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April 30 - June 7, 2020
Rockefeller had no patience with the liberal pieties of laissez-faire; for him the problem of the age was excessive competition. Oilmen produced, and wasted, too much oil. The existing refineries were small and inefficient, but there were so many of them that they still glutted markets with kerosene, driving prices down. The economy needed order: pools to regulate production and prices and consolidation to yield larger and more efficient refineries.
Rockefeller made many enemies and few friends, but he had a knack for absorbing the most able of his rivals into Standard Oil, which was ruthless, efficient, and only as scrupulous as it needed to be. His partner, Henry Flagler, was Presbyterian rather than Baptist, but he replicated Rockefeller’s business Christianity.
The railroads gained efficiencies of scale and guaranteed traffic by granting Standard Oil special privileges that antimonopolists denounced as a violation of the railroads’ duties as common carriers.42
Who controlled the conditions of work—the workers or management—became a central issue in 1877.
Here, as elsewhere, the strike was as much a community rebellion against the railroads as a work action. Initially, the local and even parts of the national press sympathized with the strikers.
Using troops in a strike represented a more radical extension of federal power than using them to protect voters in the South, where there was specific legislation that sanctioned their use.
The loudest demands for troops came from railroad executives such as Garrett and Scott. They controlled so many state officials that they sometimes seemed to forget they were not elected officials themselves and could not ask the president for soldiers.
President Hayes, having refused to deploy troops in the South, was hardly eager to use them to settle civil disputes in the North, but as would be his pattern during the first part of his presidency, he objected in principle only to yield in practice.
Workers used modern technologies as effectively as their employers. Railroad workers embodied the changing economy; they were demanding control over that change, not resisting it. In a kind of chain reaction, news of a strike in one place sparked eruptions in other towns, cities, and regions. The strike ignited social tensions that had been developing for a decade.
In Baltimore and Pittsburgh the violence unleashed by the strike brought the by-now standard comparison from frightened liberals and employers: the Paris Commune of 1871. They imagined communist revolutionaries in league with workers and the dangerous classes in an assault on free labor and property. The strikers, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote, refused “to recognize the right of every American to control his own labor and his own property.” Henry Ward Beecher condemned strikers for “tyrannical opposition to all law and order.” He insisted that a man with a family of five children needed no
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The railroad strike, having taken so many local forms, petered out at the end of July. Neither largely peaceful general strikes nor furious mobs had been able to counter the organized violence that the local, state, and federal governments brought against them.
It is hard to imagine a more disastrous beginning to a presidency than what Rutherford B. Hayes had experienced in 1877, but he was someone who thought that attracting opposition from nearly every direction meant that he was right. The president represented an odd ideological mix. In many respects he was a liberal, but not consistently enough to win the loyalty of Godkin, whose cracked scheme to deny Hayes the presidency during the election crisis cost the Nation half its declining number of subscribers. Hayes had been a free trader in Congress, but as president he accepted the tariff for
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The failure of Congress to pass appropriations for the army forced Hayes to call a special session in the fall of 1877. He not only did not get the appropriations—the Democrats would fund neither the army nor the civil service without riders repealing the civil rights laws—but also got much that he did not desire. Congress checked the federal power he had deployed to help the railroads.
In taking on the customs offices, Hayes wanted to break the Stalwart machines, which opposed him and which capitalized on the American system of fee-based governance.
Fee-based governance represented an administrative strategy that was no less “modern” than the bureaucracies that came to define European states. It used fees, bounties, subsidies, and contracts with private individuals or corporations to enforce laws and implement public policy. In the immediate wake of the Civil War, what might superficially look like a bureaucracy in the General Land Office, the Office of Indian Affairs, or the Treasury Department really amounted to a collection of agents who lived on the fees they collected and the economic opportunities their jobs presented. Where fees
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The battle over Arthur amounted to only one front in Hayes’s conflict with the Stalwarts. As the Stalwarts predicted, Hayes’s Southern policy created a series of catastrophes for the Republicans and black voters. Even before 1876, new Democratic governments had begun to call constitutional conventions. The conventions did not focus on officially eliminating the black civil rights Southerners had promised Hayes they would protect. In principle the conventions left civil rights untouched, even as state governments constricted them in practice. Instead, the conventions concentrated on the
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In control of Congress, the Democrats once again used the power of the purse to deny the government funding unless Hayes and the Republicans repealed civil rights legislation. They particularly opposed federal marshals who could be used to protect black voters in the South and often acted against immigrant voters in the cities. Democrats were a white man’s party and from the end of the Civil War to the end of the century, no Democratic congressman or senator voted for a piece of civil rights legislation.
