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

The Knights grew because they had defeated Jay Gould, one of the most hated men in the country, and because they had renounced their vows of secrecy in deference to the Catholic Church’s ban on membership in secret societies. But they also grew because they had helped mobilize the West against the Chinese in what amounted to an American pogrom, and because they were preparing to expand into the South. Together, these developments had made them the most powerful labor organization in the country.

Look to the Midwest, East, and South, and the Knights seemed the vanguard of at least a limited racial equality; look to the West and they appeared very different. At various times, the Knights distrusted Italians, Finns, Hungarians, and more, but the one racial or ethnic group they banned from the organization was the Chinese.

News of Rock Springs triggered violence elsewhere. By the spring of 1886, 150 western communities had expelled, or attempted to expel, the Chinese. In Washington Territory Daniel Cronin, an organizer for the Knights, made anti-Chinese agitation a tool for a wider attack on corporations and monopolies in order “to free the laboring man from the shackles that he now bears.” The expulsions amounted to a kind of ethnic cleansing, designed to drive people out rather than to kill them. Sinophobes initially relied on boycotts and threats rather than the violence, but they escalated into vigilante actions, which often had the acquiescence of local authorities.

The Knights were the largest and most unusual labor organization in the United States, but by the 1880s most big American cities also contained Central Labor Councils or Central Labor Unions formed from affiliated unions of skilled workers, some of whom belonged to the Knights as well. The Knights and the Councils occupied a rather large swath of ideological terrain. Both contained socialists as well as the more conservative “brotherhoods.” Both drew heavily from native-born and Irish workers, but in Chicago and other cities they also contained more radical German and Bohemian workers.

The unwillingness of employers to invest money in technologies or practices that would increase safety at the expense of profit was a constant source of contention between workers and management.

Martin Irons would be unfairly blamed for leading the Knights into a strike that paralyzed a good section of the nation over the firing of a single worker, but in fact he tried to prevent the walkout. He recognized that Gould’s strategy was to split the Knights, separating the most skilled from the rest. More critically, Gould would not fight the Knights in 1886 on the same losing ground that he had in 1885, when the strikers had considerable local support; he would bring the state and federal courts in on his side.

Railroads in receivership claimed the right to abrogate labor agreements and to appeal to the courts for the armed force to combat strikes that resulted. Receivership allowed Gould blandly to tell Powderly that “the contest is not between your order and me, but between your order and the laws of the land.”30

Gould recognized that the most critical interventions in labor unrest would come from the least democratic sector of the government: the courts, particularly the federal courts.

Congress had intended the Fourteenth Amendment to ensure that states did not interfere in the exercise of civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. Through substantive due process, judges sought to use the amendment to enshrine freedom of contract, open competition, and laissez-faire in the Constitution even though none of these things had been part of the document. The courts made the amendment a means for ruling on the constitutionality of regulatory legislation that applied to business and labor by evaluating their substantive effect. Any attempt to limit competition was an attempt at monopoly, which was anathema to a liberal judiciary.

The police, disproportionately Irish Catholic and working-class, did not naturally side with employers, but Harrison, eager to stave off the resurgent Citizens League, put men sympathetic to business in command. Foremost among them was Capt. John Bonfield, Irish but Republican and able but brutal. Bonfield rose to prominence by violently breaking a streetcar strike that had paralyzed the city in 1885. The company, as widely hated by its customers as by its workers, had precipitated the strike by firing men for belonging to a union. Crowds initially blocked the tracks, stopping trains run by scabs and occasionally pelting them and the police with stones. On July 3 Bonfield unleashed the police to clear the streets. He led by example in cracking the skull of a seventy-year-old man. A teenage girl, vendors selling vegetables and newspapers, and ditch diggers fixing a gas main, as well as strikers, felt the clubs.

Monday, May 3, 1886, proved a dark day in Chicago. First, Chicago’s Knights received word that Powderly had capitulated to Gould in the Southwest strike, and Chicago’s railroads and other large employers hardened their stance against strikers. The strike at McCormick’s Reaper Works had already turned into a guerrilla war between workers and the police, under Bonfield and the Pinkertons guarding what the strikers called Fort McCormick. The police attacked picket lines, and strikers harassed and sometimes attacked strikebreakers as they entered and left the plant.

