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Between 1870 and 1900, nearly every measure of American agriculture—the number of farms, improved acreage, the production of wheat, corn, cattle, and swine—doubled or more than doubled. The countryside continued to gain population, even if it grew less rapidly than the metropoles.
Roughly 61 percent of the foreign-born, nearly twice the percentage of native-born, lived in urban places by 1890. They were particularly noticeable in New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
A high percentage of immigrants moved into the Middle Border and West, making them the states and territories with the largest percentage of immigrants. By 1890 44.6 percent of the population of North Dakota was of foreign birth; in South Dakota the figure was 27.7 percent. California had 30.3 percent and Washington had 25.8 percent.
As in the East, Germans, Irish, and English remained the largest immigrant groups in the early 1880s, but significant numbers of Mexicans and Chinese distinguished the West’s demographic mix from the East.
Most immigrants were not fleeing persecution or famine; they chose to come, although their choice was shaped by circumstances. They wanted a better life and left regions that offered them little hope of one.
Many immigrants did not regard their moves as permanent.
There were internal barriers to migration more significant than national boundaries. As in so many other things, the South stood apart. Its citizens moved, but they largely sloshed back and forth within its boundaries. Relatively few outsiders entered the region.
The percentage of foreign-born in the South actually fell between 1860 and 1900. By 1910 only 2 percent of the Southern population had been born outside the United States, compared with 14.7 percent for the country as a whole.
The debate about immigration deeply split black leaders, for what seemed at stake was less tactics than the whole meaning of the past fifteen years. Migration meant Reconstruction had been a failure, and escape was the only hope. This Douglass was unwilling to admit, and his opposition prompted Charleton H. Tandy, who led relief efforts for the Kansas migrants, to denounce Douglass as a “fawning sycophant, who deserted his own people and toadied to those in power.”
Ultimately, the excitement of 1879–80 yielded relatively few migrants. Those going to Liberia numbered in the hundreds. The migrants to Kansas, who became known as the Exodusters, amounted to perhaps 20,000 to 25,000 people. The same conditions that created the desire to migrate inhibited actual migration. Poverty constrained the movement of poor black families, just as it limited the movement of the very poor in Europe and poor white families in the United States.
Blacks also faced the intimidation of landowners who feared the loss of tenants and laborers. They found their crops confiscated before sale, their leaders arrested, and their meetings broken up. Nightriders assaulted them and their families on the way to the Mississippi River or in camps.
Black migrants established a series of towns in Kansas and, later, in Oklahoma, and there were smaller populations elsewhere. The migration yielded attempts at black colonization in Mexico in the 1880s and 1890s,
The South quite consciously and deliberately turned its judicial system into an engine to generate servile labor, of the most deadly sort.
Convicts—90 percent of whom would be black as the system endured into the twentieth century—worked on railroads, in the turpentine industry, and in the mines. Employers rented them for less than eight cents a day, supplying them with food and clothing.
The Northern prison system, too, leased convicts to private employers, but the North differed from the South in that Northern states built penitentiaries and kept felons within them.
After the Panic of 1873 northern states turned to larger employers. By 1887, forty-five thousand prisoners, 80 percent of them in the North, labored for profit-making corporations.
The Northern system remained strong in the 1870s and 1880s but ultimately broke down from a combination of prison rebellions, union opposition, and moral revulsion from voters.
Sen. John F. Miller of California introduced a bill creating a twenty-year prohibition on new Chinese workers entering the country. It passed both houses of Congress in 1882, but the president vetoed it, influenced by railroads and other large employers of the Chinese. The veto badly embarrassed Western Republicans. It produced a League of Deliverance in California, designed to drive the Chinese out by ostracism and boycott if possible, and by force if necessary. When presented with a bill reducing the length of immigration restriction to ten years, the president signed it in May 1882. It
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Labor achieved further success against contract labor with the Foran Act of 1885, which prohibited “the importation and migration of foreigners and aliens under contract or agreement to perform labor in the United States.” It made no attempt to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary labor; it cut the Gordian knot by prohibiting all contract labor.
An unusual amount of rainfall drenched the southern plains in the late 1870s, and this coincided with a rush of settlement. Settlers could plausibly see themselves as the agents of climate change.
movement west of the 100th meridian became one of the greatest social and environmental miscalculations in American history, one that would play out far beyond the nineteenth century.
But what seemed an ingenious system that worked with natural cycles was, in fact, an intervention that created a complex productive system liable to collapse without the addition of constant labor and capital. After 1884, federal legislation made the maintenance of this impossibly convoluted system—dredging the rivers, repairing the main levees, and building them up—the work of the Army Corps of Engineers.
The heyday of liberalism was past; its great figures were aging and influential largely among more conservative Americans. Classical liberalism was metamorphosing into modern conservatism.
Spencerian liberalism became passive, a bulwark against tampering with evolutionary “laws.”
Spencerian liberals crowned nature; it determined social outcomes. The older liberal advocacy of human freedom, most visible in the attack on slavery, yielded to a set of restraints on collective action.
