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

To attack the present conditions of things, as socialists and anarchists did, was to attack “the foundation upon which civilization itself rests,” which was the “sacredness of property.”

Carnegie thought, it was impossible to change human nature. “Individualism, Private Property, the Law of Accumulation of Wealth, and the Law of Competition” were “the highest results of human experience, the soil in which society has produced the best fruit.”

What was most interesting in this was less Carnegie’s attempt to make Christ an acolyte of Herbert Spencer and to make Christianity a version of an already antique liberalism, but rather his reticence, compared with men like Rockefeller and Charles Francis Adams, to acknowledge publicly how fortunes were acquired. Carnegie knew his own fortune owed much to the tariff, which he assiduously labored to keep high; but he wrote as if tariffs, subsidies, and insider dealing were the fruits of evolution.

Carnegie imposed work rules that deprived his employees of virtually all their leisure; then he built a library and lectured them on how to spend

The Knights had failed to solve the conundrum that the old reformer Lyman Abbott had outlined in 1879: “politically America is a democracy; industrially America is an aristocracy.” The worker might make political laws, but “he is under industrial laws. At the ballot box he is a king; in the factory he is a servant, sometimes a slave.”

In the eyes of both the evangelical middle class and Protestant nativists, the saloon and all its vices were the domain of the immigrant working classes, at once signs and causes of their inferiority.

In the 1890s the temperance movement fell into disarray, weakened by the failure of prohibition in Iowa. It gained a new focus with the rise of the Anti-Saloon League, first in Ohio in 1893 and then nationally in 1895. It concentrated its attack on the saloon, but its goal was national prohibition.

Consumer goods that would shape the twentieth century became available in the nineteenth, but they did not reach mass markets.

The problem wasn’t cocaine, but alcohol. Atlanta banned alcohol sales in saloons in 1885, and Pemberton saw the writing on the wall. He changed his formula.76 The new formula emphasized sugar (a lot of sugar), caffeine (a lot of caffeine), and only small amounts of cocaine,

Pemberton marketed Coca-Cola as a temperance drink. Making a virtue of necessity since he did not have the wagons, horses, employees, or money to ship the finished product, he condensed it into a syrup; soda fountain operators had only to add carbonated water.

By 1890 Coca-Cola was available across the South; by 1895 it had spread across the nation.

Gompers embraced the living wage as a source of uplift as well as prosperity. Higher wages would increase consumption, and that would stimulate the economy. He fought back against those who condemned workers’ consumption as the growth of the immoral, the enervating, and the tawdry. Gompers insisted that by creating new wants and demands, higher pay and shorter hours would make workingmen better, not worse.

This became the AFL’s controversial doctrine of “more.” More expanded for Gompers so that by the end of the 1890s it meant “better homes, better surroundings, higher education, higher aspirations, nobler thoughts, more human feelings, all the human instincts that go to make up a manhood that shall be free and independent and loving and noble and true and sympathetic. We want more.”

Refocusing American unionism on wages and consumption rather than on control over work represented a philosophical shift as well as a tactical one. For different reasons but in a parallel way to academic economists, Gompers was rejecting central premises of classical laissez-faire economics.

Gompers suspected that the popularity of such views arose more from employers’ self-interest than natural laws,

In New York the other half were immigrants, largely Catholics and Jews from Eastern and Southern Europe; Riis targeted a Protestant and native-born audience. He desired reforms that would protect and expand the home, which remained by nearly universal consensus the core institution of American society. In revealing how immigration was changing New York, he sought to show Americans how they should deal with social problems.

Riis treated social problems as an amalgam of nature and nurture, or, in nineteenth-century terms, “race” and “surroundings.” He wrote that it was “the surroundings that make the difference.” Housing, sanitation, dress, and food, as well as education and child rearing—the elements of the larger environmental crisis, which he detailed without recognizing—all counted as surroundings.

Yet nature—not the germs that killed, the water that carried them, or the contaminated food, but rather nature as race—often overwhelmed nurture in Riis.

Race was a flexible category—sometimes determined by skin color, sometimes phenotype, sometimes ancestry, and even religion—but once people fell into a racial category, it described the “normal” range of their emotions, intelligence, thriftiness, cleanliness, sexual behaviors, and more.

Among immigrants, the highest-ranking race was the Germans, but all this meant was that they were the least deficient since immigrants were the sum of their deficiencies.

At the bottom, predictably, were the Chinese and the Irish, who for Riis embodied all the social evils of New York: drink, violence, pauperism, begging, corruption, and crime.

Ross agreed with Walker, and for that matter Theodore Roosevelt and Frances Willard, that white Americans of Anglo-Saxon stock had emerged as the world’s superior race, and he thought they were in danger of committing “race suicide” as the “inferior” races outbred them. This would become a common view among later Progressives.

the ease of access that Walker cited as a cause for the growth in immigration also made return to homelands easier. Millions would settle and raise families in the United States, but millions more were “sojourners,” single male laborers who came intending to earn money to establish themselves and their families in the home country and then return. Reliable statistics are sketchy, but roughly one in every three immigrants would go back home after 1890.30

Chief among the inspection stations was Ellis Island, which opened in New York in 1892. It became the port of entry for about 80 percent of the immigrants coming to the United States thereafter and was designed to sift the wheat from the chaff, separating out and deporting those immigrants who fell into the undesirable categories.

