What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s? ★ CHAPTER 17 ★ FREEDOM’S BOUNDARIES, AT HOME AND ABROAD 1890–1900 FOCUS QUESTIONS • What were the origins and the significance of Populism? • How did the liberties of blacks after 1877 give way to legal segregation across the South? • In what ways did the boundaries of American freedom grow narrower in this period? • How did the United States emerge as an imperial power in the 1890s? O ne of the most popular songs of 1892 bore the title “Father Was Killed by a Pinkerton Man.” It was inspired by an incident during a bitter strike at Andrew Carnegie’s steelworks at Homestead, Pennsylvania, the nineteenth century’s most widely publicized confrontation between labor and capital. The strike pitted one of the nation’s leading industrial corporations against a powerful union, the Amalgamated Association, which represented the skilled iron- and steelworkers among the complex’s 3,800 employees. Homestead’s twelve steel mills were the most profitable and technologically advanced in the world. The union contract gave the Amalgamated Association a considerable say in their operation, including the right to approve ★ 649 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 649 7/13/16 1:34 PM the hiring of new workers and to regulate the pace of work. To Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, his partner and chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company, the union’s power increasingly seemed an intolerable infringement on management’s rights. In 1892, they decided to operate the plant on a nonunion basis. Frick surrounded the factory with a fence topped by barbed wire, constructed barracks to house strikebreakers, and fired the entire workforce. Henceforth, only workers who agreed not to join the union could work at Homestead. In response, the workers, including the unskilled laborers not included in the Amalgamated Association, blockaded the steelworks and mobilized support from the local community. The battle memorialized in song took place on July 6, 1892, when armed strikers confronted 300 private policemen from the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Seven workers and three Pinkerton agents were killed, and the Pinkertons were forced to retreat. Four days later, the governor of Pennsylvania dispatched 8,000 militiamen to open the complex on management’s terms. The strikers held out until November, but the union’s defeat was now inevitable. In the end, the Amalgamated Association was destroyed. The Carnegie corporation’s tactics and the workers’ solidarity won the strikers widespread national sympathy. “Ten thousand Carnegie libraries,” declared the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “would not compensate the country for the evils resulting from Homestead.” The strike became an international cause célèbre as well. British newspapers pointed out that their country restricted the use of private police forces far more severely than the United States. Britons, they claimed, understood economic liberty better than Americans. Homestead demonstrated that neither a powerful union nor public opinion could influence the conduct of the largest corporations. The writer Hamlin Garland, who visited Homestead two years after the strike, found the workforce sullen and bitter. He described a town “as squalid and unlovely as could be imagined,” with dingy houses over which hung dense clouds of black smoke. It was “American,” he wrote, “only in the sense in which [it] represents the American idea of business.” In fact, two American ideas of freedom collided at Homestead—the employers’ definition, based on the idea that property rights, unrestrained by union rules or public regulation, sustained the public good, and the workers’ conception, which stressed economic security and independence from what they considered the “tyranny” of employers. The strife at Homestead also reflected broader battles over American freedom during the 1890s. Like the Homestead workers, many Americans came to believe that they were being denied economic independence and democratic self-government, long central to the popular understanding of freedom. During the 1890s, millions of farmers joined the Populist movement in an attempt to reverse their declining economic prospects and to rescue the 650 ★ CHA PTER 17 Freed om ’s B ou nd ari es , a t H ome an d A bro ad 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 650 7/13/16 1:34 PM What were the origins and the significance of Populism? government from what they saw as control by powerful corporate interests. The 1890s witnessed the imposition of a new racial system in the South that locked AfricanAmericans into the status of second-class citizenship, denying them many of the freedoms white Americans took for granted. Increasing immigration produced heated debates over whether the country should reconsider its traditional self-definition as a refuge for foreigners seeking greater freedom on American shores. At the end of the 1890s, in the SpanishAmerican War, the United States for the first time acquired overseas possessions and found itself ruling over subject peoples from Puerto Rico to the Philippines. Was the democratic republic, many Americans wondered, becoming an empire like those of Europe? Rarely has the country experienced at one time so many debates over both the meaning of freedom and freedom’s boundaries. • CHRONOLOGY • 1867 Alaska purchased 1874 Women’s Christian Temperance