Liberals retained relevance in the 1880s, but most were not Social Darwinists. Their opponents ridiculed them as Mugwumps, self-important and supposedly aloof from party politics. They were leaders without followers. Liberals ensconced themselves in the judiciary and, far less reliably, in the executive; their power in Congress, never substantial, was receding.
George regarded the ownership of land as the root of all evil because it would always yield “the ownership of men” who needed access to land and resources to live.
George did not advocate the state purchase or confiscation of land; he would simply arrange the tax system “to confiscate rent,” the unearned increment that came from the ownership of land.
ideally the state would own all the land and lease it to citizens as they needed it. But with most land already in private hands, he proposed a tax—the single tax—that would assess landowners the rental value of their land minus improvements. The tax would be set at rates that forced those who held land or other resources for speculation or pleasure to sell it to those who would put it into production.
Progress and Poverty resonated with both the old free-labor ideology and emerging antimonopolism.
The analysis appealed to a nation with an agrarian tradition, in which labor in the earth was fundamental and which deeply distrusted wealth that seemed to flow from mere exchanges of paper; but it was also quixotic, reductionist, and full of unintended consequences. It promised to force owners to expand production to maintain ownership of their land even when there was no market for what they produced. It reduced the natural world to a set of resources, and in this it was not so different from either corporate capitalism or later Progressive conservationists.
Morgan said that the basis of the whole financial system was character. Character was not morality. A man of character might be dissipated, lie, cheat, steal, and either order or condone deeds punishable by time in a penitentiary, but he did not do those things to his friends. Friendship depended on character; friends were loyal and keepers of bargains (whenever possible). They did not talk outside of school.
Character existed in a network of friends who judged it and sustained it. Having character meant being someone whom J. P. Morgan could trust.
By the mid-1880s, despite the social ferment and new ideas, intelligent men still thought American politics could be reduced to a simple matter of character. Liberals, in particular, bereft of other ways of ordering American politics, fell back on character.
When as MacVeagh said there was no issue except honesty, he and other Mugwumps and liberals meant that there was no real issue except civil service reform. He located dishonesty in political machines and patronage rather than in the fee-based nature of the offices themselves. If appointment to office—whether fee-based or salaried—could be wrested away from politicians and be made subject to exams, then the result would be an efficient, streamlined bureaucracy whose members would have secure tenure so long as they performed their jobs well.
liberals sought a single overarching reform to produce a minimal, but efficient and expert, government, removed from the direct control of elected officials. That reform was the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883.
The Pendleton Act also prohibited contributions from office holders, thus choking off a key conduit of patronage.
Within five years of passage, half of federal appointments outside the Post Office fell within the scope of the act, although not until the twentieth century would 80 percent of federal appointees achieve civil service status.
Field brought the Fourteenth Amendment to the defense of corporate personhood, but in a much more limited way than later courts would interpret it. His intent seems to have been to expand the power of the Supreme Court to strike down what he considered invasions of liberty, particularly freedom of contract, by state governments. He did not extend the due process and privileges and immunities clauses to corporate persons.
California Governor George Stoneman objected that the conflation of corporate persons with actual living and breathing citizens was both illogical and unjust. He argued that the state had a right to distinguish between “the natural person … who is part of the Government” and the “artificial person, which is but a creature of the Government.”
President Arthur’s and the Republicans’ endorsement of the anti-Chinese legislation helped restore California and Nevada to the GOP. Carrying the West maintained the Republican majority in the Senate, just as the Democrats’ hold on the South gave them control of the House.
Both parties waged what was the last of the full-fledged national “hurrah” campaigns, which were less about issues than stimulating party, ethnic, sectional, and religious loyalties and ensuring turnout. Ultimately, the candidate who won New York would carry the election.
Blaine, for all his cultivation of the Irish, suffered a fit of inattention when, at a meeting with Protestant clergy, he let pass a denunciation of the Democrats as the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” The Democrats seized on it. Blaine did himself no favors by the same day attending a dinner with his millionaire backers, including the usually reclusive Jay Gould, at Delmonico’s.
Cleveland carried New York by less than a thousand votes, and with it the election.
by the 1880s any promise made to the freedmen by Democrats was empty. There would not be a single Democratic vote for a civil rights bill for the rest of the century. Cleveland regarded black people, particularly Southern black people, as lazy and thriftless.
By the most basic standards—life span, infant death rate, and bodily stature, which reflected childhood health and nutrition—American life grew worse over the course of the nineteenth century.
In the Gilded Age people living in most rural areas outside the South were comparatively healthier and lived longer lives, but in the cities the crisis intensified, producing a facsimile of war with a series of epidemic invasions and eruptions as well as a steady annual carnage that took a particular toll on the nation’s infants and children. The diseases came through the air, in
Sitting beside the rivers and “half a dozen railroads,” the coal summoned iron and copper to Pittsburgh for smelting, since minerals could more cheaply be brought to coal than coal could come to them.
Ice can claim credit for perhaps 50 percent of the improvement in nutrition in the 1890s, and with it the beginning of the rise in average height.
The poor derived the least benefit from the infrastructure of sanitation and clean water in the cities. As late as 1893, 53 percent of the families in New York City, 70 percent of those in Philadelphia, 73 percent in Chicago, and 88 percent in Baltimore had access only to an outdoor privy.
