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May 23 - August 9, 2025
At the same time, because they defined themselves as true Americans, members of this middle class willingly harnessed a growing national government to their own interest, for it was the government’s job, they believed, to promote the good of all Americans. Paradoxically, American individualists came to depend on government support while denying it to others.
Although questions about the relationship between the government and its citizens were hardly new in 1865, one thing made the post–Civil War years critical for American identity: during the war, for the first time in American history, Congress had imposed national taxes. After the war, individuals— taxpayers—had a new and powerful interest in their government and were concerned about who should be able to vote about how their money was spent.
With its second section declaring that “Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation,” it was the first amendment in the history of the American Constitution that increased, rather than limited, the power of the national government.
In order to find out, I tried to put myself as closely as I could into the position of an educated nineteenth-century American, worried about the future of the nation, my family, and myself. I read newspapers, novels, memoirs, and histories of the late 1800s; looked at paintings; and listened to music. As I did so, the world I saw around me appeared very diffierent from the one I had read about in history books.
After the Spanish-American War, America was a land where an activist government supported individualism, and those who endorsed this contradictory ideology exported it to other nations through both trade and military conflict. In 1901, Theodore Roosevelt—that “damned cowboy,” as a spokesman for the eastern establishment called him—sat in the White House, directing an activist government that served a peculiarly American middle class.
As I researched these individuals, I was astonished at how often the lives of those who embraced a developing middle-class ideology crossed, suggesting that they recognized an affinity for those who thought like themselves and actively worked to spread their worldview across the country.
America is neither excellent nor oppressive; rather, it is both at the same time.
The founding fathers were determined to keep government small so that it could not develop an office-holding class that lived on taxes sucked from hardworking producers. Large government invited corruption, they thought, as officeholders used tax dollars for pork-barrel projects to buy political support. If this were permitted, the government would become independent of its constituents, and the nation would have a new, European-style aristocracy, mercilessly taxing the average person to maintain its political and economic power.
During the war, the Republican Congress created an army and navy of more than a million men, invented national taxation and national money, distributed land to settlers and state governments for colleges, and protected American production. The government’s increasing activity meant that government positions multiplied dramatically.
In North Carolina in 1870, for example, only 6.7 percent of all African Americans held land, and those listed in the census as “mulatto” were four times more likely to own land as those described as “black.”
Instead, many wage laborers worried that something had gone wrong during the war, something that unbalanced the stability of the free labor economy and threatened to capsize it altogether by creating extremes of wealth and poverty in the nation. Business was certainly thriving and creating jobs, but business owners were pocketing profits that dwarfed the paychecks of their workers. At the same time, wartime legislation designed to be even-handed ended up benefiting the wealthy.
Ikard’s position on the crew reflected the general rule that one-third of western cowhands were men of color.
People died in childbirth, in accidents, of cold, of infections (the discovery of penicillin was a generation away). But in the crowded cities, yellow fever, cholera, typhoid, and tuberculosis took an appalling toll, especially on children. Urban childhood death rates were twice as high as those in rural areas, and for parents it was devastating to hold a child too sick to cry any longer, helplessly knowing it was doomed, then look around at a home full of other children and wonder how many of them would soon show symptoms of the same deadly illness.
While white southerners were especially sensitive to the corruption of government by the poorer classes, northerners had their own examples of such corruption close at hand to make them nervous about the situation in South Carolina, as portrayed by the New York Daily Tribune. In July 1871, the New York Times launched an exposé of Democratic machine politician William Marcy Tweed.
The Chicago Tribune maintained that New York and South Carolina both suffiered under corrupt governments elected by vicious constituencies. “New York is abandoned by her property-owners to the rule of one set of adventurous carpet-baggers and vagabonds…. South Carolina is ruled by carpet-baggers and irresponsible non-property-holders for other reasons.”
The next year, Utah’s territorial legislature allowed more than 17,000 women to go to the polls. Hopeful reformers expected that these women would provide the votes to outlaw polygamy, thus destroying one of the evils that still plagued the American state. Instead, they voted overwhelmingly in favor of it, powerfully illustrating to disappointed observers the potential of the vote to corrupt American society.
