More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 3 - November 3, 2020
America grew continuously more urban as people moved into towns and cities. A little more than a quarter of the country’s population counted as urban in 1870; nearly 40 percent did in 1900. The West and Midwest nearly mirrored these figures. The Northeast, with two-thirds of its population in urban areas, far exceeded them. The South remained the least urban area of the country, but its people too moved into towns and cities.
Only about 55,000 of the roughly 1.5 million Germans (more than 25 percent of all migrants) entering the United States during the 1880s stayed in New York, but this, combined with earlier immigration, made it the third-largest German-speaking city in the world, after Berlin and Vienna.
California did not overtake Kansas and Minnesota in total population until the twentieth century. Between 1870 and 1900, nearly every measure of American agriculture—the number of farms, improved acreage, the production of wheat, corn, cattle, and swine—doubled or more than doubled.
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,
Subtract San Francisco’s population from the West’s total, and New York and Brooklyn alone came within a couple hundred thousand people of the population of the Rocky Mountains, Southwest, and Pacific Coast combined.
Roughly 61 percent of the foreign-born, nearly twice the percentage of native-born, lived in urban places by 1890. They were particularly noticeable in New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
In all, 9,249,547 people, or 14.8 percent of the U.S. population, had been born abroad by 1890, with roughly eight out of nine immigrants born in Europe. This has remained the peak percentage ever since.11
The growth of cities and the movement west masked declining geographical mobility among native-born Americans. Native-born whites were less likely to leave the state of their birth after 1880. Where roughly half of white males aged fifty to fifty-nine in the years between 1850 and 1880 lived outside the state of their birth, the percentage plunged after 1880 and would fall below 40 percent by the early twentieth century.
The American economy demanded labor, and it extracted people from Europe both by attracting them to the United States with higher wages and by undercutting their existing ways of life, thus setting them in motion. Inexpensive grain pouring off American farms cost Austro-Hungarian farmers their markets, deprived them of their livelihoods, and gave them reason to move to the United States
Germans formed the largest body of immigrants coming into the United States for most of the nineteenth century, but those who came after the Civil War were not from the same parts of Germany; nor were they members of the same social classes as the earlier arrivals. By the late 1870s German migrants were poorer peasants, their landless children, and farm laborers from northeastern Germany rather than the small landowners from southwest Germany who came before the war.
In a sense, immigration was contagious, affecting many in one place but few in others. Some were immune. Most of the rich had no incentive to leave, and the very poor lacked the means to do so. Those with declining opportunities and enough education to be literate were among the most likely to emigrate.
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.
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.
By 1910 only 2 percent of the Southern population had been born outside the United States, compared with 14.7 percent for the country as a whole.23
Immigrants avoided the South because of low wages, sharecropping, tenancy, and the pervasive poverty they yielded.
The South lacked the class of inventive mechanics and machinists so abundant in the North, and its refusal to invest in education put Southern workers at a disadvantage.
The iron and coal industries also relied on native labor in the South. In the 1880s Birmingham, Alabama, located in the midst of both coal and iron ore deposits, overtook Chattanooga, Tennessee, as the center of the Southern iron industry. 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. Relying on poorly paid black workers, Birmingham turned inferior coal and inferior iron ore into an inferior metal.
In the Old Confederacy, only New Orleans and the border state cities of Baltimore and Louisville ranked in the top twenty cities in the 1880s.
Their departure, however, threatened the existing order and was resisted not just by landowners and employers, but also by established black ministers and Republican leaders—the “representative colored men.” Many of them, like Frederick Douglass, lived in the North or in the smaller Southern bastions where blacks retained political influence. 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. Migration meant Reconstruction had been a failure, and escape was the only hope.
By 1880 attempts of black people to leave the South had become alarming enough for the U.S. Senate to investigate and subsequently publish “The Causes of the Removal of the Negroes from the Southern States to the Northern States.” The Democrats controlled the Senate and named three of the committee’s five members; one, Zebulon Vance, was an ex-Confederate. In questioning black witnesses, some of whom testified at the risk of their lives, the Democrats hectored, ridiculed, and condescended.
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
...more
Low Southern wages compared with those in the North and West impeded immigration, and one of the things that secured a low-wage labor regime was coerced labor. 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 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.
By the 1880s every Southern state except Virginia, where the Readjusters ended the practice, was wedded to the convict lease system. The companies that leased their labor took responsibility for the prisoners, whom they could whip or kill if they tried to escape. Those who leased the prisoners expected large numbers to die.
The death rates among convict laborers were appalling. In Mississippi the death rate between 1880 and 1885 averaged 11 percent. It was about the same in Arkansas in the mid-1880s. In Louisiana in 1881 it was 14 percent; in Mississippi in 1887, 16 percent. Of the roughly eleven hundred prisoners brought to the Slope No. 2 mine run by the Pratt Mining Company of Alabama in 1888–89, only forty had prior criminal records.