The court implicitly recognized that pure markets did not exist; markets operated within specific sets of political rules. In the Granger Cases, the court tried to set the parameters of legitimate rule making.96
Himself a German immigrant, Schurz in effect treated the Indians in a way he would never have allowed Germans to be treated. He advocated eliminating their language and traditions.
Tuskegee grew as the relocation of responsibility for black education moved from the public sphere to the private. It reflected a politics of lowered expectations.
Republican political economy evolved piecemeal in response to necessity, events, and opportunity. Its distinct pieces made it particularly well suited to a tripartite government. Congress took responsibility for the tariff, a key issue for those Republicans who were ex-Whigs. It provided the main source of the nation’s revenue and protected key industries.
The president and the executive branch monitored and administered the money supply, which, with resumption in 1879, made gold the basis of the nation’s currency. This was foundational for the liberals.
Federal courts increasingly intervened to strike down state regulations that affected interstate commerce. The courts created what amounted to a de facto, largely unregulated, national market.2
Taxing Southern consumers and farmers, who were overwhelmingly Democrats, to subsidize northern industrialists and workers, who were largely Republicans, made political sense. So did implementing a gold standard that helped the Northeast while harming the South.
But if gold was the cure, why had Great Britain, which had adopted the gold standard long before the United States, endured the same economic downturn?
Liberals, at their simplest, thought of the gold standard as self-regulating, but the country’s monetary system could not run on autopilot. The Treasury Department had to monitor trade, the tariff, and the national banks to make sure that it always had enough gold to redeem paper currency and silver coins when presented. To fail to do so would, in effect, be to take the country off the gold standard. Given the difficulty of the task and the efforts of opponents to subvert the system, the country often hovered on the brink of default.
Every month the government, according to law, bought and minted $2 million in silver dollars, and every month it issued those dollars only to have the vast majority quickly come back to the Treasury in exchange for paper or gold. Carrying around silver dollars—popularly known as a “stove-lid currency”—was inconvenient. As a result, silver flowed into the Treasury, and notes backed by gold reserves flowed out. The unwanted silver coins piled up. By 1880 the Treasury held thirty-two thousand ordinary nail kegs full of silver dollars in its vaults. The situation only got worse. By 1885 the
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1897 prices fell at about 1 percent a year, and the consumer price index declined from 196 to 100, according to retrospective calculations (1860 = 100). Wealthy creditors gained premiums beyond interest payments since deflation meant that the dollars paid to them in interest, and ultimately in the repayment of principal, were always more valuable than the earlier dollars they had lent. The monetary system transferred wealth from the debtor West and South to the East, whose banks and investors controlled the money that was lent. The gold standard also allowed a much smoother integration of New
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The American demand for sugar was so strong that domestic producers could not fill it; the sugar tariff acted to raise prices for domestic producers while still allowing imports. Sugar yielded more tariff income than any other commodity.
The Arrears Act, signed by President Hayes in 1879, proved to be one of the more unheralded pieces of legislation in American history. It expanded a U.S. pension system designed to take care of the dependents of Union Army soldiers killed during the war as well as disabled soldiers.
By making pension payments retroactive to the date of
a soldier’s discharge, or in the case of dependents from the date of a soldier’s death rather than the date of an approved application, the Arrears Act created a windfall for veterans and their families. All recipients would receive a check for the “arrears” owed them, and anyone filing for a new pension before July 1880 would also receive a payment covering the period from the date of his discharge. The average first payment including arrears in 1881 was roughly $1,000, at a time when the annual earnings of nonfarm employees were about $400. Between 1879 and 1881, total disbursements for
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In Democracy Mrs. Lightfoot Lee’s grandiloquent denunciation of Ratcliffe could have applied to a range of American political figures. “I have degraded myself,” the text ran, “by discussing with you the question whether I should marry a man who by his own confession has betrayed the highest trusts that could be placed in him, who has taken money for his votes as a Senator, and who is now in public office by means of successful fraud of his own, when in justice he should be in a State’s prison.” But her real disappointment was in her fellow countrymen, “nine out of ten” of whom “would say I had
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If anyone wondered how Grant would have reacted to the Great Strike of 1877, they could read his sanguinary conversation with Bismarck. Grant and the Prussian chancellor agreed that the only solution to anarchism, socialism, and disorder was blood in the streets.30
the Republicans had passed the Morrill antipolygamy bill in 1862.
