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July 11 - September 27, 2022
Southerners met even Johnson’s minimal requirements only in order to rid themselves of federal troops. They complained bitterly of receiving no compensation for their slaves and had not given up hope of eventually being paid.
Stevens could not eliminate American racism, but that was not his aim. He wanted to topple as many of its supports as he could and link it to a failed past. The doctrine of a “white man’s government” was a sibling of deceased Chief Justice Roger Taney’s ruling in the Dred Scott decision that black men were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” That “infamous sentiment,” Stevens said with characteristic bluntness, had
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And this party … proclaims to an astonished world that the only effect of vanquishing armed rebels in the field is to return them to seats in Congress, and to restore them to political power. Having failed to destroy the constitution by force, they seek to do it by construction, with … the remarkable discovery that the rebels who fought to destroy the constitution were its true friends, and that the men who shed their blood and gave their substance to preserve it were its only enemies.
Among the squatters was the Ingalls family, whose residence in Kansas from 1869 to 1871 inspired Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie. That the Ingalls family was squatting, illegally taking Indian land, was not featured in the Little House books.39
Terence Powderly, the head of the Knights of Labor, in an accusation that says much about the sexual activities of adolescent boys, claimed Chinese prostitutes had infected “thousands of boys” from eight to fifteen with venereal disease. These boys would, doctors asserted, then later infect their wives and through them their children.
What
Modern definitions of sexuality are no more appropriate to the late nineteenth century than modern definitions of race; they were both being invented as time went on. Horatio Alger was sexually attracted to men, but sexual contact between men did not in the nineteenth century mark men as homosexual. Sexual contact between men might be a sin—like masturbation—but it did not yet signify that men who indulged in it occupied a distinct sexual category.
but above all Comstock made Americans quail when faced with the specter of the masturbating boy.55
Top 10 wtf moments in american history
As part of the long struggle of women to take control of their own bodies and childbearing, female fertility steadily declined, leading to charges by the end of the century that Protestant white women were failing in their duty to the home by restricting the number of children they bore. These charges usually came from middle- and upper-class men. But men from these same classes were simultaneously engaged in a quiet withdrawal from the home.
A Michigan Board of Health estimate in the 1880s claimed that one-third of all pregnancies ended in an abortion. For all the uncertainties, the signs point to women voluntarily controlling their fertility.71
Between 1860 and 1890, forty states and territories outlawed abortion, with most rejecting the quickening doctrine.72
Collectivizing risk and considering the community as a whole rather than the individual was a form of “communism,” but the practice paradoxically allowed people to maintain their belief in individualism.
The gold standard created what economists have called a “golden straitjacket.” Debtor nations would exchange control over their monetary policy for capital mobility and stable exchange rates. Although the cost of borrowing abroad would fall, the United States would lose the ability to drive domestic interest rates below international interest rates. Gold dollars would flee abroad if interest rates elsewhere were higher.40
In having the North’s lust for progress cause it to forget rather than uproot the legacy of slavery, Akerman separated what the Radicals had sought to join.
These were practical men, enamored of new technologies, and they admired other practical men who got their hands dirty. They thought their ability to manage their firms depended on their grasp of constantly changing tools and problems of production. Their workers, in turn, prided themselves on their skill, knowledge, and independence.
In the early 1870s officials in the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor began to link threats to the home and the wretched condition of the poor not to their moral failings or bad social influences but to the wage system.
Contract freedom provided no solution. Wages sufficient to support a family and home could not be left to the market, since a wage insufficient to support a wife and children endangered the home and the republic.
John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy accepted the tenet that a worker’s wages must support “himself, a wife, and a number of children.
If free labor did not yield a living wage, then there was no such thing as free labor.72
2022 :(
Competition, which free-labor doctrines regarded as the source of equality and prosperity, seemed to be turning into a problem rather than providing a solution.75
The free labor vision of a nation of small producers, their efforts aided by government, was yielding a world in which large producers, some of them organized as corporations, dominated crucial parts of the economy. The rise of antimonopolists in both parties signaled that many Americans regarded monopoly and privilege, rather than competition and general equality, as defining the new economy.
