Wars
C. Eugene V. Debs and the Pullman Strike
1. The model town: Pullman
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company town of Pullman on the outskirts of Chicago, where workers were forced to pay high rents
and lived under the constant threat of eviction.
2. Wage cuts
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saw their wages slashed five times in 1893, with cuts totaling at least 28 percent, while their rent
remained constant; at the heart of the labor problems at Pullman lay not only economic inequity but
also the company’s attempt to control the work process; substituted piecework for day wages and
undermined skilled craftsworkers.
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workers rebelled, flocking to the ranks of the American Railway Union (ARU), led by the charismatic
Eugene V. Debs; George Pullman responded to his workers’ grievances by firing three union leaders
the day after they led a delegation to protest wage cuts, leading 90 percent of Pullman’s 3,300
workers to strike.
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Pullman strikers appealed to the ARU for help and the conflict quickly escalated; ARU membership
voted to boycott Pullman cars, and switchmen in other states refused to handle any train carrying
Pullman cars; prompted the General Managers Association (GMA) to recruit strikebreakers and fire
protesting switchmen; the boycott/strike spread to more than fifteen railroads and affected twentyseven states and territories.
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strike remained surprisingly peaceful; however, management distorted and misrepresented the strike;
sent out press releases describing the violence supposedly engaged in by the strikers.
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Washington, D.C., Attorney General Richard B. Olney, a lawyer with strong ties to the railroad,
convinced President Cleveland that federal troops should intervene to protect the U.S. mails (the
governor of Illinois saw a peaceful boycott and refused to call out troops); two Chicago judges issued
an injunction that prohibited Debs from speaking in public and made the boycott a crime punishable
by jail sentence for contempt of court; strategy worked; Cleveland called out the army, Debs was
jailed, and in the resulting violence, the strike was broken; Pullman hired new workers to replace
many of the strikers; Pullman strike demonstrated that workers had little recourse when the
government and courts sided with industrialists in defense of property rights.
3. Worker revolt
4. A nationwide boycott
5. Manipulating the press
6. The government breaks the strike
III. Women’s Activism
A. Frances Willard and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
1. Temperance politics
2. Willard’s tactics
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Willard radically changed the direction of the WCTU; moved it away from religiously oriented programs
to a campaign that stressed alcoholism as a disease rather than a sin and poverty as a cause rather
than a result of drink; joined with labor unions to press for better working conditions for women
workers.
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3. Mobilizing women around a women’s issue
Willard argued that women needed the vote to protect home and family. Willard worked to create a
broad reform coalition in the 1890s, embracing the Knights of Labor, the People’s Party, and the
Prohibition Party; WCTU had over 200,000 members in the 1890s; gave women valuable experience in
political action.
B. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and the Movement for Woman Suffrage
1. Division and reconciliation
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Stanton and Anthony launched the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, demanding the vote
for women; a more conservative group, the American Woman Suffrage Association, formed the same
year, believed that women should vote in local but not national elections; by 1890, the split had
healed, and the newly united National American Woman Suffrage Association launched campaigns at
the state level to gain the vote for women.
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2. New era for women’s rights movement
won victories in Colorado in 1893, as well as Idaho and Utah in 1896; although it would take another
two decades for all women to gain the vote with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920,
the unification of the two woman suffrage groups in 1890 signaled a new era in women’s fight for the
vote.
IV. Depression Politics
A. Coxey’s Army
1. Unemployed march to Washington
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spring of 1894, masses of unemployed Americans marched to
Washington, D.C., to call attention to their economic plight and to
urge Congress to enact a public works program to end
unemployment
Jacob S. Coxey from Massilon, Ohio, led the most publicized
contingent
Coxey’s “army” started in Ohio with one hundred men, swelling as
it marched east through the Allegheny Mountains
on May 1, Coxey’s army arrived in Washington and defiantly
marched onto the Capitol grounds; they were met by police using
nightsticks; Coxey was jailed for his efforts, and by August, the
leaderless, tattered armies of the unemployed dissolved.
2. Plight of the unemployed
Coxey’s army brought attention to the plight of the unemployed;
though unsuccessful in forcing federal relief legislation, it called
into question the underlying values of the new industrial order;
demonstrated how ordinary citizens turned to means outside the
regular party system to influence politics in the 1890s.
IV. Depression Politics
B. The People’s Party and the Election of 1896
1. Threat to party unity
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captured more than a million votes in the presidential election of 1892, a respectable showing for a
new party; but sectional and racial animosities threatened party unity, especially Populists’ willingness
to form common cause with black farmers, which made them hated in the white South.
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Republicans nominated Ohio governor William McKinley on a platform pledging the preservation of the
gold standard, western advocates of free silver representing miners and farmers walked out of the
convention; open rebellion also split the Democratic Party as vast segments in the West and South
repudiated President Grover Cleveland because of his support for gold.