In the wake of Haymarket, in September 1886, William Dean Howells published perhaps his most quoted “Editor’s Study” columns in Harper’s. He praised the novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky but cautioned that the Russian’s work was to be appreciated “only in its place.” Its “profoundly tragic” note and the author’s socialism were unsuitable for the United States. Howells thought that American novelists should “concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and to seek the universal in the individual rather than the social interests.” In a country where “journeymen carpenters and plumbers strike for four dollars a day the sum of hunger and cold is certainly very small, and the wrong from class to class is almost inappreciable.” It would be wrong to boast, but “the race here enjoys conditions in which most of the ills that have darkened its annals may be averted by honest work and unselfish behavior.”

Capital trials for conspiracy were unusual but not unprecedented in the nineteenth century, and rules for the admissibility of evidence had not evolved to their present form. As in most trials, the witnesses for both the prosecution and the defense were sometimes confused and not always credible. Still, Lingg did manufacture bombs, several of the defendants had attended meetings to plan revolutionary violence and attacks on the police, and all of the defendants had mustered bloodthirsty rhetoric and armed themselves. Except for Lingg’s activities, however, none of this amounted to proof that they planned the bombing or aided the bomber. The trial provided clear evidence that the anarchists were failed revolutionaries; it did not prove that, with the exception of Lingg, they aided or abetted whoever threw the bomb.

seven of the eight defendants were sentenced to death. They were to die for what they said, not for what they did.

In their unsuccessful appeal, their attorney, in what became a common analogy, said that hanging them would be the equivalent of hanging the abolitionists who had sympathized with John Brown. In the wake of Haymarket, Illinois passed a conspiracy law making anyone who advocated revolution guilty of criminal conspiracy, and, if a court found a ...

Howells became the most noted and surprising advocate of clemency for the Haymarket convicts. He opposed “punishing men for their frantic opinions, for a crime they were not shown to have committed.” There was strong sympathy for the convicted among workers, but not all labor leaders joined the campaign for clemency. Samuel Gompers did, but Terence Powderly defended the verdict. Many workers never forgave Powderly.

The Bread-Winners was a fantasy of privilege that became, in part, real. Hay imagined how the Strike of 1877 should have been handled. Farnham mustered members of his old regiment, whom he armed at personal expense, had them deputized, and easily dispersed the mob. Except for lack of worker resistance, this was not so different from Pinkertons and the company of the new Illinois National Guard, armed and equipped by Chicago merchants and industrialists.

A decade later the Astors, Stewarts, and Vanderbilts were no longer alone. The railroads, the rise of manufacturing, and the financial market created vast new fortunes. The consolidation of industries into larger holdings added lesser fortunes as those whom men like Rockefeller or Carnegie bought out found themselves with more than sufficient money on which to live and no further need to labor. This was no longer a mere competence. They could afford considerable extravagance. These arrivistes peopled the novels of Howells and later Edith Wharton. They also became the subjects of Frederick Townsend Martin’s The Passing of the Idle Rich, a book he wrote in the early twentieth century looking back at the invasion of New York society by the nouveau riche.

countered by mobilizing the Catholic hierarchy, which had already tried to stop the immensely popular Father Edward McGlynn from supporting George. McGlynn had defied Archbishop Michael Corrigan, saying that he had not surrendered his “rights and duties as a citizen” when he became a priest. Corrigan suspended him from his parish duties, and just prior to the election, in concert with Tammany, the diocese released a statement asserting the overwhelming opposition of the Catholic clergy to George. Tammany distributed it the Sunday before the election at the doors of the parish churches.

By 1893 the APA had enrolled more than a million members. It was paradoxically nativist, stressing the Anglo-Saxon Protestant roots of the country, without being against all immigrants. It was particularly strong among British and Canadian immigrants, who brought to the United States their existing attachments to the anti-Catholic Orange order. APA newspapers printed forged papal encyclicals calling for a Catholic uprising and fed its adherents a steady diet of familiar tales of nuns imprisoned in convents, but APA speakers were capable of adding new technologies to old conspiracies. They alleged that there was a secret cable to relay messages between the White House and Baltimore’s Archbishop Gibbons.

