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President Hayes, having refused to deploy troops in the South, was hardly eager to use them to settle civil disputes in the North, but as would be his pattern during the first part of his presidency, he objected in principle only to yield in practice.
Hayes accepted the mere possibility, and not the actuality, of violence as sufficient, proclaimed the strike “unlawful and insurrectionary proceedings,” and dispatched troops, despite the lack of violence or property destruction since the initial shooting.
Hayes initially confined the use of federal troops to protecting government property and keeping the peace, but Scott wanted the soldiers to suppress the strike and, if necessary, operate the trains.
When three federal judges ruled that workers striking against bankrupt railroads in the hands of federal receivers were in contempt of court, they opened a huge loophole for federal intervention. Bankruptcy proceedings became a tool to acquire the federal aid needed to crush strikes.
In Baltimore and Pittsburgh the violence unleashed by the strike brought the by-now standard comparison from frightened liberals and employers: the Paris Commune of 1871. They imagined communist revolutionaries in league with workers and the dangerous classes in an assault on free labor and property. The strikers, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote, refused “to recognize the right of every American to control his own labor and his own property.” Henry Ward Beecher condemned strikers for “tyrannical opposition to all law and order.” He insisted that a man with a family of five children needed no
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Chicago the attempt at a general strike had deteriorated into violence; in San Francisco, it had turned into anti-Chinese rioting;
The railroad strike, having taken so many local forms, petered out at the end of July. Neither largely peaceful general strikes nor furious mobs had been able to counter the organized violence that the local, state, and federal governments brought against them.
The lesson that President Robert Harris of the Burlington took from the strike was that “a reduction of pay to employes [sic] may be as expensive to the Co. as an increase of pay.” Over the next several years many of the railroads restored all or part of the pay cuts. They were, however, unwilling to concede control over work.
The failure of Congress to pass appropriations for the army forced Hayes to call a special session in the fall of 1877. He not only did not get the appropriations—the Democrats would fund neither the army nor the civil service without riders repealing the civil rights laws—but also got much that he did not desire. Congress checked the federal power he had deployed to help the railroads. In 1877 the Democrats proposed a bill to prevent the use of federal troops as a posse comitatus, a civil force. They aimed to cripple civil rights enforcement. The bill failed, but antimonopolist Republicans
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Even before 1876, new Democratic governments had begun to call constitutional conventions. The conventions did not focus on officially eliminating the black civil rights Southerners had promised Hayes they would protect. In principle the conventions left civil rights untouched, even as state governments constricted them in practice. Instead, the conventions concentrated on the Republican programs of internal improvements, education, and active government. Democrats struck particularly at debt and taxation and curtailed government powers. On this the agrarian and Bourbon wings of the Democratic
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By 1890 the Southern states had repudiated $116 million in debt and avoided paying another $150 million in interest payments.
In March 1880 in Ex parte Siebold, the Supreme Court incensed Democrats by ruling that “if Congress has the power to make regulations it must have the power to enforce them.”
The laws passed in the Upper Midwest to regulate railroads and middlemen yielded the so-called Granger Cases, covering state regulatory powers over railroads and middlemen, which came to the Supreme Court in 1877. The Court validated the well-established police power of local and state governments and their right to restrain corporations and other businesses in pursuit of the ideal of a well-regulated society.
in Munn v. Illinois (1877), the Supreme Court went beyond arguments resting on public safety. It qualified the due process clause regarding property in the Fourteenth Amendment by marking the railroads as a specific class of property “clothed with a public interest” and holding monopoly power, in the sense that the public had no realistic choice but to make use of the services railroads provided. The court countenanced state regulation of railroad rates and grain warehouse rates in the public interest.
Federal courts increasingly intervened to strike down state regulations that affected interstate commerce. The courts created what amounted to a de facto, largely unregulated, national market.
With the party’s Southern voting base diminished or demolished, Republicans had little chance to carry elections over much of the South and so nothing to lose from imposing policies that benefited the North at the expense of the South.
What complicated matters was that the tariff and the gold standard also hurt the agricultural Midwest and the West, areas the Republicans would have to carry to control the federal government.
In the House, antimonopolists, who preferred greenbacks, allied with less radical soft-money representatives to pass the Bland Bill, which required unlimited coinage of silver at a ratio of 16:1 with gold. This was inflationary since the market price of silver was less than the price the Treasury would offer, ensuring that silver would flow into the Treasury and increase the money supply.
During the next regular session of Congress, the Senate amended the Bland Bill to give the president discretion over how much silver would be coined. Hayes vetoed this bill—the Bland-Allison Act—but Congress passed it over his veto.
Hayes minted only the minimum amount of silver dollars
Hayes credited the serendipitous return of prosperity in 1879 to the gold standard. But if gold was the cure, why had Great Britain, which had adopted the gold standard long before the United States, endured the same economic downturn?
The government purchase of silver worked largely to subsidize western mines.
By limiting the money supply in a growing economy, the gold standard led to deflation, which transferred wealth from debtors to creditors and hurt producers, particularly in the South and West. Between 1865 and 1897 prices fell at about 1 percent a year, and the consumer price index declined from 196 to 100, according to retrospective calculations (1860 = 100). Wealthy creditors gained premiums beyond interest payments since deflation meant that the dollars paid to them in interest, and ultimately in the repayment of principal, were always more valuable than the earlier dollars they had lent.
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So long as a gold standard Republican or Democrat occupied the presidency, the policy could not be overthrown without the two-thirds majority necessary to override a presidential veto. Winning the presidency, not controlling Congress, became the key to monetary politics.