American impediments to immigration remained mild compared with those enacted in Europe. Even the most basic measures restrictionists introduced to Congress—a literacy law proposed in 1888 and endorsed by Rep. Henry Cabot Lodge in 1891, went nowhere.

Industrialists, largely Republican, needed the unskilled labor of immigrants. But unions also split, with Powderly and the Knights favoring restriction and much of the AFL (but not Samuel Gompers) opposing it.

With elements in both political parties hostile to immigration, with liberal intellectuals and social scientists condemning it in the press, and with labor equivocal, immigrants needed friends. They found them among urban Democratic politicians, coreligionists, and those Americans whose families had come earlier

the immigrants themselves turned self-help organizations into political organizations to protect their interests. By the end of the decade, Italian, Irish, German, and Jewish groups had created the Immigration Protective League.

roughly two hundred thousand Eastern European Jews arrived in the United States during the 1880s.

There are differing accounts of the derivation of the slur, but German Jews dismissed the Eastern Europeans as “kikes.”

The Catholic Church as a church of immigrants was also a working-class church, and in the late 1880s and early 1890s the Church turned to the “social question.” In 1891 Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum, denouncing the “misery and wretchedness” affecting the working classes and permitting both unions and government intervention on behalf of the poor and working classes. Closer to the ground, whether in orphanages and hospitals staffed by nuns or in parish pulpits, Catholic clergy proved sympathetic to the living wage and skeptical of laissez-faire.

The pope and conservative bishops attacked individualism, emphasized the reciprocal duties between hierarchical social classes, and identified the family, not the individual, as the core unit of society. Rerum Novarum said nothing about political liberty or democracy. The other shoe dropped in 1897, when Leo XIII issued Testem benevolentiae, which declared heretical many of the ideas associated with Catholic “Americanism” with its embrace of democracy, progress, individualism, and liberalism.

Parkhurst’s exploration of vice led to a state investigation and the defeat of Tammany in the 1894 election by a nonpartisan ticket.

One result of the election was that Theodore Roosevelt became president of the four-member police commission of New York City, and Jacob Riis became his unofficial guide.

Roosevelt also learned that the moral reform that motivated evangelical reformers like Parkhurst, Willard, and Comstock came at a political and social price. Roosevelt pushed Sunday closure of saloons both as a political tactic to hurt Tammany and as a way to break police corruption.

But Sunday closure deeply angered a working-class male constituency, especially German Americans, for whom a Sunday in a saloon or family beer garden was one of their few pleasures, and they would help return Tammany to office in 1897.

but immigrant voters did not judge bosses so harshly. When reformers succeeded, if only briefly, in ousting the boss, they found their constituents expected them to act like the boss.

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.

In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court upheld the distinction between legal equality and social equality.

Blacks and whites, the court argued, were biologically different, with the skin colors designating dissimilar temperaments.

The state could not force white people to associate with black people, but it could and must ensure that the facilities offered to both races were equal. It thus established the separate-but-equal doctrine, enshrining Jim Crow for generations to come.

Wells became the nation’s chief cataloguer of lynchings, but more than that she filled in the empty spaces of Josiah Strong’s account of Anglo-Saxon domination and demonstrated how white Americans established that domination and repulsed what they regarded as threats to it. She discovered that no matter what the original reasons for the mob violence, newspapers turned them into stories of the rape of a white woman by a black man. 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.

Her attacks struck at the core of the mythic South: the purity of Southern womanhood and homes threatened by black men.

she published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases in 1892. She recognized that whereas lynching revolved around real events and claimed real victims, those events took shape and people died as part of a narrative of regional stories. Over the course of her life, she framed a counternarrative of lynching as a criminal and shameful act that would help undo it.

The preamble of the Populist platform reflected the Populists’ anger, but the planks captured their essential moderation. They identified the country’s problems as deflation, monopoly, the misdistribution of wealth, and corruption. All sapped the nation’s vigor, but all could be reformed and the country restored. The Populists were not revolutionaries, and many policies they recommended would become staples of American political practice.

The Populists were conflicted in their simultaneous distrust of government and their granting the federal government new powers and obligations.

Once the Democrats secured the allegiance of the Southern Farmers’ Alliance, the 1892 national election was over. The Democrats had merely to hold some of their previous gains in the Midwest, hope the Populists weakened the Republicans in the West, and await the results. By and large, this is what happened.

Everything the Democrats had claimed about the tariff seemed luridly and spectacularly true: large companies had their markets protected while they cut workers’ wages, working people paid more for necessities from thinner paychecks.

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.

Presidential campaign expenses that totaled $300,000 in 1872 rose to just over $4 million in 1892.