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In the aftermath of the Great Upheaval, workers turned toward politics.
They did not intend to substitute politics for union activity. Indeed, without strong unions to mobilize workers as voters, political action usually failed.
Workers’ parties, however, proved hard to sustain, although several, particularly in the West, endured over a number of election cycles. Even when successful, they dominated only local elections;
By 1886 American and European observers wrote of plutocracy and an “aristocracy of wealth.” The very wealthy were among the men of property—a much larger group who formed a bourgeoisie in the European sense—who feared George and mobilized against him. They had emerged and consolidated in New York in reaction to that city’s assertive working class. This bourgeoisie—merchants, manufacturers, builders, investors, and the professionals who served them—self-consciously conceived of themselves as men of property, recognizing, like George and his adherents, that property in New York had become
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The candidate the New York elite abandoned was Theodore Roosevelt. He was one of them, but he was also the antithesis of this idle rich,
In abandoning Roosevelt, New York’s Republican elite made him a footnote to the campaign. They joined both Tammany and the Democratic Swallowtails—the prosperous and largely Protestant opposition to Tammany within the Democratic Party whose derisive nickname came from the tails of their formal dress coats—to defeat George. They backed Democrat Abram Hewitt, the son-in-law of Peter Cooper—a rich antislavery industrialist and reformer who had run as the Greenback candidate for president in 1876.
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.
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.
America had to become “God’s right arm in his battle with the world’s ignorance and oppression and sin.” The United States was the “elect nation … the chosen people” destined to lead “in the final conflicts of Christianity for the possession of the world.”
The elect did not include all Americans. Strong regarded most urban workers—immigrant, Catholic, potentially socialist—not as allies but as obstacles in the fight for reform, which Christian reformers already imagined as a worldwide battle. Willard and the WCTU had spread the temperance crusade abroad, where it merged with Protestant missionary efforts. Suffragists learned to frame the claim for women’s suffrage as springing not from citizenship but from whiteness and civilization. Like Willard, they often questioned the wisdom of having given the vote to black men and Catholic immigrants.
The Great Upheaval had badly weakened the Knights, and their attempt to organize in the South inflicted additional wounds. Amidst the fallout from Haymarket, the Knights turned to the South, where they tackled the divisions between white and black workers and launched a major organizational campaign.
Angry whites in the South knew that social equality—equal access to schools, businesses, and transportation—was a corollary of political equality, and they were not about to accept it. The Southern press attacked the Knights for breaking down necessary barriers between the races.
In 1886 white textile workers in Augusta, Georgia, struck, and employers responded with a lockout and evictions from company housing. The Knights provided little aid, and what came was too late. The manufacturers took no chances. They used race baiting, accusing the Knights of favoring social equality and claiming they would promote the replacement of white workers with black. By November the strike was defeated, and the Knights were no longer a threat in the Southern textile industry.
That same fall attempts to organize largely black sugarcane workers in Louisiana fell short,
Employers prevailed on the governor to mobilize the militia, which evicted strikers and installed strikebreakers on the plantations. When the militia withdrew, a white vigilante force took over, and a shooting triggered an assault on strikers in the town of Thibodaux. The vigilantes moved systematically through the town, hunting down and executing strike leaders and strikers.
The vigilantes killed dozens and injured a hundred or more. It was the end of the Knights in the sugar country. No one was prosecuted, let alone convicted.
Despite the barriers race, religion, and ethnicity presented to interregional reform alliances, a powerful antimonopoly movement formed nonetheless.
During the 1880s an antimonopoly majority—a combination of Democrats and Republicans—customarily ruled the House, and Reagan took himself and his cause to the Senate, which had consistently rejected regulation.
When in October the Supreme Court in Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Ry. Co. v. Illinois ruled that state regulation of interstate commerce was unconstitutional, it was clear that Congress would pass a bill of some kind.
Organized capital, the world with investment bankers and corporate leaders at the top, paid little attention to homilies about competition, individualism, laissez-faire, and the invisible hand.
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.
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.
For Cody as much as King, the West was about homemaking.
To be sure, resources in larger amounts also moved to corporations, particularly railroads, but the rationale was to provide the infrastructure necessary for free labor and contract freedom to thrive.
Instead of a pastoral paradise of small producers, the West became a region of bankrupt railroads, wasted capital, and angry workers and farmers.
The federal government could push reform in the West more directly than elsewhere in the country because it had greater authority in the territories than in the states. It owned the public lands, and could also act with an impunity on Indian reservations that it could not employ elsewhere.