Except for taxes on tobacco and alcohol, which continued to produce about a third of all federal revenue, the tariff had replaced excise taxes, which were a direct tax on consumption and extremely unpopular, as the major source of federal revenue.
Not only liberal free traders but also Southern, Western, and Midwestern farmers disliked the tariff, which taxed them to subsidize Eastern industrialists.
the tariff would have probably been an untenable political liability for the Republicans. It not only raised consumer prices, it generated a surplus that gathered in the treasury, exacerbating the inadequate money supply. Henry Blair, a senator from New Hampshire and an ardent protectionist, had a solution. By spending the surplus the tariff generated to create a federal welfare system, he diminished the surplus, expanded the realm of the federal government, and created powerful constituencies that would serve to sustain both the tariff and the Republicans.
The Arrears Act, signed by President Hayes in 1879, proved to be one of the more unheralded pieces of legislation in American history. It expanded a U.S. pension system designed to take care of the dependents of Union Army soldiers killed during the war as well as disabled soldiers. The expenditures of the Bureau of Pensions had peaked in the mid-1870s and gone into decline. The Arrears Act stimulated new growth, and President Hayes linked expenditures under the act to the home:
By making pension payments retroactive to the date of a soldier’s discharge, or in the case of dependents from the date of a soldier’s death rather than the date of an approved application, the Arrears Act created a windfall for veterans and their families. All recipients would receive a check for the “arrears” owed them, and anyone filing for a new pension before July 1880 would also receive a payment covering the period from the date of his discharge.
Between 1879 and 1881, total disbursements for pensions roughly doubled and then rose even more steeply during the 1880s. Civil War pensions became the leading expenditure of the U.S. government. Republicans used it to justify high tariff rates.
anyone wondered how Grant would have reacted to the Great Strike of 1877, they could read his sanguinary conversation with Bismarck. Grant and the Prussian chancellor agreed that the only solution to anarchism, socialism, and disorder was blood in the streets.
By 1880 there were roughly 105,000 Chinese in the American West. Because they were overwhelmingly male, they formed a disproportionate percentage of wage laborers. Only 4.5 percent of the Chinese population was women, and roughly 25 percent of the work force of California was Chinese.
Free labor began as an argument for equal rights and homogeneous citizenship, but it became an argument for exclusion. Free labor demanded self-ownership and freedom of contract; Sinophobes on the West Coast claimed that the Chinese were incapable of either. They were supposedly not only degraded, semislaves, but they could never be anything else.
Sinophobia differed from generic American racism in predicting that the “inferior” race would triumph in a contest with whites.
The Chinese would triumph because they worked for wages that no white man supporting a home and family would, or could, accept.
An 1879 referendum asking California voter opinion on Chinese exclusion favored exclusion by a vote of 150,000 to 900.
Congress had failed to pass antipolygamy legislation before the Civil War, partially because the South regarded such legislation against a “peculiar institution” as a precedent for laws against slavery. The Republicans did equate the two.
Republicans had passed the Morrill antipolygamy bill in 1862. Mormon control over courts and marriage records in Utah, however, rendered it a dead letter.
Protestants reduced polygamy to male lust and female slavery, but Mormons justified the practice by appealing both to the Old Testament example and as a “new dispensation,” part of the revelations given to the church’s founder, Joseph Smith.
in 1879, when Grant was still abroad, the Supreme Court outlawed polygamy in Reynolds v. United States. Amidst a series of decisions limiting the reach of the federal government in the Reconstruction South, Reynolds was an affirmation of federal authority to limit and regulate local practices that, lawyers for the Mormons had argued, the Constitution left to the states and territories. The government stressed polygamy as slavery’s analogue;
Polygamy, the justices decided, led to barbarism and despotism; monogamy was the republican form of marriage. Implicit in the limitations placed on Mormon religious practices was the conviction that Protestant Christian practices were normative and protected by the Constitution.
Moral reformers acquiesced to, and even demanded, increases in federal and state power to protect the home, in part because once the reforms were in place, the power of enforcement was delegated to the reformers.
Local governments had long regulated personal behavior. What distinguished the efforts of the 1870s and 1880s was that they had gone national in scale.
Frances Willard’s genius was in recognizing the political power women could gain from agitating, petitioning, and demonstrating to protect the home.
Congress, with a critical intervention by James G. Blaine, responded by passing the Comstock Act in 1873, greatly expanding federal supervision of American sexuality. It made the U.S. Post Office and the courts a kind of morals police in charge of American censorship. The act banned “obscene, lewd and lascivious” materials in any form from the mails, including contraceptives, abortifacients, and information about how to obtain or use them.
Comstock continued to lobby, and Congress continued to strengthen the law in the 1880s and 1890s, giving postal inspectors the right to open envelopes in search of obscene materials.
Grant’s support remained solid until the end, while Blaine’s melted away; but neither got the nomination. Grant, rejecting his wife’s entreaties that he appear at the convention, failed to reach the numerical threshold for the nomination. The Republicans picked a dark horse, James Garfield of Ohio, on the twenty-sixth ballot. He had a reputation for indecision. Tarred by the Crédit Mobilier scandal, he could, in the party of Grant, Blaine, and Conkling, still appear to walk among the righteous.
Garfield attempted to unite the party by making Chester A. Arthur, Conkling’s close associate and the man whom Hayes had removed from the New York Custom House, his vice-presidential nominee. Conkling, furious at seeing his ally moving above him, demanded that Arthur reject the offer. Arthur, never expecting to rise to such heights, accepted it, but he was never loyal to Garfield.
little more than a quarter of the country’s population counted as urban in 1870; nearly 40 percent did in 1900.
The South remained the least urban area of the country, but its people too moved into towns and cities.