The efforts of the church and Catholic politicians to undermine public schools were quite real, as Florence Kelley discovered in Chicago. Despite a state compulsory education law, in 1892 there were 2,957 seats available for 6,976 schoolchildren in Chicago’s nineteenth ward. Kelley led a campaign for new schools, which was fought tooth and nail by Alderman John Powers, an Irish Catholic who opposed public education and sought to promote parochial schools.

The fissures that opened in Clinton, Iowa, and Bowers’s reaction to them were symptomatic of reform’s problems. When evangelicals pushed for temperance, women’s suffrage, social purity, and English language education, they reinforced the ethnocultural political divisions that reformers needed to bridge to create majority alliances. Yet evangelicals could not give up these measures; they were, as Josiah Strong emphasized, the core of their attempt to redeem and reform America.

This convergence of elements in the late-nineteenth-century United States, Strong concluded, could not be an accident; it was part of God’s plan. God was “training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour sure to come in the world’s future.” The moment of a final contest between the races was at hand, and God was schooling Anglo-Saxons for victory and conquest. Strong’s God was an evangelical one, not Calvinist, and Anglo-Saxons had to choose their destiny. God had given them capacities—their skill at creating wealth, their “genius for colonizing”—that, if properly used would lead Americans to spread across the world, and other races would not only have no choice other than submitting but would also be happy to do so. Strong spiced his racism with religion to explain why Americans would make the right choice. All civilizations had their vices, and Anglo-Saxons would succumb to their own materialism without the “salt” of Christianity. He regarded popular government as providential and irreversible, but without Christianity, it could decline into anarchism.

David Ricardo, Adam Smith, and Thomas Malthus—was like citing a wizard in a fairy tale to explain how a locomotive worked. Liberals conceived of the market as a collection of rational actors pursuing their own interests. All had equal access to information and an equal choice to participate or not participate. Every transaction was separate from all that preceded or followed. These were the foundational ideas of free labor and laissez faire. They had arisen in opposition to slavery and feudalism, and had done effective work against them, but they seemed virtually irrelevant in the new industrial economy.

The sentiment grew in the late 1880s among the more advanced capitalists that the industrial economy was as likely to devour them as enrich them, while among workers there was an even more acute sense that teeth were already gnawing at their bones. Herbert Spencer might be sanguine about the ultimate beneficence of this economy, but few of its actual participants were.

Adams and Huntington, however, underestimated the ICC and Charles Cooley, the liberal judicial theorist whom Adams dismissed as “a second rate Judge, somewhat past the period of usefulness, and long since wholly past the period of growth.” Adams often mixed arrogance and insight. In this case, he was just arrogant.

School spending provided one of the starker measures of the difference between North and South. In 1880 the sixteen former slave states spent roughly $12 million on education. The former free states appropriated more than five times as much. In North Carolina the state spent 87 cents per child. Only five states spent $2.00 or more per student to educate their children. Average northern spending per child ranged from a low of $4.65 in Wisconsin to $18.47 in Massachusetts, with only two other states spending below $5.00 per student. The results were predictable. Although the percentage of illiterates in the country fell from 20 percent to 17 percent between 1870 and 1880, the total number rose from 5.7 million to 6.2 million. They were concentrated in the South, which had 65 percent of the country’s illiterates.

In the South as a whole, 37 percent of the population was illiterate, with a high of 54 percent in South Carolina. Much of this was a legacy of slavery, since the rate of illiteracy among black people was 75 percent.

Existing ethnocultural politics and party loyalties divided reformers, but the opposite also became truer than ever. Reform alliances across party lines, no matter how fragile, began to take on a salience that threatened the old logic of the parties and the loyalty of their partisans. National politics were becoming unstable. It appeared that the existing parties could not govern.

Western development sometimes seemed more like a runaway train than an engine powering lasting growth. The Republicans had subsidized railroads the West did not need. These roads carried more wheat than the country wanted or export markets could absorb, more cattle than the country needed, and minerals that it often did not need at all. Instead of a pastoral paradise of small producers, the West became a region of bankrupt railroads, wasted capital, and angry workers and farmers. Since much of what the West produced in the 1880s could be produced elsewhere, overproduction and competition put intense pressure on the small farmers and the workers who were supposed to be the beneficiaries of Republican development.