Union founded 1879– 1880 Kansas Exodus 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act 1883 Civil Rights Cases 1885 Josiah Strong’s Our Country 1886 AFL established 1890 National American Woman Suffrage Association organized 1891 Populist Party organized 1892 Homestead strike 1893 Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani overthrown Economic depression begins 1894 Pullman Strike THE POPULIST CHALLENGE The Farmers’ Revolt Even as labor unrest crested, a different kind of uprising was ripening in the South and the trans-Mississippi West, a response to falling agricultural prices and growing economic dependency in rural areas. Like industrial workers, small farmers faced increasing economic insecurity. In the South, the sharecropping system, discussed in Chapter 15, locked millions of tenant farmers, white and black, into perpetual poverty. The interruption of cotton exports during the Civil War had led to the rapid expansion of production in India, Egypt, and Brazil. The glut of cotton on the world market led to declining prices (from 11 cents a pound in 1881 to 4.6 cents Coxey’s Army marches to Washington Immigration Restriction League established 1895 Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta speech 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson The National Association of Colored Women established 1897 William McKinley inaugurated president 1898 Spanish-American War Anti-Imperialist League 1899– 1903 Philippine War 1900 Gold Standard Act 1901– 1904 Insular Cases • • T H E PO P U LI ST C H A LLE N G E ★ 651 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 651 7/13/16 1:34 PM in 1894), throwing millions of small farmers deep into debt and threatening them with the loss of their land. In the West, farmers who had mortgaged their property to purchase seed, fertilizer, and equipment faced the prospect of losing their farms when unable to repay their bank loans. Farmers increasingly believed that their plight derived from the high freight rates charged by railroad companies, excessive interest rates for loans from merchants and bankers, and the fiscal policies of the federal government (discussed in the previous chapter) that reduced the supply of money and helped to push down farm prices. Through the Farmers’ Alliance, the largest citizens’ movement of the nineteenth century, farmers sought to remedy their condition. Founded in Texas in the late 1870s, the Alliance spread to forty-three states by 1890. The farmers’ alternatives, said J. D. Fields, a Texas Alliance leader, were “success and freedom, or failure and servitude.” At first, the Alliance remained aloof from politics, attempting to improve rural conditions by the cooperative financing and marketing of crops. Alliance “exchanges” would loan money to farmers and sell their produce. But it soon became clear that farmers on their own could not finance this plan, and banks refused to extend loans to the exchanges. The Alliance therefore proposed that the federal government establish warehouses where farmers could store their crops until they were sold. Using the crops as collateral, the government would then issue loans to farmers at low interest rates, thereby ending their dependence on bankers and merchants. Since it would have to be enacted by Congress, the “subtreasury plan,” as this proposal was called, led the Alliance into politics. The People’s Party In the early 1890s, the Alliance evolved into the People’s Party (or Populists), the era’s greatest political insurgency. The party did not just appeal to farmers. It sought to speak for all the “producing classes” and achieved some of its greatest successes in states like Colorado and Idaho, where it won the support of miners and industrial workers. But its major base lay in the cotton and wheat belts of the South and West. Building on the Farmers’ Alliance network of local institutions, the Populists embarked on a remarkable effort of community organization and education. To spread their message they published numerous pamphlets on political and economic questions, established more than 1,000 local newspapers, and sent traveling speakers throughout rural America. Wearing “a huge black sombrero and a black Prince Albert coat,” Texas Populist orator “Cyclone” Davis traveled the Great Plains accompanied by the writings of Thomas Jefferson, which he quoted to demonstrate the evils of banks and large corporations. 652 ★ CHA PTER 17 Freed om ’s B ou nd ari es , a t H ome an d A bro ad 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 652 7/13/16 1:34 PM What were the origins and the significance of Populism? At great gatherings on the western plains, similar in some ways to religious revival meetings, and in small-town southern country stores, one observer wrote, “people commenced to think who had never thought before, and people talked who had seldom spoken. . . . Little by little they commenced to theorize upon their condition.” Here was the last great political expression of the nineteenth-century vision of America as a commonwealth of small producers whose freedom rested on the ownership of productive property and respect for the dignity of labor. “Day by day,” declared the People’s Party Paper of Georgia in 1893, “the power of the individual sinks. Day by day the power of the classes, or the corporations, rises. . . . In all essential respects, the republic of our fathers is dead.” But although the Populists used the familiar language of nineteenthcentury