The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

Poverty constrained the movement of poor black families, just as it limited the movement of the very poor in Europe and poor white families in the United States. Migration demanded money to fund the trip, to acquire a farm, or, if homesteaders, to provide the tools and animals necessary to stock a farm and to sustain a family until the farm became productive. Blacks also faced the intimidation of landowners who feared the loss of tenants and laborers. They found their crops confiscated before sale, their leaders arrested, and their meetings broken up. Nightriders assaulted them and their families on the way to the Mississippi River or in camps. Steamboat companies, intimidated by threats of boycott by whites or by vigilantes, refused to pick up the travelers and transport them.

The South quite consciously and deliberately turned its judicial system into an engine to generate servile labor, of the most deadly sort. Fee-based governance and pervasive racism gave Southern sheriffs and deputy sheriffs strong incentive to arrest black people for misdemeanors. The fines assessed for misdemeanors, largely property crimes, provided money for the sheriffs, and when poor defendants could not pay the fees, officials obtained the money by leasing out the convicted. The Southern practice of assessing penalties for nonpayment of debts and assigning forced labor if the defendant failed to pay provided similar fees for court officials, and more prisoners for leasing. The system had the added advantage of providing local revenue to keep down taxes.35 Convicts—90 percent of whom would be black as the system endured into the twentieth century—worked on railroads, in the turpentine industry, and in the mines. Employers rented them for less than eight cents a day, supplying them with food and clothing. The conditions were horrific. Convict laborers could not strike, and their presence inhibited strikes by free workers.

The Northern system remained strong in the 1870s and 1880s but ultimately broke down from a combination of prison rebellions, union opposition, and moral revulsion from voters.

As manufacturing processes grew more complicated and coordinated, prisoners gained leverage. Individuals or small groups could create bottlenecks that brought production to a halt.

The convict lease system formed the most glaring example of the persistence of servile labor in a free labor country, but it was, workers contended, not the only example. What counted as coerced labor and what to do about it became central political questions in the Gilded Age and directly linked to immigration. The accusation that the Chinese were coolies—servile labor brought in by employers to drive down the wages of free labor—had been prevalent in the West since the California Gold Rush. The Chinese were indebted, usually to the Six Companies that arranged their passage and often found them employment, but they were free laborers able to quit when they chose.

Labor achieved further success against contract labor with the Foran Act of 1885, which prohibited “the importation and migration of foreigners and aliens under contract or agreement to perform labor in the United States.”

More than wishful thinking prompted opposition to Powell. His proposal would put into the hands of experts decisions that had been left to individual citizens. It embodied the liberal tension between contract freedom and individualism, on the one hand, and expertise and bureaucracy, on the other.

On the reservations conditions were often deadly. Between 15 and 25 percent of the Piegans starved and died on their Montana reservation during the winter of 1882 and 1883. It was hardly noticed. Indians discerned things that whites did not. They knew that Western boundaries could be firm for Indians while porous for whites. Reservations and Indian Territory were supposed to be havens for Indians, a remnant of their land not subject to white entry, but they were subject to constant pressure from whites who wanted them opened up for white settlement, or for their resources—from grass to minerals—to be made available for white use. Indians, on the other hand, found their movements restricted.

Sara Winnemucca made herself an Indian reformer who often praised the U.S. Army and was at odds with white Indian reformers, who endorsed the peace policy. She attacked Christians and Christianity as hypocritical and corrupt in taking Paiute land without Paiute consent.

the home, Winnemucca made her story the story of white rape and pillage and made her hero the Indian woman. She made the domestic space Indian space and put Indian women in constant danger from white men. She turned Cody’s scouts, cowboys, and settlers into rapists and cowards; none of them could be trusted. The white men who could be trusted were soldiers, whom Winnemucca made friends of the Indians, and men who married Indian women and entered Indian domestic circles.

Settlers recognized the association of malaria, dysentery, and other diseases with standing water, although they would not understand the vectors such as the anopheles mosquito for malaria until the end of the century. Their explanation was miasma. The exact definition of miasma was vague. It was a vapor whose palpable signs were dampness, foul odors, and haziness.

After 1884, federal legislation made the maintenance of this impossibly convoluted system—dredging the rivers, repairing the main levees, and building them up—the work of the Army Corps of Engineers.