The Northern prison system, too, leased convicts to private employers, but the North differed from the South in that Northern states built penitentiaries and kept felons within them. After the Panic of 1873 northern states turned to larger employers. By 1887, forty-five thousand prisoners, 80 percent of them in the North, labored for profit-making corporations.
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. Unions ratcheted up their opposition to an arrangement that made a travesty of free labor and was used to break unions. In 1883 voters in New York, which had pioneered large-scale prison labor, voted to abolish the system by a margin of nearly two to one. It was the beginning of the end for use of prisoners for profit in the North.
An unusual amount of rainfall drenched the southern plains in the late 1870s, and this coincided with a rush of settlement. Settlers could plausibly see themselves as the agents of climate change.47
When the Mississippi overflowed in 1874, 1882, and 1884, the federal government provided aid. When grasshoppers ravaged western farmers in 1874, 1875, 1877, and 1878, the federal government provided aid. Great fires, yellow fever epidemics, tornados, and flooding all produced federal aid. When citizens suffered through no fault of their own, it became a justification for federal intervention.
a memoir, which like all memoirs, turned actual people into literary characters, whose lives the author plotted to reveal lessons that arose not from immediate experience but from the writer’s later thought and rumination.
In 1880 Rutherford Hayes again traveled west, becoming the first sitting president to visit the Far West when he took the Pacific Railway to San Francisco.
The trip’s two-month duration emphasized the vastness of the country; it also showed how easily Washington could do without the president.
To protest Garfield’s denial of his control over New York patronage, Conkling resigned his U.S. Senate seat and persuaded Sen. Thomas Platt, a New York politician open to payments from both Conkling’s friend Collis P. Huntington and Jay Gould, to resign also. Both expected to be immediately reelected by the New York legislature, demonstrating to Garfield and to Conkling’s many enemies his control over the state machinery. Platt, however, got caught in bed with another man’s wife, derailing his reelection.
Andrew Jackson had carried a bullet in his body through his two terms in the White House; if lodged in fatty tissue, as Garfield’s was, a bullet need not be fatal, but the doctors’ failure to find it made them all the more determined to locate it. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, thought he could help by employing a machine using sound waves. He tried and failed. The doctors continued to seek the elusive bullet.
Their probing took place in an unsanitary White House with instruments and hands that had not been fully sterilized. The White House was infested with rats and afflicted with a plumbing system that left the soil in the basement saturated with excrement; this, to be fair, did not make it worse than many hospitals.
But Garfield’s shooting was the crowning blow to Conkling’s ambitions and career. A shooting by an avowed Stalwart, even a crazy one, could not help his cause, and his resignation had already proved a terrible mistake and boon to his enemies. His reelection was probably doomed even before Guiteau shot Garfield. The New York Legislature had deadlocked in the same way the 1880 Republican convention had deadlocked, and Conkling finally lost his bid for reelection to the Senate in July.
It took Dr. Bliss most of the summer to kill Garfield. His incessant probing tortured and infected the president. Garfield finally insisted on being transported to the New Jersey shore in September, and a special train took him there. Dr. Bliss remained confident to the end. Garfield died on the evening of September 19, 1881. James Garfield had been a minor Civil War general, who had become a Republican politician from a major state, Ohio. He had a minor role in a major scandal, the Crédit Mobilier. He died a minor president, whose term in office was short and inconsequential but contained the
...more
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
A major consequence of industrialization was that agricultural land, though still important, formed a decreasing portion of capital, while buildings—both factories and housing in the new cities—other infrastructure, and financial instruments, particularly bonds, had become more valuable than land by roughly 1880.34
In a nation where only 360 people owned one-quarter of the land in all of England and Wales, and 350 landowners had possessed two-thirds of Scotland in 1873, George could hardly be ignored.
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;
Character existed in a network of friends who judged it and sustained it. Having character meant being someone whom J. P. Morgan could trust.
In 1884 national politics had reached low tide. The epic efforts to reconstruct the South and West according to the old free labor vision had largely ended. The economy had suffered through its second major postwar downturn. For more than a decade, recession and depression had been far more prevalent than prosperity.
Civil War veterans retained great moral authority, and they regularly wielded it against younger men untested in battle, but that moral authority did not elevate politics. Scandal and corruption had proved pervasive and nearly constant.
Both Mark Twain and Henry James were close friends with Howells, and Grant became the most unlikely member of a literary renascence sparked by writers whose best work came with middle age. Twain published Huckleberry Finn, Howells published The Rise of Silas Lapham, and Henry James published The Bostonians. All embraced a naturalism that represented bold steps away from sentimental fiction.
MacVeagh thought that voters were apathetic about the coming election because there were no great issues left in American politics, and government had little relevance to their lives. Municipal government, he proclaimed, was simply a matter of character and administration, which meant taking it away from the parties and the machines and handing it over to experts.