radicalism, they were hardly a backward-looking movement. They embraced the modern technologies that made large-scale cooperative enterprise possible—the railroad, the telegraph, and the national market—while looking to the federal government to regulate them in the public interest. They promoted agricultural education and believed farmers should adopt modern scientific methods of cultivation. They believed the federal government could move beyond partisan conflict to operate in a businesslike manner to promote the public good—a vision soon to be associated with the Progressive movement and, many years later, politicians like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. The Populist Platform The Populist platform of 1892, adopted at the party’s Omaha convention, remains a classic document of American reform (see the Appendix for the full text). Written by Ignatius Donnelly, a Minnesota editor and former Radical Republican congressman during Reconstruction, it spoke of a nation “brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin” by political corruption and economic inequality. “The fruits of the toil of millions,” the platform declared, “are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes . . . while their possessors despise the republic and endanger liberty.” The platform put forth a long list of proposals to restore democracy and economic opportunity, many of which would be adopted during the next half-century: the direct election of U.S. senators, government control of the currency, a graduated income tax, a system of low-cost public financing to enable farmers to market their crops, and recognition of the right of workers to form labor unions. In addition, Populists called for public ownership of the railroads to guarantee farmers inexpensive access to markets for their crops. A generation would pass before a major party offered so sweeping a plan for political action to create the social conditions of freedom. T H E PO P U LI ST C H A LLE N G E ★ 653 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 653 7/13/16 1:34 PM The Populist Coalition In some southern states, the Populists made remarkable efforts to unite black and white small farmers on a common political and economic program. The obstacles to such an alliance were immense—not merely the heritage of racism and the political legacy of the Civil War, but the fact that many white Populists were landowning farmers while most blacks were tenants and agricultural laborers. Unwelcome in the southern branches of the Farmers’ Alliance, black farmers formed their own organization, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance. In 1891, it tried to organize a strike of cotton pickers on plantations in South Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas. The action was violently suppressed by local authorities and landowners, some of them sympathetic to the white Alliance but unwilling to pay higher wages to their own laborers. In general, southern white Populists’ racial attitudes did not differ significantly from those of their non-Populist neighbors. Nonetheless, recognizing the need for allies to break the Democratic Party’s stranglehold on power in the South, some white Populists insisted that black and white farmers shared common grievances and could unite for common goals. Tom Watson, Georgia’s leading Populist, worked the hardest to forge a black-white alliance. “You are kept apart,” he told interracial audiences, “that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. . . . This race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.” While many blacks refused to abandon the party of Lincoln, others were attracted by the Populist appeal. In 1894, a coalition of white Populists and black Republicans won control of North Carolina, bringing to the state a “second Reconstruction” complete with increased spending on public education and a revival of black officeholdIn an 1891 cartoon from a Texas Populist newsing. In most of the South, however, paper, northern and southern Civil War veterans Democrats fended off the Populist clasp hands across the “bloody chasm” (a phrase challenge by resorting to the tactics first used by the New York editor Horace Greeley during his campaign for president in 1872). they had used to retain power since the Beneath each figure is an explanation of why 1870s—mobilizing whites with warnvoting alignments have previously been based ings about “Negro supremacy,” intimion sectionalism—the North fears “rebel” rule, the dating black voters, and stuffing ballot white South “Negro supremacy.” boxes on election day. 654 ★ CHA PTER 17 Freed om ’s B ou nd ari es , a t H ome an d A bro ad 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 654 7/13/16 1:34 PM What were the origins and the significance of Populism? POPULIST STRENGTH, 1892 WASHINGTON CANADA MONTANA OREGON IDAHO WYOMING NEVADA CALIFORNIA COLORADO NEW MEXICO TERRITORY Populist share of the presidential vote, 1892 (percentage) MINNESOTA SOUTH DAKOTA WISCONSIN NEW HAMPSHIRE MAINE VERMONT NEW YORK MICHIGAN IOWA PENNSYLVANIA INDIANA OHIO ILLINOIS WEST VIRGINIA KANSAS VIRGINIA MISSOURI KENTUCKY NORTH CAROLINA TENNESSEE OKLAHOMA SOUTH TERRITORY ARKANSAS CAROLINA NEBRASKA UTAH TERRITORY ARIZONA TERRITORY Over 48 30–48 15–30 5–15 0–5 Not voting NORTH DAKOTA TEXAS MASSACHUSETTS RHODE ISLAND CONNECTICUT NEW JERSEY DELAWARE MARYLAND ALABAMA GEORGIA MISSISSIPPI LOUISIANA FLORIDA MEXICO 0 0 250 250 500 miles 500 kilometers The Populist