The knowledge to prevent infection was readily available and widely accepted in Europe, where Joseph Lister had demonstrated that sanitizing operating equipment and operating rooms with his “antiseptic surgery” prevented infection and saved lives. Garfield’s physician, Willard Bliss, had attended the wounded Lincoln and was called in by Robert Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s son and a member of Garfield’s cabinet. Bliss rejected Lister’s methods.

Such pessimism rose like miasma from liberalism, but the gloom lifted with Howells’s growing distance from his liberal fellows. The heyday of liberalism was past; its great figures were aging and influential largely among more conservative Americans. Classical liberalism was metamorphosing into modern conservatism.

Spencer condemned the tariff and any public aid to the poor; he also opposed public education and the post office. Earlier nineteenth-century liberals had been activists, collectively opposing an existing order of inherited privilege and slavery; Spencerian liberalism became passive, a bulwark against tampering with evolutionary “laws.”

Spencer’s American followers embraced the “metaphysic creed” that James attacked. John Fiske was an historian and philosopher who celebrated the ascendancy of an English “race.” His 1879 lecture “The Manifest Destiny of the English Race” was, in the words of an admirer, a “logical application of the doctrine of Evolution to the developing interest of humanity” and a comprehensive view of “America’s place in universal history.” Andrew Carnegie, something of an outlier among the acolytes, was approaching fifty in 1882, and he had latched onto Spencer to justify his own amazing fortune—which owed more to the tariff than the survival of the fittest—as a contribution to human progress.

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.

Social Darwinism—far from defining the age became an outlier. Hofstadter mistook a liberal army in retreat for conquerors and then described Sumner’s extreme minority opinion as in the vanguard. Liberals retained relevance in the 1880s, but most were not Social Darwinists. Their opponents ridiculed them as Mugwumps, self-important and supposedly aloof from party politics. They were leaders without followers. Liberals ensconced themselves in the judiciary and, far less reliably, in the executive; their power in Congress, never substantial, was receding.

German professors told their American students that humans were social animals shaped by the very traditions and institutions that they created. True human life was not the private life embraced in the American worship of the home, but rather the public life and entertainments that evangelical Americans so distrusted. Social welfare was not the responsibility of the family, but rather of society as a whole. In the 1880s, even as Bismarck attacked socialists, he simultaneously adopted state social insurance schemes and protectionism.

Many reformers embraced socialism, but they used the term in a quite particular, non-Marxian way in the 1880s. Socialism involved an appreciation and a celebration of “society” and a rejection of atomistic individualism. If socialism meant anarchism or Marxism, the younger economists opposed it, but to the extent it meant only a kind of antithesis of individualism and an advocacy of cooperation, they too embraced it. They believed, as Ely put it, that government was “the agency through which we must work.”

Progress and Poverty was a sustained attack on Thomas Malthus and the idea that mass poverty was inevitable as a rising population pushed against scarce resources.31 At the heart of George’s argument was a redefinition of capital and a resurrection of the old liberal hostility to a landed aristocracy.

For J. P. Morgan, the New York banker escaping the shadow of his father in the 1880s, upholding the rights of property was nothing to be ashamed of; it was a mark of character. At the end of the era, Morgan said that the basis of the whole financial system was character. Character was not morality. A man of character might be dissipated, lie, cheat, steal, and either order or condone deeds punishable by time in a penitentiary, but he did not do those things to his friends. Friendship depended on character; friends were loyal and keepers of bargains (whenever possible). They did not talk outside of school.

The Grants’ fortune arose largely through the firm of Ward & Grant. Ferdinand Ward, the son of a minister, hailed from upstate New York. His inattentive partner was Grant’s son Buck, who had made money in western mining speculations using his father’s political connections and the geological knowledge of Ward’s brother. Ward was running what would later be called a Ponzi scheme; in an economy with falling returns on investment, he delivered dividends and annuities that seemed too good to be true. They were.

In the summer of 1884, Grant’s omnipresent cigars caught up with him. The taciturn general bit into a peach, swallowed, and screamed in pain. He had throat cancer and was dying, but he retained the fierce determination that had seen him through the Civil War. Grant made his last year his finest hour since the war’s conclusion. He set out to write his memoirs—The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant—in order to provide for his family after he died. With the help of Mark Twain, who published them, he did so. His Memoirs—whose conclusion begins, “The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery”—remain one of the finest memoirs of the Civil War.

The Pendleton Act created a salaried Civil Service Commission to replace the old U.S. Civil Service Commission, which had been defunded in the Grant administration. It was to craft exams for the selection of officials in certain classified government positions. The Pendleton Act also prohibited contributions from office holders, thus choking off a key conduit of patronage.