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spirit of revolt animated the Democratic National Convention as thirty-six-year-old William Jennings
Bryan whipped the crowds into a frenzy with his “Cross of Gold” speech, a passionate call for free
silver; the People’s Party met a week later, and many western Populists urged the party to ally with the
Democrats and endorse Bryan; but the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate, Arthur M. Sewall, a
railroad director and bank president, posed significant obstacles to Populists who advocated fusion
with the Democrats; to deal with the issue of fusion, the People’s Party convention selected the vice
presidential candidate, Tom Watson of Georgia, before selecting the presidential candidate; nomination
of Watson undercut opposition to Bryan’s candidacy, and the fusionists triumphed when the People’s
Party convention nominated Bryan for president.
4. A fierce election -Bryan delivered more than six hundred campaign speeches in 3 months.
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silver states of the Rocky Mountains lined up for Bryan, while the Northeast stood solidly for McKinley;
much of the South, with the exception of the border states, abandoned the Populists and returned to
the Democratic fold; midwestern farmers, less receptive to the call for free silver, and eastern workers,
who would not gain many benefits from the inflation that free silver would bring, did not rally behind
Bryan, costing him crucial votes.
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McKinley won twenty-three states and 271 electoral votes to Bryan’s twenty-two states and 176
electoral votes; biggest losers in the election of 1896 turned out to be the Populists; the People’s Party
was crushed, and with it died the agrarian revolt, but Populism nevertheless set the domestic political
agenda for the United States in the next decades; highlighted issues such as banking and currency
reform, electoral reform, and an enlarged role for the federal government in the economy.
2. Cries for reform
3. Nominating Bryan
5. Sectional divisions
6. Populist agenda
V. The United States and the World
A. Markets and Missionaries
1. Economy and expansion-looked abroad
2. Religious zeal
3. The Boxer Rebellion
missionary activity and Western enterprise touched off a series of antiforeign uprisings in China
that culminated in the Boxer uprising of 1900; Boxers terrorized missionaries and Christian
converts throughout northern China; in August 1900, 2,500 U.S. troops joined an international
force sent to rescue foreigners besieged in Beijing; put down the rebellion the following year; in
the aftermath of the Boxer uprising, missionaries voiced no concern at the paradox of bringing
Christianity to China at gunpoint.
B. The Monroe Doctrine and the Open Door Policy
1. Protecting American hegemony
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the Monroe Doctrine and Open Door policy; American diplomacy worked to buttress the
Monroe Doctrine’s assertion of American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.
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risked war with Great Britain over America’s role in a conflict between Venezuela and British
Guiana; in Central America, American business triumphed in a bloodless takeover that saw
French and British interests routed by behemoths such as the United Fruit Company of
Boston.
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2. American business in Central America
3. The U.S. in the Far East
4. An open door to China
Secretary of State John Hay wrote a series of notes to Britain, Germany, Russia, France,
Japan, and Italy, calling for an “open door” policy; would ensure access to all and maintain
Chinese sovereignty; by insisting on the Open Door policy, the United States secured access
to Chinese markets, expanding its economic power while avoiding the problems of
maintaining a far-flung colonial empire on the mainland of Asia.
V. The United States and the World
C. “A Splendid Little War”
1. The Cuban rebellion
2. Yellow journalism
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Journalism—Newspapers fueled public outcry at Spain; circulation war raged in New York
City between William Randolph Hearst’s Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s World; sensational
stories called yellow journalism, named for the colored ink used in a popular comic strip.
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American business had more than $50 million invested in Cuban sugar; American trade
with Cuba, a brisk $100 million a year before the rebellion, had dropped to near zero; to
expansionists such as Theodore Roosevelt, more than Cuban independence was at stake,
because war with Spain opened up the prospect of expansion into Asia as well—Spain
controlled not only Cuba and Puerto Rico but also Guam and the Philippine Islands.
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3. Economic and territorial Interests
4. The Maine
McKinley slowly moved toward intervention; in a show of American force, he dispatched
the armored cruiser Maine to Cuba; a mysterious blast destroyed the ship, killing 267
crew members and prompting cries for war back home.
5. A brief war in Cuba
declared war in April, and five days after McKinley signed the war resolution, the U.S.
Navy, under Commodore George Dewey, destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay; war
in Cuba ended almost as quickly as it began.
6. Roosevelt’s Rough Riders
Theodore Roosevelt a bona fide war hero; he formed the Rough Riders, a regiment
composed of Ivy League polo players and western cowboys; played a role in the decisive
battle of San Juan Hill; brought Roosevelt to the attention of prominent independent
Republicans.
V. The United States and the World
D. The Debate over American Imperialism
1. The American empire
• the American people found themselves in possession of an
empire stretching halfway around the globe, including
Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.
2. The fate of Cuba
• the United States directed the writing of a new constitution
in 1900; included the so-called Platt Amendment, which
granted the United States the right to intervene in Cuban
affairs, oversee Cuban debt, and keep a naval base at
Guantánamo.
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3. The Treaty of Paris and war in the Philippines
formal Treaty of Paris that ended the war with Spain ceded
the Philippines to the United States along with Spain’s
former colonies in Puerto Rico and Guam; Filipino
revolutionaries bitterly fought American troops, engaging
the United States in a nasty guerrilla war that lasted seven
years.
4. The politics of imperialism