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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.
Until the Pendleton Act of 1883, parties relied largely on money paid in by office holders and job seekers. The resulting system was both democratic—the United States conducted more elections and enfranchised more voters than any nation in the world—and incredibly corrupt.
Getting elected and deriving the necessary revenue for running and winning elections mattered much more to most politicians than any particular policy agenda.
unintended effect of the Pendleton Act was that the prohibition of contributions by federal workers to campaigns amplified the reliance of the parties on corporate money and larger donors.
the Republican success in the election of 1888 might not be as complete as it seemed. The Republican Party remained diverse, and tariff reform would hardly be enough either to satisfy all its members or to address a social and economic crisis that voters regarded as dire. Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress for the first time since 1874, but their narrow margins—seven in the House and two in the Senate—meant that the desertion of a few members on any vote could stalemate them.
Republicans leaders chose to treat the election as a mandate. They would revise the tariff, but upward. They would change the rules in the House of Representatives to make their narrow margin effective. They would pass new legislation to increase their numbers in Congress and the Electoral College, and they would add other reforms to keep their antimonopolist members from deserting them on key votes.
Republicans threw the political doors open to western territories that had been denied statehood in the years of divided government. Most were still vast expanses with few people, but 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. Following Harrison’s victory, Cleveland and the lame duck Democrats recognized the inevitable and agreed to admit Montana, Washington, North Dakota, and South Dakota (1889) in the hope that Montana at least would
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Republicans had courted the American public by convincing them that the Democrats would institute free trade by lowering the tariff. They then convinced themselves that their victory meant Americans wanted dramatically higher tariffs and shaped their legislative agenda around that.
What emerged from innumerable hearings, conferences, and debates in 1889 and 1890 was the McKinley Tariff, principally sponsored by William McKinley, a rising Republican congressman from Ohio. It was the most protectionist in American history, raising duties by an average of 48 percent. It protected not only infant industries but also industries not yet born.
In an important innovation, the McKinley Tariff gave Secretary of State Blaine the power to negotiate reciprocal agreements with foreign countries. Other nations would receive favored status with lower duties on their products in return for opening markets for American goods, particularly farm products.
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. The Republicans regarded this as a good thing since it partially took care of the problem of the growing Treasury surplus.
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
In 1888 Congress passed the Sioux Bill, but with a significant caveat: the government would have to obtain the consent of three-quarters of the Sioux, as required in previous treaties to the cession of roughly half their remaining lands. The government had failed to do so in the past, and it failed again in 1888 when Richard Henry Pratt headed a commission to gain a cession. In 1889 Harrison sent out a commission headed by Gen. George Crook to try once more.
Crook raised the price to be paid for the land; he gave feasts, tolerated social dances, and promised improved rations, services, and protection of remaining reservation lands. But it was ultimately coercion that won consent.
In 1890 the president declared the ceded areas of the Sioux reservation open to white settlement.54
Had the government let the dance alone, the result most likely would have been what happened at other reservations touched by the Ghost Dance: it would have turned into a new sect or merged with existing ones. Millennial religions among both Indians and non-Indians have ways of coping with the failure of the millennium to arrive. The government, however, did not leave the dance alone.
The Republicans were finding it difficult to appease reformers, both antimonopolist and evangelical, while maintaining the ethnocultural alliance that formed their base, but their main problem across the North remained the tariff. Whatever the tariff’s promised benefits, they had not yet been realized, while merchants, seeing an opportunity, raised prices on a wide range of goods alarming voters. The Democrats presented themselves as defenders of American consumers. The Republicans sloughed off large numbers of voters. Some went to the Democrats, Populists, or Independent slates; others simply
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Nationally, local tickets that grew out of the Farmers’ Alliance elected nine congressmen, all but one—Thomas Watson from Georgia—at the expense of the Republicans.
The 1890 elections brought 238 Democrats and 86 Republicans to the House of Representatives. The Republicans retained the Senate only because just a third of the seats in that body were up for election. It was the greatest midterm reversal in American history.
Nebraska had elected one Democratic congressman in its entire history before 1890, when it elected its second, William Jennings Bryan.
Watson’s victory reminded the Democrats that even as the rise of the Populists helped them in the North, it potentially threatened them in the South.
The Republicans had given a great gift to manufacturers, but those manufacturers refused to raise their employees’ wages, driving workers from the party.
The Republicans had won in 1888 by taking advantage of Democrats’ miscalculations over the tariff. The Democrats had won in 1890 by taking advantage of Republican miscalculations about the tariff.
The tariff mattered in its own right, but it mattered mostly because it had become shorthand for the benefits and inequities of an industrial economy.