The ultimate goal of the Pendleton Act was to create a bureaucracy separate from partisan governments whose members would enjoy uninterrupted tenure in their offices so long as they performed their duties, but the act utterly failed to achieve this during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, except in the smaller technical and professional agencies. Instead, it created a nonpartisan gloss on a persistent partisan system.

The Pendleton Act did change the financing of political campaigns. With federal officials prohibited from contributing to political campaigns, a major source of financing for the national parties dried up. There is no denying the corruption of the old system, but turning to corporate and wealthy donors hardly seemed a turn for the better.

Howells was nearly a caricature of Victorians in regard to sex; he used to hide copies of Emile Zola’s novels to keep them from his children. His reaction to Cleveland greatly amused Mark Twain: “To see grown men, apparently in their right mind, seriously arguing against a bachelor’s fitness for President because he has had private intercourse with a consenting widow!”

The “best” of the Republican Party had been its insistence on protecting the rights of the freedpeople, but Blaine had refused to make repression in the South a campaign issue. He did so only after he had lost. “The course of affairs in the South,” he declared, “has crushed out the political power of more than six million American citizens and has transferred by violence to others.” This was certainly true, but it was not the ground on which the Republicans had fought.80

average white ten-year-old American boy in 1880, born at the beginning of the Gilded Age and living through it, could expect to die at age forty-eight. His height would be 5 feet, 6-1/2 inches. He would be shorter and have a briefer life than his Revolutionary forebears.

As tuberculosis declined, water-borne and insect-transmitted diseases became the most lethal killers. Malaria was endemic across the Midwest, while yellow fever epidemics plagued the Southern coasts, advancing up the Atlantic seaboard and the Mississippi Valley. Cholera epidemics struck repeatedly, spread through contaminated water. Bacterial diseases such as dysentery and other diarrheal diseases were less spectacular but more consistent killers.

Recognizing the connection between feces and cholera did not mean understanding how excrement communicated disease. Americans and Europeans assimilated Snow’s discovery into the existing theory of miasma. Most would continue to believe in miasma for the rest of the century, even after the bacteriological revolution of the 1880s, which introduced germ theory.

As engineers and public health reformers, usually called sanitarians, assumed the task of improving the cities, their numbers grew. Only 512 civil and mechanical engineers lived in the United States during the Civil War, but in 1867 there were enough civil engineers for them to organize their own professional organization, the American Society of Civil Engineers. By 1880 civil engineers alone numbered 8,261, and that rose to well over 100,000 in the early twentieth century.

Even before the Civil War, the need for pumps, reservoirs and sewers that served the whole city made it hard to segment public works. There was a democracy of defecation. For all their advantages, the rich could not avoid contamination by the feces of the poor. Polluted water and germs on the hands of their servants penetrated their residences. Like feces and urine, neither fire nor disease respected property boundaries. Water and sewer systems had to cover and protect everyone. Cities were like ships; they sailed, and sank, as a whole.

Environmental improvements and corporate advantages combined in 1865 when the railroads and the big packinghouses in Chicago combined to create the 320-acre Union Stockyards, a “bovine city” just outside the city limits on the Southwest Side. Unloading livestock from the railroads at the new yards eliminated the need to move cattle and pigs through the streets of the city, a real gain for public health and safety. The big meat packers having opposed attempts to make them take responsibility for slaughterhouse wastes switched positions and supported stricter environmental and health regulations within Chicago’s limits. They hoped these laws would both drive independent butchers out of business and force other packers to move into the yards, where they would share the expenses.

Medill’s plans threatened the interests of the stablest elements of Chicago’s working class. Twenty percent of skilled workers and 17 percent of the unskilled owned homes. These were the small and inexpensive wooden cottages, clustered two or three on a lot, that had fueled the fire. The small house inhabited by the O’Learys, which miraculously survived the blaze, was typical. It was a double cottage, with the O’Learys and their five children crowded into the rear half and the front rented to another family. The house and its neighbors were firetraps, but they were also all a working-class family could afford. To eliminate new wooden houses would be to eliminate the possibility of homeownership for the vast majority of workers within the city’s limits. These workers organized and protested, and bummers led the protests. Like the workers, they were mostly German American and Irish American. In the 1870s Chicago was, in the phrase of the time, a “foreign” city with about a third of the city being German in origin, 20 percent Irish, large numbers of Scandinavians, and a scattering of other immigrants.