The idea that the family of the ideal American individualist must be protected from special interests fed an attack on the practice of abortion, organized to guard women from those who seemed to be evil butchers killing children and often women themselves.
Nine months later, in December 1869, in his first message to Congress, he noted that the government’s management of Indians “has been a subject of embarrassment and expense, and has been attended with continuous robberies, murders, and wars.’’ His experience on the frontier made him aware that whites were not blameless for the troubles no matter what western settlers claimed.
At the end of the Civil War, northerners dreamed of their free labor vision spreading across the nation and transforming the backward South into a realm of small farmers, prosperous and educated, whose votes supported a small government that developed the national economy for the good of everyone.
Even at their peak in 1886, unions never organized more than one-third of all American wage laborers, but their strength in the 1870s seemed to be growing.
While Anthony suggested that she could tolerate a world where “the rich govern the poor … [or] where the educated govern the ignorant, or even … where the Saxon rules the African,” she railed against a system that placed “father, brothers, husband, sons … over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters, of every household.’’
In the complicated 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases, the Supreme Court limited the federal government’s power to defend civil rights when it decided that the Fourteenth Amendment protected only the rights of federal citizenship but could not prevent a state from curtailing other individual rights.
In Minor v. Happersett, handed down in 1874, the Supreme Court decided that women were citizens, but citizenship did not automatically include the privilege of suffrage.
In 1873, Congress passed an “Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.’’ This law, known as the Comstock Law after New York reformer Anthony Comstock, who crusaded against sexual vice, prohibited the sale or distribution not only of pornography, but also of birth control information and products.
The state exhibitions were small houses, and states were prohibited from making any political or “offiensive” reference to the Civil War.
It calmly announced a belief in “the equality of all citizens before just laws of their own enactment,” a seemingly uncon-troversial statement that appeared to support black rights but that also endorsed opposition to tax assessments that benefited African Americans.
The Union must be “saved from a corrupt centralism which, after inflicting upon ten States the rapacity of carpet-bag tyrannies, has honeycombed the offices of the Federal Government itself with incapacity, waste and fraud; infected States and municipalities with the contagion of misrule, and locked fast the prosperity of an industrious people in the paralysis of hard times.’’
Increasing governmental expenses must be curbed and a “rigorous frugality” observed.
Hampton’s campaign was not purely one of white supremacy, though, for the economic language of his “reform” rhetoric drew enough African American followers to make him request federal protection for them from their hostile Republican neighbors, a political ploy to be sure, but contemporary accounts from a few prominent black followers supported his complaints.
The New York Times pointed out in astonishment that “while denouncing a ‘strong Government,’ the Greenback-Labor Party demand[s] that Congress shall take charge of all railroad and steamship lines, abolish private land-holdings, regulate industrial establishments, and do a great many other things which the strongest advocate of a strong Government has not yet dared to approve…. These midsummer madmen ask that … Congress … shall regulate everything, abolish debt and evidences of debt, and be a species of special providence to every person who proves himself incapable of taking care of himself.”
In 1878, they passed the Posse Comitatus Act prohibiting the deployment of the army to enforce the laws, except under a very few circumstances.
The president could still use the military to put down domestic insurrections, for example, but it could no longer oversee southern elections.
Beginning in 1885, federal workers were given a day o? on Christmas so they could enjoy the holiday with their families.
But Nast’s early Santa Claus had one important feature that he has shed over the years. In the 1880s, Santa carried over his arm a belt with a broad buckle bearing the prominent letters “U.S.’’ In the 1880s, prosperity had a distinctly American cast.
Worker organization continued to rise, but at its peak in 1886 no more than one-third of wage laborers were members of unions. This was, in part, because unskilled workers were constantly on the move, looking for new jobs. It probably also reflected the fact that white workers in America enjoyed enough upward mobility to convince them that they, too, could rise on their own.