movement also engaged the energies of thousands of reformminded women from farm and labor backgrounds. Some, like Mary Elizabeth Lease, a former homesteader and one of the first female lawyers in Kansas, became prominent organizers, campaigners, and strategists. Lease was famous for her speeches urging farmers to “raise less corn and more hell” (although she apparently never actually uttered those exact words, which would have been considered inappropriate for a woman in public). “We fought England for our liberty,” Lease declared, “and put chains on four million blacks. We wiped out slavery and . . . began a system of white wage slavery worse than the first.” During the 1890s, referendums in Colorado and Idaho approved extending the vote to women, while in Kansas and California the proposal went down in defeat. Populists in all these states endorsed women’s suffrage. Populist presidential candidate James Weaver received more than 1 million votes in 1892. The party carried five western states, with twenty-two electoral votes, and elected three governors and fifteen members of Congress. In his inaugural address in 1893, Lorenzo Lewelling, the new Populist governor of Kansas, anticipated a phrase made famous seventy years later by Martin Luther King Jr.: “I have a dream. . . . In the beautiful vision of a coming time I behold the abolition of poverty. A time is foreshadowed when . . . liberty, equality, and justice shall have permanent abiding places in the republic.” T H E PO P U LI ST C H A LLE N G E ★ 655 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 655 7/13/16 1:34 PM The Government and Labor Were the Populists on the verge of replacing one of the two major parties? The severe depression that began in 1893 led to increased conflict between capital and labor and seemed to create an opportunity for expanding the Populist vote. Time and again, employers brought state or federal authority to bear to protect their own economic power or put down threats to public order. Even before the economic downturn, in 1892, the governor of Idaho declared martial law and sent militia units and federal troops into the mining region of Coeur d’Alene to break a strike. In May 1894, the federal government deployed soldiers to disperse Coxey’s Army—a band of several hundred unemployed men led by Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey, who marched to Washington demanding economic relief. Also in 1894, workers in the company-owned town of Pullman, Illinois, where railroad sleeping cars were manufactured, called a strike to protest a reduction in wages. The American Railway Union, whose 150,000 members included both skilled and unskilled railroad laborers, announced that its members would refuse to handle trains with Pullman cars. When the boycott crippled national rail service, President Grover Cleveland’s attorney general, Richard Olney (himself on the board of several railroad companies), obtained a federal court injunction ordering the strikers back to work. Federal troops and U.S. marshals soon occupied railroad centers like Chicago and Sacramento. The strike collapsed when the union’s leaders, including its charismatic president, Eugene V. Debs, were jailed for contempt of court for violating the judicial order. In the case of In re Debs, the Supreme Court unanimously confirmed the sentences and approved the use of injunctions against striking labor unions. On his release from prison in November 1895, more than 100,000 persons greeted Debs at a Chicago railroad depot. Populism and Labor In 1894, Populists made determined efforts to appeal to industrial workers. Populist senators supported the demand of Coxey’s Army for federal unemployment relief, and Governor Davis Waite of Colorado, who had edited a labor newspaper before his election, sent the militia to protect striking miners against company police. In the state and congressional elections of that year, as the economic depression deepened, voters by the millions abandoned the Democratic Party of President Cleveland. In rural areas, the Populist vote increased in 1894. But urban workers did not rally to the Populists, whose core issues—the subtreasury plan and lower mortgage interest rates—had little meaning for them and whose demand for higher prices for farm goods would raise the cost of food and reduce the value 656 ★ CHA PTER 17 Freed om ’s B ou nd ari es , a t H ome an d A bro ad 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 656 7/13/16 1:34 PM What were the origins and the significance of Populism? of workers’ wages. Moreover, the revivalist atmosphere of many Populist gatherings and the biblical cadences of Populist speeches were alien to the largely immigrant and Catholic industrial working class. Urban working-class voters in 1894 instead shifted en masse to the Republicans, who claimed that raising tariff rates (which Democrats had recently reduced) would restore prosperity by protecting manufacturers and industrial workers from the competition of imported goods and cheap foreign labor. In one of the most decisive shifts in congressional power in American history, the Republicans gained 117 seats in the House of Representatives. Bryan and Free Silver In 1896, Democrats and Populists joined to support William Jennings Bryan for the presidency. A thirty-six-year-old congressman from Nebraska, Bryan won the Democratic nomination after delivering to the national convention an electrifying speech that crystallized the farmers’ pride and