Hesing was a Republican and a bummer who would later go to jail in the Whiskey Ring scandal, but he spoke for his constituency. He and Irish American Democratic leaders formed an alliance in 1873, which toppled Medill and the reformers. They embraced an ethnic Chicago. Although corrupt and not necessarily averse to redistributing a certain amount of income upward, they protected ethnic voters who elected them from the evangelical Republican temperance reformers. They reclaimed the police force, which had under Medill increasingly become the domain of the native-born, and they handed out the small favors immigrants often needed to survive.

Political battles over housing easily morphed into fights over water and sewage. The business reformers wanted fire protection. This required a water system covering the entire city so that a fire could be stopped before it reached critical mass. They did not, however, want either urban debt or high taxes. The result in Chicago, and elsewhere, was a grand political accommodation. Liberalized city charters allowed cities to pay for public improvements through increases in bonded debt to finance the pumping stations, aqueducts, underground pipes, and sewers; in return business secured a legal limitation on the maximum size of the city’s municipal debt and taxes. As long as the politicians maintained low taxes, businessmen would not monitor the conduct of local government.

the expansion of the suburbs meant that Boston would still receive its neighbors’ wastes even if it successfully disposed of its own. The scale of the solution had to be municipal, extending beyond Boston’s boundaries. Neither Boston nor its neighbors, however, were willing to do this; nor did they have a political mechanism for doing so. The environmental crisis continued to demand expansions of government powers, and it could not be remedied until those powers increased. As with so many other things, the environmental improvements initiated during the Gilded Age would not bear fruit until the Progressive Era.61

A boring made in 1879 at the West Thirteenth Street outfall in New York City illustrated the scale of the pollution. The drill passed through 175 feet of sewage and sludge before it found the bottom of the harbor. The combination of nitrogen from the decaying wastes of urban areas and phosphorus that entered the rivers with the deforestation of the Hudson River Valley produced eutrophication. The declining level of oxygen in urban waters meant many could not sustain life. As the amount of sediments and eutrophication increased, urban fisheries declined, eliminating another cheap and common source of food for the poor.

The gruesome death of a Western Union lineman, whose body dangled over the streets of Manhattan for an hour with blue flames shooting from his mouth, symbolized the danger they presented. Even indirect contact with the wires was dangerous. If a telephone wire crossed a high-voltage power line, a person picking up the telephone could be electrocuted.

In New York, Pearl Street had just 710 customers and lit only 16,377 lamps in 1888. It was a piece of conspicuous consumption.80

Westinghouse prospered by improving railroad brakes. He understood the corporate needs for uniformity, predictability, and control.82 Westinghouse invented his automatic railroad air brake in 1869. As with Edison’s incandescent bulb, “invent” is a deceptive word. Virtually all the inventions of the period arose from the tinkering culture of American shops and factories. There were numerous versions of most devices. Attaching a single inventor to any of them and awarding a patent often involved seemingly endless litigation.

Westinghouse’s use of the patent revealed the ambiguities of innovation. The number of patents issued in the late nineteenth century swelled dramatically, but this was not necessarily a sign that Americans were becoming more inventive.

The vacuum brake was a dangerous rival to Westinghouse’s air brake, but by securing patents to vacuum brakes and buying out rivals, he blocked competition and secured a monopoly for his airbrakes.

By the 1880s “skyscraper” had moved from describing the highest sail on masted vessels to designating tall buildings. They were the real estate market’s response to rising land values and the concentration of new urban businesses, which needed to house significant amounts of records and large numbers of office workers at a single site. It was cheaper to build up than out.

the most critical innovation was the use of iron and steel in revolutionary new designs cloaked by stone and brick exteriors. Instead of having thick weight-bearing masonry walls, these buildings used cage or skeleton construction, which permitted thin walls, providing more floor space, larger windows, and thus more interior light.

In their light, quiet, and isolation, the upper floors of an office building could not have been further from the other distinctive urban building: the tenement. A Harper’s Weekly series on “Tenement Life in New York” in 1879 began: “Half a million men, women, and children are living in the tenement-houses of New York today, many of them in a manner that would almost disgrace heathendom itself.”

Ice can claim credit for perhaps 50 percent of the improvement in nutrition in the 1890s, and with it the beginning of the rise in average height.

The failure to spread the benefits of the new infrastructure to the poor became evident in their homes. Dark, dank, and filthy, tenements were as antithetical to American ideas of the home as they were hospitable to tuberculosis, typhoid, dysentery, and other waterborne diseases.