The role played by women in the attack on polygamy added to the ironies. Protestant women attacked plural marriage as a form of slavery since Mormon women lived under conditions that denied them true consent. Yet not only did Mormon women overwhelmingly defend plural marriage, but Utah in 1870 also gave women what many of them sought elsewhere in the country: the vote.
Polygamy, the justices decided, led to barbarism and despotism; monogamy was the republican form of marriage. Implicit in the limitations placed on Mormon religious practices was the conviction that Protestant Christian practices were normative and protected by the Constitution.
Suppression was Comstock’s life work, and it demanded being always on the alert. He even succeeded in getting a new edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass banned as pornography.
Comstock Act in 1873, greatly expanding federal supervision of American sexuality. It made the U.S. Post Office and the courts a kind of morals police in charge of American censorship. The act banned “obscene, lewd and lascivious” materials in any form from the mails, including contraceptives, abortifacients, and information about how to obtain or use them.
This expansion of federal, state, and local power, without an expansion of administrative capacity, often delegated authority to petty tyrants.
That such modest reforms, some of which were already in place and others of which would be enacted either in the United States or elsewhere, inspired such horror was revealing. Harrison wrote of the Nationals, “If their undertaking could succeed, we should have wealth without labor, and a system of morals without self-restraint; and instead of the orderly empire of law we should have ‘mob-voiced lawlessness,’ anarchy uttered or ordained by the people.” Howells thought the opinions of the Nationals “astonishing, disheartening and alarming.
In both the Democratic and the Republican parties, the challenge for candidates was to avoid issues that could divide the party and emphasize issues that drew distinctions with the opposing party. When Howells wrote Rutherford B. Hayes’s campaign biography for the 1876 election, the candidate had instructed Howells not to commit him on “religion, temperance, or free trade. Silence is the only safety.”
migration both from abroad and within the United States is better understood as a single complicated movement in which travel within and across borders combined wrenching change, dislocation, and dispossession, as well as opportunity. That Giles moved out of discouragement and his ship reeked of desperation did not mean that there was not also hope. That Berry was giddy with opportunity did not change the fact that his earnest boosterism reflected the necessity of persuading others that change would prove beneficial. Giles and Berry may have been at opposite ends of a spectrum, but it was
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Americans mythologized the movement of population onto uncultivated lands as quintessentially American. The number of people going into the cities, however, far exceeded the pioneers near or beyond the 100th meridian. The urban immigrants were creating the American future. In 1890 the collective population of Chicago, New York, and Brooklyn exceeded the 2.8 million people who lived in the states and territories lying wholly west of the 100th meridian,
atypical migrations of the nineteenth century—those caused by famine in Ireland before the Civil War, the failed revolutions of 1848, and the Russian pogroms that began in 1881 with the assassination of Czar Alexander II—as representative. Most immigrants were not fleeing persecution or famine; they chose to come, although their choice was shaped by circumstances. They wanted a better life and left regions that offered them little hope of one. Their arrivals tracked (although calculations are not precise) the rise and fall of the American economy. There were no direct measures of GDP in the
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There were internal barriers to migration more significant than national boundaries. As in so many other things, the South stood apart. Its citizens moved, but they largely sloshed back and forth within its boundaries. Relatively few outsiders entered the region. The borders of the old Confederacy might as well have been a dam,
Immigrants avoided the South because of low wages, sharecropping, tenancy, and the pervasive poverty they yielded. Although a national labor market was developing, it evolved only gradually in the late nineteenth century and did not extend to the South, where wages, particularly pay for unskilled workers, lagged far behind
As the more modern and highly financed northern mills moved into steel, Birmingham produced cheap pig iron used chiefly in pipes for new water and gas lines.
The debate about immigration deeply split black leaders, for what seemed at stake was less tactics than the whole meaning of the past fifteen years.
They subpoenaed the black Henry Adams. Dignified, polite, direct, and eloquent, he proved more than a match for the committee. His testimony about the persecution of black people and the despair that drove them to emigrate was among the most powerful ever delivered to Congress. He made those questioning him seem lesser men, as indeed they were.