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.
where Rockefeller harbored the illusion that God had given him his money, Carnegie cultivated an even greater one: he thought his success was the product of evolution. He should have known that it was the product of Tom Scott.
Thomson and Scott taught Carnegie how to make connections pay. If sleeping car companies wanted to sell sleeping cars to the Pennsylvania Railroad, Thomson and Scott got a kickback, and they made sure their protégé, the young but well-connected Carnegie, did too.
When Congress imposed a $28 per ton tariff on steel, the British lost their price advantage. Carnegie later said that it was the tariff more than anything else that brought him into the steel business.
Carnegie became acquainted with Frick after the latter gained control of the coke industry, which produced the fuel necessary for iron production. He raised the price and made it stick. Carnegie bought a half interest in Frick’s firm, and, as it turned out, a full interest in Frick. It was his greatest acquisition.
Carnegie’s mill at Homestead was initially an exception. It had originated as an attempt by rival steel makers to escape the monopoly the Bessemer patent holders had established, and to do so they created an idiosyncratic and hybrid plant whose operation depended on skilled workers familiar with its peculiarities. When in 1882 its owners tried to institute ironclad contracts under which workers promised not to unionize, the AAISW went on strike.
For management, the issue boiled down to rights of property: “It has become an issue between some workmen and ourselves as to whether we shall be allowed to run our business or whether they will run it for us.”
The strike demonstrated that Homestead’s owners could not run their business without skilled workers. Production plummeted. The mill lost customers due to inferior products, and Homestead missed contracts, opening the owners to lawsuits.
Workers dominated the community, and strikers became deputy policemen. Eventually, the owners turned to the county, but this too proved ineffective. The disorder, though real, never mounted to a level that required the militia, and thus the owners could not muster the necessary state aid to break the strike.
After nearly three months, the owners conceded. Carnegie bought the mill in 1883.
but scabs—“black sheep,” as they were called in Pennsylvania—were their Achilles heel.
They were not numerous enough to break the strike, but their presence marked future dangers, which grew even more pronounced as the relentless mechanization of steel making and divisions between puddlers and finishers weakened the AAISW.
By 1889 Homestead was the last steel union stronghold in the Pittsburgh area.
Carnegie turned to open-hearth furnaces at Homestead in 1886 and moved into structural steel and armor plate for the U.S. Navy.
By 1892 the Homestead mills employed four thousand workers. As he expanded, Carnegie demanded wage concessions by his workers, particularly a sliding scale that tied their wages to the price of steel rather than to Carnegie’s profits. To tie employee wages to a product steadily and dramatically falling in price was like tying stones to workers and pushing them overboard. Carnegie could profit despite falling prices because of reduced costs and increased output, but workers, some already working twelve-hour days seven days a week, could not realistically increase their own hours of labor.
Carnegie tried to break the union in 1889. He locked the workers out and succeeded in winning wage concessions with a sliding scale above a base wage, but both the Amalgamated and the Knights remained.
On the evening of July 6, the Pinkertons mutinied, hoisted the white flag, and surrendered. What followed was the most widely reported part of the strike. Although the workers had assured them of their safety, and received in return the sheriff’s promise that the Pinkertons would be arrested and tried, neither promise held. The Pinkertons ran a gauntlet of workers, their wives, and children, who beat the disarmed guards bloody and screamed for their deaths. None died, but only an armed guard of union men saved the lives of some of them. The press, following the tropes of the time, relished,
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On July 10, Governor Pattison ordered eighty-five hundred militia to Homestead, and they took possession of the mill on July 12. Gen. George R. Snowden, who commanded them, considered the workers communists and his task to be suppressing them and breaking the strike. Scabs began to arrive on July 13, and although union men persuaded them to leave, more—black and white—followed.
The mills resumed steel production with nonunion workers.33 The strike continued against ever-lengthening odds.
The state of Pennsylvania indicted strike leaders and some strikers for murder, riot, and conspiracy. It was an overreach; most juries would not convict, but the trials drained the union coffers and put workers on the defensive.
The anarchists, who rarely missed an opportunity to make a bad situation worse, garnered public sympathy for Frick by trying to assassinate him.
The union held out through the summer and into the fall, far longer than Frick and Carnegie expected. The two thousand new workers could not bring the mills close to full production, and Homestead hemorrhaged money.
By October the troops were gone from Homestead, but only in mid-November did the union vote to call off the strike. The men would return under company terms, which meant their unions were dead.
The death rate from accidents in Pittsburgh’s iron and steel mills nearly doubled between 1870 and 1900.
Carnegie had two tasks. First, he had to justify these fortunes as the deserved rewards of those who ranked among Spencer’s fit, and second, he had to show that they benefited society at large by providing a road to improvement and independence.
