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November 3 - November 3, 2020
Lynching and Jim Crow were, as white Southerners saw it, the centerpieces of Southern reform and race relations. In 1890 Louisiana had imposed Jim Crow with a Separate Car Act, which segregated railroad cars by race.
One of the many difficulties in defining race and imposing segregation was that racial origins were not always apparent, and this was particularly the case as much of the South moved toward the one-drop rule: any African ancestry defined a person as black. Homer Plessy was one-eighth Afro-American, as prosperous blacks were coming to call themselves, and he agreed to serve as the litigant challenging the Separate Car Act as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Tourgée’s argument revealed the turn that the Fourteenth Amendment had taken. An amendment aimed at securing racial equality had become instead armor for property and freedom of contract. This led a black man who could pass as white to claim a property in whiteness in order to gain the protection from racial discrimination the amendment had originally been intended to prevent.
In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court upheld the distinction between legal equality and social equality. The judges appealed to a set of precedents used to justify the separation of blacks and whites in schools.
Lynching—the execution of accused criminals by mobs or posses without official legal sanction—was an old American practice, but only in the 1880s and 1890s did it become almost exclusively associated with the South. Before the 1880s lynching was most common in the West.
Most such claims were false. Western vigilantes killed men already convicted of crimes to save the cost of imprisonment or execution, and they exiled and sometimes executed political rivals and members of threatening social groups. A narrative of lynching as a heroic response to intolerable disorder was far stronger than the facts that sustained it. Lynching’s justification remained intact even as the victims became overwhelmingly black and the practice became concentrated in the South.
Wells showed that in some cases the rape accusations disguised consensual sex, and in most other cases the original reasons for the lynchings had nothing to do with rape at all. Accusations of rape were, she wrote, “an old racket.” Her attacks struck at the core of the mythic South: the purity of Southern womanhood and homes threatened by black men. Memphis papers attacked her “obscene intimations,” and a mob destroyed her press and threatened to kill anyone who tried to resume publishing. Wells fled to New York,
The number of Southern lynchings had first mounted in the early 1880s, but in these years more whites than blacks were still lynched nationally. When the number of Southern victims peaked again in the early 1890s, blacks accounted for the overwhelming number of victims.
Lynchings were more than executions; they were public spectacles, even entertainments, that often took place before large crowds. White men tortured black men, dismembering, castrating, and burning them. Photographers memorialized the murders. The photographs, turned into postcards, sold widely. As Wells asserted, rape had become a racial weapon; the mere accusation against a black man amounted to a death sentence.
When Ida Wells attended the WCTU convention in 1894, Willard attacked her for slandering Southern white women by saying that not all accusations of rape were true.
The Republicans had been badly burned by intervening in social issues in the Midwest; they had scant desire to try again as the 1892 election cycle approached. The Democrats, knowing the election was theirs to lose, were cautious. They recognized that the tariff remained an albatross around the Republican Party’s neck. Far from being a problem for the Democrats, lynching carried little political cost with their Southern base. It reinforced their standing as a white man’s party and defender of Southern home and womanhood.
the Populists were willing to embrace a wide package of reform, but Southern racism posed grave problems for them. When in 1891 the Colored Alliance sponsored a cotton pickers’ strike, the white Farmers’ Alliance suppressed it with as much zeal as more conservative farmers. The strike ended with the lynching of its organizers and largely finished the Colored Alliance.
Nationalizing railroads had widespread support and essentially prefigured the modern highway system.
Everywhere the Republicans looked in 1892, they saw liabilities. Andrew Carnegie became a particular problem. He was a leading Republican donor, a friend of James G. Blaine, an enthusiastic backer of the McKinley Tariff, and an ardent supporter of the gold standard.
Carnegie had, however, horrified too many Republican voters with his actions at Homestead to be an asset. Rutherford B. Hayes attributed Republican weakness to the defection of laborers, who “saw the capitalists going to Europe to spend the fortunes acquired in America.”
The Republicans renominated Benjamin Harrison, in part because their only alternative was Blaine, whose late and quixotic attempt at the nomination went nowhere. Harrison and Cleveland faced off in a rematch of the 1888 election.
“eminent men” did not rise in American politics, both because the ablest men were not attracted to public life and because congressional politics gave little chance for distinction. The most famous congressmen, men such as Blaine and Roscoe Conkling, made too many enemies to be viable candidates for the presidency.
To the parties, a candidate who would be a bad president was preferable to someone who would be a good president but a bad candidate.