In the 1880s the Western open-range cattle industry became both a cautionary tale of Republican development policies and a sign of the possibilities for reform. There is probably no greater irony than the emergence of the cowboy as the epitome of American individualism, because cattle raising quickly became corporate. Cowboys became corporate employees in a heavily subsidized industry whose disastrous failure demonstrated the limits of corporate organization and fed the reforms in land policy that emanated from Washington.

The ticks produced the famous long drive. Longhorns walked the seven hundred or more miles from southern and central Texas to Kansas, going through Indian Territory, in order to get to the railroads that had pushed their lines onto lands with few white people and were desperate for traffic.

The federal government provided Roosevelt and other cattlemen with free land, and nature provided the grass and water that the cattle consumed. The federal government and states subsidized the railroads that promoted cattle-raising and hauled cattle to market. For all practical purposes, the “producer” in this industry was the product itself, for cows and steers got precious little help from humans in surviving on the Great Plains. Their owners branded them, gathered them when ready for shipping, and sent them off to market.

In 1887, over the objections of Bland and many Indians, Congress passed the General Allotment Act that allowed distribution of tribal lands in severalty, with the exception of Indian Territory and Iroquois country, without Indian consent. Reformers proclaimed the act the equivalent of the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Emancipation Proclamation all rolled into one. It recognized, they said, Indian manhood. Secretary of the Interior L. Q. C. Lamar, an ex-Confederate from Mississippi, presented the law as the only escape available to Indians “from the dire alternative of impending extirpation.” In a century of disasters for Indian peoples, the General Allotment Act ranked among the greatest. In 1881 Indians held 155 million acres of land; by 1890 the total had fallen to 104 million. By 1900, when Merrill E. Gates praised the act at the Lake Mohonk Conference as “a mighty pulverizing engine for breaking up the tribal mass,” the total was down to 77 million.43

In the 1880s the market for copper both as a component of the common alloys of bronze and brass and, in its pure form, as wire exploded. Telegraph companies, electric utility companies, telephone companies, and trolley companies all demanded copper wire. American copper production increased fivefold from 378 million pounds in 1868 to 1.9 billion pounds in 1910.

The defeat of Cleveland, despite his majority of the popular vote, was not the blot on democracy that it seemed because there were far larger blemishes. Given the suppression of the Republican black vote in the South, it was hard to argue that Harrison was truly a minority president. Three black-majority Southern states—South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana—sent only 311,674 voters to the polls to determine twenty-six electoral votes. Their electoral votes were based on the total population, black and white, but in reality only white votes counted. Illinois cast nearly twice as many votes, but had only twenty-two electoral votes. Ohio cast more than 839,000 votes for only twenty-three electors. Southern fraud and violence ensured that every white vote in the South was worth two Northern votes in presidential elections.

Seven states of the Deep South—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—sent forty-five members to the House. Averaged together, this was a representative for every 19,200 voters. California, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oregon, and Wisconsin had only thirty-three members, or an average of 47,200 voters per member.12

By turning the task of determining the popular will over to private organizations—the political parties—the United States had created both a means to integrate the politics of the nation and an open invitation for fraud and corruption. The foundational documents of the world’s leading democracy said precious little about conducting elections. The Constitution made no provision for funding elections, and states were reluctant to do so. By failing to provide a mechanism for funding and conducting the constant elections that the democracy demanded, the Constitution had created a vacuum that the parties had occupied.

the Republicans countered the Democrats’ structural advantage in the House, which came from disenfranchising black voters to create the Solid South, with their own ability to elect senators by the acre.

The federal budget surplus, which had instigated the tariff debate, presented both a problem and an opportunity. During the fiscal year ending on June 30, 1889, the tariff provided 60 percent of federal revenue. Most of the rest came from taxes on tobacco and alcohol, for total revenue of $387 million. Of this sum, $87 million was surplus, unspent by the government. The rates on many commodities under the new McKinley Tariff would be so high as to bar their entry, thus reducing revenue by an estimated $86 million.