grievances. “Burn down your cities and leave our farms,” Bryan proclaimed, “and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.” Bryan called for the “free coinage” of silver—the unrestricted minting of silver money. In language ringing with biblical imagery, Bryan condemned the gold standard: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” At various points in the nineteenth century, from debates over “hard” versus “soft” money in the Jacksonian era to the greenback movement after the Civil War, the “money question” had played a central role in American politics. Bryan’s demand for “free silver” was the latest expression of the view that increasing the amount of currency in circulation would raise the prices farmers received for their crops and make it easier to pay off their debts. His nomination wrested control of the Democratic Party from long-dominant leaders like President Grover Cleveland, who were closely tied to eastern businessmen. There was more to Bryan’s appeal, however, than simply free silver. A devoutly religious man, he was strongly influenced by the Social Gospel movement (discussed in the previous chapter) and tried to apply the teachings of Jesus Christ to uplifting the “little people” of the United States. He championed a vision of the government helping ordinary Americans that anticipated provisions of the New Deal of the 1930s, including a progressive income tax, banking regulation, and the right of workers to form unions. Many Populists were initially cool to Bryan’s campaign. Their party had been defrauded time and again by Democrats in the South. Veteran Populists feared that their broad program was in danger of being reduced to “free silver.” But realizing that they could not secure victory alone, the party’s leaders T H E PO P U LI ST C H A LLE N G E ★ 657 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 657 7/13/16 1:34 PM endorsed Bryan’s candidacy. Bryan broke with tradition and embarked on a nationwide speaking tour, seeking to rally farmers and workers to his cause. The Campaign of 1896 Republicans met the silverite challenge head on, insisting that gold was the only “honest” currency. Abandoning the gold standard, they insisted, would destroy business confidence and prevent recovery from the depression by making creditors unwilling to extend loans, since they could not be certain of the value of the money in which they would be repaid. The party nominated for president Ohio governor William McKinley, who as a congressman in 1890 had shepherded to passage the strongly protectionist McKinley Tariff. The election of 1896 is sometimes called the first modern presidential campaign because of the amount of money spent by the Republicans and the efficiency of their national organization. Eastern bankers and industrialists, thoroughly alarmed by Bryan’s call for monetary inflation and his fiery speeches denouncing corporate arrogance, poured millions of dollars into Republican coffers. (McKinley’s campaign raised some $10 million; Bryan’s around $300,000.) While McKinley remained at his Ohio home, where he addressed crowds of supporters from his front porch, his political manager Mark Hanna created a powerful national machine that flooded the country with pamphlets, posters, and campaign buttons. The results revealed a nation as divided along regional lines as in 1860. Bryan carried the South and West and received 6.5 million votes. McKinley swept the more populous industrial states of the Northeast and Midwest, attracting 7.1 million. The Republican candidate’s electoral margin was even greater: 271 to 176. The era’s bitter labor strife did not carry over into the electoral arena; indeed, party politics seemed to mute class conflict rather than to reinforce it. Industrial America, from financiers and managers to workers, now voted solidly Republican, a loyalty reinforced when prosperity returned after 1897. According to some later critics, the popular children’s classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published by L. Frank Baum in 1900, offered a commentary on the election of 1896 and its aftermath. In this interpretation, the Emerald City (where everything is colored green, for money) represents Washington, D.C., and the Wizard of Oz, who remains invisible in his palace and rules by illusion, is President McKinley. The only way to get to the city is via a Yellow Brick Road (the color of gold). The Wicked Witches of the East and West represent oppressive industrialists and mine owners. In the much-beloved film version made in the 1930s, Dorothy, the all-American girl from the heartland state of Kansas, wears ruby slippers. But in the book her shoes are silver, supposedly representing the money preferred by ordinary people. 