Cleveland’s 1887 opposition to the tariff reaped him large if belated rewards in 1892. He learned to be a new kind of candidate, one who posed as the national voice of the people and not as the representative of regional bosses and machines.
Those who funded them rose in influence. Presidential campaign expenses that totaled $300,000 in 1872 rose to just over $4 million in 1892.55 Henry Adams noticed the growing importance of money and thought it gave the Republicans the advantage; he underestimated the ability of the Democrats to learn and compete. Cleveland apparently raised more money than Harrison in 1892.
Francis Bellamy, a minister, Christian socialist, cousin of Edward Bellamy, and the editor of Youth’s Companion, suggested setting aside Columbus Day as a national holiday (which would not happen until the 1930s). He composed the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States and “the Republic for which it stands” to commemorate the holiday and the fair. His original version did not contain the phrase “under God,” which was added in the 1950s.
Mandates had a way of souring quickly in the Gilded Age. Grover Cleveland began his second term with the kind of single-party dominance not seen since the Grant Administration. The Republicans hated him: “that fat and fatuous freak,” John Hay called him.
The fundamental problem remained: since the money supply depended on the gold supply, the gold standard provided insufficient currency and thus contributed to deflation.
In 1892–93 the combination of Europeans liquidating investments and a poor cotton harvest caused gold reserves to fall dramatically, credit to become more expensive, and investment to decline. Immense pressure came to bear on the overbuilt railroad system.
Cleveland brought patronage and party discipline to bear on the Democrats, but he never broke resistance to repeal in his own party. Republican senators provided the margin of victory. More Democrats voted for free silver than for repeal, but the real division was regional rather than partisan. The West and the South were for silver.
Repeal was supposed to restore confidence and, with it, the economy; instead, more failures followed. In 1893 alone 360 national and state banks—343 in the Midwest, South, and West—shut their doors, with an eventual loss of roughly $42 million. The iron industry suffered the worst year in its history; textile mills closed, and railroads steamed into the abyss, unable to meet their interest payments or repay their loans. In all, 119 railroads went into receivership in 1893,
Gold continued to drain from the country. This depression—which until the 1930s would be known as the Great Depression—meant that tax revenue, particularly from the tariff, declined. With little new gold flowing into the Treasury, the government tried to prevent the collapse of the gold standard by issuing bonds, which purchasers paid for in gold.
This proved to be only a temporary stopgap, and reserves fell to $52.19 million in August, necessitating further bond sales. Cleveland’s monomaniacal focus on gold had made silver a potent symbolic issue.19
When the London Board of Guardians announced a program to speed the movement of Russian-Jewish immigrants to the United States, Debs denounced the immigrants as “criminals and paupers.” Nor did he criticize the emergence of Jim Crow or try to break the racist culture of the railroad brotherhoods that he led.
There had been little violence before Cleveland intervened, but the president’s orders and the arrival of federal deputy marshals and troops precipitated the violence they were supposed to prevent. The U.S. marshal in Chicago reported that police and the five thousand deputy marshals deployed in Chicago were insufficient. On July 4, federal troops arrived.
The arrival of federal troops further fueled the conflict. On July 5 mobs—containing few strikers—destroyed railroad property in the Union Stockyards and forced police and soldiers to retreat.
Until the 1890s corporations, which became virtually synonymous with monopoly, dominated only the railroads and the oil refining industry. There were large firms in other industries, but they tended to be partnerships of one kind or another, or other forms of privately held companies. In the 1890s, following the onset of the depression, American business began a great merger movement, creating the large corporations that would dominate the economy thereafter. It was the result of business weakness as much as strength; it indicated the growing potency of reform, not its feebleness.
Mergers resulted from attempts to eliminate competition. To maintain the advantages mergers created, these firms had to create and maintain high barriers to entry for new competitors.
Congress could have solved the legal issues and established a clear basis for regulation with a federal incorporation law, which would have limited what corporations could do. Instead, by leaving incorporation to the states and attempting to regulate competition between firms, it left open a giant loophole in antitrust legislation. Corporations could not cooperate in restraint of trade, but they could find ways to merge and grow larger and larger.
Internal development of a limited partnership firm like Carnegie Steel, which ruthlessly drove down costs and seized on new technologies, gave way to U.S. Steel, which expanded horizontally, growing by acquisitions rather than through technological innovation. Morgan did not just help to assemble the capital necessary to bring them about; he also took a direct role in the governance of the new corporations and holding companies, seeking to ensure competent management and to forestall the ruthless competition of the 1890s, which Morgan had always thought wasteful and inefficient.