Garfield’s death from infection in September spurred the creation of civil service legislation to curb the abuses of patronage. In 1883, Congress passed the Civil Service (or Pendleton) Act, which required that certain federal jobs be filled on a merit basis, determined by competitive exams overseen by a bipartisan civil service commission. The new law covered only about 10 percent of all federal jobs, but it allowed future presidents to expand the list of jobs protected from patronage. This they did—usually upon leaving office, to protect the supporters they left behind—and gradually the
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There was no contradiction between Roosevelt’s desire to use government to protect the middle-class family and his celebration of the individualistic West. Indeed, the idealized image of the American West increasingly emphasized individualism, economic opportunity, and political freedom at the same time that mainstream justification for government activism grew. Both were a reaction to popular fears of government as a tool of special interests.
Westerners, Roosevelt believed, “recognized their obligations to one another,” but to them “both the Government and the Indians seemed alien bodies, in regard to which the laws of morality did not apply.”
Wet years at the beginning of the 1880s had enabled cattlemen to move too many cattle onto the plains, and a bovine lung disease spreading across state lines made the national government step in to quarantine exposed herds. Then, when drought years reduced forage, cattle went weakened into the terrible winter of 1886–87. In the northern range, cattlemen lost up to 90 percent of their herds. The days of free-ranging cattle were over, and cattlemen settled into ranching, breeding higher-quality beef rather than focusing on quantity.
But Buffialo Bill’s West was not simply a great show, it had a political theme, too. It was a story of the prowess of individual Americans pitted against nature in the form of buffialoes, horses, and Indians. There were no government surveyors in Buffialo Bill’s Wild West Show, no railroad grants, no slogging army campaigns, and no railroad barons like Leland Stanford manipulating politics. The audience saw brave men riding, roping, shooting, and challenging the lawless bandits and Indians who stood in their way, and the program assured them that everything they saw was true. The West, the
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This middle-class vision appeared to be inclusive, welcoming African Americans and anyone who embraced these values. At the same time, it explicitly excluded anyone who seemed to belong to a group that argued that there were class interests in society that must be addressed by government. “The mass” of African Americans, labor activists, and activist women were excluded from this mainstream acceptance. It did not matter that Ida B. Wells was a productive, upwardly mobile member of society; she was not welcome to participate equally in society so long as she tried to get the government to
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Paradoxically, though, part of the individualist vision included a homemaking wife, who was increasingly calling for activist government to protect her ability to care for her family. Tucked neatly within the middle-class dislike of government activism for special interests was a willingness to use the government to protect the middle-class individualist.
But she loved theater so much that her first reaction to Lincoln’s assassination was to worry that the actor Booth’s “atrocious act, which was consummated in a very theatrical manner, is enough to ruin … the theatrical profession.’’
There was a legal distinction between trusts and holding companies, but their aim and effiect was the same: horizontal integration to control production and prices.
In 1895, even the lobstermen in Maine organized to stockpile their catch, create a shortage, and force up the price of this cheap food. On August 3, lobster in New York City cost eight to ten cents a pound, by August 10 it was fourteen cents a pound, and by August 13 had risen to twenty cents a pound, an outrageous sum for a household budget to absorb for what was then seen as an inferior food.
Promptly retitled “The Gospel of Wealth,” the essay became a classic justification of workers’ ill treatment by industrialists, although Carnegie clearly meant it to chastise the Jim Fisks and Jay Goulds of the nation as well as striking workers. Carnegie argued that the concentration of wealth and industry in the hands of a few was not only inevitable in an industrial system, but also beneficial so long as the rich used their money wisely.
The wealthy were stewards of society’s money, administering it for the common good by using it for libraries, schools, and so on to uplift everyone rather than permitting individuals to squander it in frivolity, Carnegie wrote.
Even the business-minded New York Times took exception to Carnegie’s defense of trusts, snapping, “to hold more power than God has allotted to man makes him arrogant, and, attributing to himself a prescience only second to that of his Maker, he becomes unjust.’’
In 1887, Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission, an independent federal regulatory commission designed to curb shady railroad practices by making sure that railroads adhered to standard rate schedules, for example, across state lines.
In addition to policing the railroads, though, some of the force of the Interstate Commerce Commission came from its power to publicize the previously private actions of corporations. No longer could Carnegie hide his inside deals; they would be broadcast to the public.