Mythologized as the heartland of individualism, the West became the kindergarten of the modern American state.
There is probably no greater irony than the emergence of the cowboy as the epitome of American individualism, because cattle raising quickly became corporate.
Ticks and Texas fever kept the longhorns from market. Two species of the protozoan Babesia caused splenetic or Texas fever, and Texas longhorns carried both of them. Having evolved to live with Texas fever, longhorns had a mild case when young and were thereafter resistant. When longhorns moved, the disease went with them.
If other cattle passed along the same trail as the longhorns or shared a pasture, stockyard, or railroad car with them, they were likely to pick up the ticks and get infected. Unlike the longhorns, local stock died.
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. Beginning in 1867, cattle towns—Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell—grew up alongside the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, the Kansas Pacific, and connecting lines. Although each in turn yielded to a rival farther west when farmers arrived, their initial lifeblood was cattle.
The long drive survived better railroad connections to Texas because going north turned out to have unanticipated advantages for cattle and cattlemen. When dealers held the longhorns until after the first hard freeze or overwintered them in Kansas, the cold killed the ticks, making the Texas cattle far less likely to infect domestic stock. Holding cattle on the central and northern Great Plains had a second, unplanned, advantage: they put on weight more quickly than they did in Texas. The industry became specialized, with Texas becoming a bovine nursery and the grasslands to the North a place
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By the end of the 1880s the cattle companies were reeling, the victims, as John Clay put it, of “three great streams of ill luck, mismanagement, [and] greed,” which merged to produce catastrophe. It was only a matter of time before drought, part of longstanding climatic patterns on the grasslands, cut down forage available to the excessive number of cattle dumped on the plains. The particularly harsh winter of 1886–87 on the northern plains had cut down the stressed and weakened herds like the grim reaper. The blizzards came so fast and so hard that it seemed like a two-month storm.
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In 1887 the Supreme Court confirmed the company’s right to its land in Colorado and New Mexico. Internally contradictory, legally incoherent, and historically inaccurate, the decision in U.S. v. Maxwell Land Grant condoned a corporate land grab of stunning proportions.
Even after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, Indians retained their anomalous position under American law. They lived as semi-sovereign wards of the government with separate treaty rights in territory claimed by the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment did not make them citizens or initially grant them common Constitutional protections.
Congress passed the Major Crimes Act, giving the United States jurisdiction over seven major crimes in Indian Country. Opponents challenged its constitutionality, but the Supreme Court upheld it in U.S. v. Kagama (1886). The court cited the plenary power of Congress since the tribes were wards of the nation and dependent on the United States. Wardship trumped sovereignty.
Eventually, in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903) the Supreme Court went further, ruling that treaties could not stop Congress from exercising its plenary powers. It could unilaterally void explicit treaty promises.
“Friends of the Indian” did not admire Indians. They were not technically racist, since they considered Indians the potential equal of whites, but they considered most actual Indians to be woefully deficient.
For what they considered the Indians’ own good, reformers planned to toss them into a political cauldron to be recast as autonomous individuals who enjoyed contract freedom and created homes based on monogamous marriage.
Allotment had been tried well before 1887, and, as Bland pointed out, it had proven to be a disaster. In Michigan the allotment of Odawa and Chippewa reservations had led to merciless and remorseless fraud, aided and abetted by government officials, both elected and appointed. The impoverishment of Indians had been nearly complete.
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.
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.
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.
American copper production increased fivefold from 378 million pounds in 1868 to 1.9 billion pounds in 1910.
Conservation, like the industrial world that inspired it, could look like class war.
In 1888 the political system tipped, lost its balance, and would not right itself for nearly a decade. When it did recover, it would be different: less democratic, more centralized, and more dependent on corporate funding.
Given the suppression of the Republican black vote in the South, it was hard to argue that Harrison was truly a minority president.
Radical Republicans had designed the Fourteenth Amendment to punish any state that denied the vote to male citizens not involved in rebellion against the country by reducing its representation, but Congress never imposed the penalties. As a result, by 1888 Southern white voters had a disproportionate representation not only in the Electoral College but also in the House of Representatives.
Racial discrimination, and the exclusion of women from the vote, formed the greatest stains on democracy, but they were not the only ones. Gerrymandering remained ubiquitous, and it undercut equal representation.
Democrats were everywhere undemocratic. The goal in neither Kansas nor Indiana was to protect incumbents; most legislators rotated in office serving only a term or two, and it was to protect parties, which were the beating heart of the American political system.