The move toward centralization and consolidation was not an inevitable development, part of the natural order of things; it was historical, the result of accumulating human actions, networks, laws, and institutions. It was the work of the courts, the work of markets shaped by human hands, the work of corporations, the work of government, and the work of the networks that tied them all together.
Neither group had imagined the results of their combined success. On the one hand, they had created an economy of undeniable productivity and an industrial infrastructure continental in scale, but this economy had not produced the republican society they desired. Contract freedom had yielded a world of dependence and wage labor rather than independence. Competition had yielded a chaotic economy of boom and bust and surplus production that markets could not absorb. Businessmen sought to escape competition, and failing that, to control costs. This created a relentless downward pressure on wages,
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Although Democratic cartoonists, particularly those working for William Randolph Hearst, parodied him as Dollar Mark, he was a relatively moderate Republican. He had no desire to emulate Pullman, or for that matter Carnegie, both of whom professed sympathy for workers while crushing them. Hanna imagined a harmony between business interests and the public interest, but he was not a reformer. He thought traditional Republican policies of the tariff and hard money would yield general prosperity.
Hanna gained a reputation as a puppet master, the man who controlled McKinley and the Republicans, but he admired, almost adored, McKinley, along with other men he had supported earlier. He eagerly enlisted in John Sherman’s doomed presidential ambitions before he became enamored with McKinley. McKinley’s tariff had certainly helped Hanna’s interests, but there was more than financial benefit involved in their relationship.
Although no one thought McKinley deep, well read, or well informed (outside of Republican politics), he was intellectually open and willing to work with men who disagreed with him.
McKinley had rebounded quickly from his 1890 defeat. He won election as governor of Ohio in 1891, but the combination of the Panic of 1893 and his own carelessness, misjudgment, and devotion to friends nearly undid him.
McKinley’s debt cast yet another light on the friendship that greased the wheels of both American politics and business. That the governor of Ohio cosigned for loans to a businessman whose business depended on the tariff that the governor had helped enact when in Congress was how political friendship worked in the United States.
But a $100,000 debt (a very sizable sum in 1893), which was beyond McKinley’s means to repay, actually convinced many voters of his honesty. They expected politicians to have enriched themselves, and McKinley had not. He initially refused to accept help, but reconsidered as gifts poured in.
As governor in the midst of the strikes that wracked the country in 1893 and 1894, McKinley managed to maintain significant labor support even as he dispatched the National Guard. He walked a fine line, claiming that he used the Guard to suppress violence rather than to break strikes. Unlike Cleveland at Pullman, he did not dispatch troops until requested by local authorities whose resources were exhausted.
During his second term, Grover Cleveland fashioned himself into the Andrew Johnson of the 1890s: a man spectacularly unsuited by temperament and belief for his time and his place. In his first term, Cleveland had established himself as a politician happiest when saying no. He vetoed more bills, most of them pension bills, than any president before him. During his second term, while presiding over the most severe economic downturn of the nineteenth century, he worried mainly about the danger of government paternalism, walking backward into the future undoing what the Republicans had done. He
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The only thing softening the blow was that the economy had already conditioned workers to endure a quota of misery. The general insecurity of wage work and its rising incidence in American society made the depression only a more intense version of what many workers already knew. In the generally prosperous years of 1890 and 1900, when the federal census measured unemployment, 15–20 percent of workers in industrial states lacked work at some time during the year.
The impact of joblessness varied. A skilled worker with a previously steady job history and employed daughters or sons had resources to fall back on, but a younger worker with small children and scant savings had little or nothing.
In 1894 the electoral pendulum made yet another of the era’s characteristically dramatic swings. The Democrats lost 125 seats; the Republicans gained 130.
Labor reformers and antimonopolists achieved considerable success in legislatures and Congress. They passed regulatory legislation that curtailed sweatshops and banned manufacturing in tenements. They passed laws that required payment to workers in cash rather than scrip, banned contract labor, mandated shorter workdays, outlawed the contracting of prison labor to private employers, created an array of health and safety requirements, and regulated railroads.
Turning people into commodities was impermissible, but turning people’s labor into a commodity—a piece of property to be bought and sold—was the source of progress. Freedom became the protection of property. Rarely has a minority opinion been so influential.50