Corporations were already moving to a new device, the holding company, to escape the restraints imposed by state laws, and the Sherman Antitrust Act accelerated that movement. That no one voted against the bill in the House, and only one opposing vote was cast in the Senate, when it passed on July 2, 1890, demonstrated how little immediate danger the act posed to corporations.

The Lodge Bill, meanwhile, remained stranded in the Senate, and Democrats in the South had already begun erecting a firewall against further federal interventions. In the Senate debate over the Lodge Bill, Republicans repeatedly cited the new constitution Mississippi had adopted in 1890 as a glaring example of Southern repression. Mississippi imposed a poll tax and a literacy test, both designed to eliminate black voters who were overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately illiterate, and consigned to a segregated school system. Since the illiteracy rate in the South was higher than anywhere in the country, the literacy test was cleverly arranged to eliminate black voters, not white. It read: “Every elector shall … be able to read any section of the constitution of this State; or he shall be able to understand the same when read to him, or give a reasonable interpretation thereof.” A registrar could thus pick and choose voters. A white voter might be illiterate, but a clerk could read him Section 8: “All persons resident in this State, citizens of the United States, are hereby declared citizens of the State of Mississippi,” and, unless a complete fool, he could vote. A black voter might be literate, but the registrar could ask him to interpret Section 111, which began “All lands comprising a single tract sold in pursuance of decree of court, or execution, shall be first offered in subdivisions not exceeding one hundred and sixty acres, or one-quarter section, and then offered ...

Would the Lodge Bill change any of this? The bill’s advocates admitted it would not. It would protect only those already registered to vote from fraud and violence in federal elections. White Southerners were institutionalizing racial inequality, making fraud and violence less necessary, and the Supreme Court would validate their efforts in Williams v. Mississippi in 1898. The Republicans had, in effect, traded the West for the South.42

The Oklahoma Land Rush stood as yet another monument to the vexing contradiction that the federal government commanded great power even as it lacked reliable administrative capacity. Stealing the land was relatively easy but distributing it was hard.

There was a method behind this madness. Miles’s experience in the Nez Perce War should have taught him some lessons about the tragedies of unnecessary Indian wars, but he had both military and presidential ambitions. He wanted to achieve the old dream of army control over Indian affairs and to stop the drawing down of troops in the West. Suppressing the most serious Indian threat in American history would further all these goals, and it would be particularly easy to do if there were no actual threat.

Carnegie aspired to be a sage and not just a plutocrat. He collected intellectuals, particularly aging British liberals such as Herbert Spencer, William Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, and the poet Edwin Arnold. Carnegie liked to pontificate, and as he grew older it became increasingly hard to shut him up; he could drive the British to distraction with his praise of the United States and its opportunities.

Carnegie steered iron purchase for the Pennsylvania’s expansion to his (and Thomson’s) Keystone Bridge Company. After the Civil War, Thomson, Carnegie, and Scott granted themselves a franchise for a new telegraph company that would have the right to string its wires along the Pennsylvania right-of-way. They paid nothing for the franchise and sold the company at a profit to another company in which they retained a minority interest. This company then hired yet another Carnegie company to construct the telegraph. It was how business was done.7

Carnegie recognized that reducing the competition that plagued the iron makers was critical to the new steel industry. For all practical purposes the market for steel initially consisted of the railroads. As late as 1882, steel rails composed 90 percent of steel production. The new steel rails lasted much longer than iron rails, and their strength allowed the railroad companies to run bigger, faster, and longer trains. Once the tariff eliminated British steel, and the steel companies’ control of patents limited new entries into the field, the major companies formed pools to allot production.

In nearly every trait but ability and ruthlessness, Henry Clay Frick, a descendant of Pennsylvania Mennonites, differed from Carnegie. Where Carnegie was congenial, Frick was dour; where Carnegie charmed, Frick glowered. Where Carnegie at least claimed beneficence, Frick threatened and carried through on his threats. His great-granddaughter described him “taciturn, brusque … and guarded.” His dominant emotion was anger; his first instinct was distrust. The deaths of two of his children hardened him even more. The day after his young son and namesake was buried, he was at work, answering mail.

Jones regarded low wages as counterproductive, believing that “low wages does not always imply cheap labor. Good wages and good workmen I know to be cheap labor.”