Sumner was extreme even among Spencerian intellectuals in his fear of socialism, antipathy toward the poor, disdain for popular government, zeal for individualism, and identification of capitalism with civilization and progress. He popularized the idea that the new social order of capitalism was natural and necessary.
In another century, Reagan
Society acting through the state needed to impart morality to an economy that, if left unchecked, rewarded greed and spawned disorder and injustice.22
Reagans great enemy
In 1877 the New York Labor Standard, edited by an Irish socialist, lamented: “There was a time when the United States was the workingman’s country, … the land of promise for the workingman… . We are now in an old country.” Nearly a decade later the Detroit Labor Leaf used nearly identical language: “America used to be the land of promise to the poor… . The Golden Age is indeed over—the Age of Iron has taken its place.
Henry Adams, who hated Blaine, came to enjoy the campaign: “When I am not angry, I can do nothing but laugh.”71
I feel you
It would be well into the twentieth century before white American men achieved the average lifespans of late eighteenth-century New England men.
Parton quite literally inspected Pittsburgh in the dark: in the summer “every street appears to end in a huge black cloud, and there is everywhere the ominous darkness that creeps over the scene when a storm is approaching.” In November he could not tell when the sun had risen, and the gas lamps had to burn even at midday. Everywhere there was smoke—smoke from factories, smoke from coke ovens, smoke from stoves and furnaces. This caused obvious problems and health problems unrecognized until later. Women passed “their lives in an unending, ineffectual struggle with the omnipresent black.”
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Oh my god
Smoke from bituminous coal was similarly the flag of Chicago’s prosperity. Hamlin Garland remembered his first visit in the 1880s, when he saw from the train windows “a huge smoke-cloud which embraced the whole eastern horizon, for this, I was told, was the soaring banner of the great and gloomy inland metropolis.”
but as Boston expanded and suburbanized, the local elite found they were unable to wall themselves off from larger urban failures.55
Hmmmm
He brought in Herbert Baxter Adams, who was skeptical of the ability of competition to promote either equity or efficiency in the railroad industry, as the chief statistician of the ICC. Influenced by Herbert Baxter Adams and his own son, the social psychologist Charles Cooley, he focused the ICC on the fair distribution of transportation and its benefits. He still desired the broad opportunity and economic decentralization that had prompted his earlier beliefs, but he now saw government regulation as the best way to achieve them in a world of powerful railroad corporations. The Supreme Court
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President Cleveland had warned in his inaugural address that “corporations, which should be carefully restrained creatures of the law and servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”
Mythologized as the heartland of individualism, the West became the kindergarten of the modern American state.
When Owen Wister, a Philadelphian and friend of Theodore Roosevelt’s, romanticized the American cowboy and cattleman in his novel The Virginian (1902), he had his hero say that “back East you can be middling and get along. But if you go to try a thing on in this Western country, you’ve got to do it well.” This might have been the most astonishing line written about the nineteenth-century West, a land where the federal government repeatedly intervened to correct mistakes, many of them its own and others made by its citizens, and bail out Western failure. Nowhere was this truer than in the
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Laissez-faire was impossible. Society could not simply stand back in the midst of the struggle. As society grew more complex, the individual confronted forces beyond personal control, and the state took on a larger role. “The more a state helps the citizen when he cannot help himself,” Ross would later write, “protecting him from disease, foes, criminals, rivals abroad and monopolists at home, the more he will look to it for guidance.”
In the 1880s and 1890s, labor reformers continued to win victories in state legislatures, only to lose them in the courts.
There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.”
1896
We trust the republic with itself; that is we trust one another, and we trust one another the most implicitly when we affirm the most clamorously, one half of us, that the other half is plunging the whole of us in irreparable ruin. That is merely our way of calling all to the duty we owe to each. It is not a very dignified way, but the entire nation is in on the joke, and it is not so mischievous as it might seem.