658 ★ CHA PTER 17 Freed om ’s B ou nd ari es , a t H ome an d A bro ad 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 658 7/13/16 1:34 PM How did the liberties of blacks after 1877 give way to legal segregation across the South? Whatever Baum’s symbolism, one THE PRESIDENTIAL thing was clear. McKinley’s victory ELECTION OF 1896 shattered the political stalemate that 4 had persisted since 1876 and created 44 6 3 3 4 9 one of the most enduring political 3 15 36 12 4 14 3 4 majorities in American history. During 32 13 6 8 10 3 3 24 15 23 3 McKinley’s presidency, Republicans 6 4 8 12 8 10 17 12 1 11 placed their stamp on economic policy 12 1 9 8 13 11 by passing the Dingley Tariff of 1897, 9 15 8 raising rates to the highest level in his4 Non-voting territory tory, and the Gold Standard Act of 1900. Electoral Vote Popular Vote Not until 1932, in the midst of another Party Candidate (Share) (Share) Republican McKinley 271 (61%) 7,104,779 (51%) economic depression, would the DemDemocrat Bryan 176 (39%) 6,502,925 (47%) ocrats become the nation’s majority Minor parties 315,398 (2%) party. The election of 1896 also proved to be the last presidential election with extremely high voter turnout (in some states, over 90 percent of those eligible). From then on, with the South solidly Democratic and the North overwhelmingly Republican, few states witnessed vigorous two-party campaigns. Voter participation began a downhill trend, although it rose again from the mid-1930s through the 1960s. Today, only around half the electorate casts ballots. THE SEGREGATED SOUTH The Redeemers in Power The failure of Populism in the South opened the door for the full imposition of a new racial order. The coalition of merchants, planters, and business entrepreneurs who dominated the region’s politics after 1877, who called themselves Redeemers, had moved to undo as much as possible of Reconstruction. State budgets were slashed, taxes, especially on landed property, reduced, and public facilities like hospitals and asylums closed. Hardest hit were the new public school systems. Louisiana spent so little on education that it became the only state in the Union in which the percentage of whites unable to read and write actually increased between 1880 and 1900. Black schools, however, suffered the most, as the gap between expenditures for black and white pupils widened steadily. “What I want here is Negroes who can make cotton,” declared one planter, “and they don’t need education to help them make cotton.” New laws authorized the arrest of virtually any person without employment and greatly increased the penalties for petty crimes. “They send [a man] to the penitentiary if he steals a chicken,” complained a former slave in North T H E S E G R E G AT E D SO U T H ★ 659 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 659 7/13/16 1:34 PM Carolina. As the South’s prison population rose, the renting out of convicts became a profitable business. Every southern state placed at least a portion of its convicted criminals, the majority of them blacks imprisoned for minor offenses, in the hands of private businessmen. Railroads, mines, and lumber companies competed for this new form of cheap, involuntary labor. Conditions in labor camps were often barbaric, with disease rife and the death rates high. “One dies, get another” was the motto of the system’s architects. The Knights of Labor made convict labor a major issue in the South. In 1892, miners in Tennessee burned the stockade where convict workers were housed and shipped them out of the region. Tennessee abolished the convict lease system three years later but replaced it with a state-owned coal mine using prison labor that reaped handsome profits for decades. The Failure of the New South Dream During the 1880s, Atlanta editor Henry Grady tirelessly promoted the promise of a New South, an era of prosperity based on industrial expansion and agricultural diversification. In fact, while planters, merchants, and industrialists prospered, the region as a whole sank deeper and deeper into poverty. Some industry did develop, including mining in the Appalachians, textile production in the Carolinas and Georgia, and furniture and cigarette manufacturing in certain southern cities. The new upcountry cotton factories offered jobs to entire families of poor whites from the surrounding countryside. But since the main attractions for investors were the South’s low wages and taxes and the availability of convict labor, these enterprises made little contribution to regional economic development. With the exception of Birmingham, Alabama, which by 1900 had developed into an important center for the manufacture of iron and steel, southern cities were mainly export centers for cotton, tobacco, and rice, with little industry or skilled labor. Overall, the region remained dependent on the North for capital and manufactured goods. In 1900, southern per capita income amounted to only 60 percent of the national average. As late as the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt would declare the South the nation’s “number one” economic problem. Black Life in the South As the most disadvantaged rural southerners, black farmers suffered the most from the region’s condition. In the Upper South, economic development offered some opportunities—mines, iron furnaces, and tobacco factories employed black laborers, and a good number of black farmers managed to acquire land. In the rice kingdom of coastal South Carolina and Georgia, planters found themselves unable to acquire the capital necessary to repair irrigation systems and 660 ★ CHA PTER 17 Freed om ’s B ou nd ari es , a t H ome an d A bro ad 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 660 7/13/16 1:34 PM How did the liberties of blacks after 1877 give way to legal segregation across the South? machinery destroyed by the war. By the turn of the century, most of the great plantations had fallen to pieces, and many blacks acquired land and took up self-sufficient farming. In most of the Deep South, however, African-Americans owned a smaller percentage of the land in 1900 than they had at the end of Reconstruction. In southern cities, the network of institutions created after the Civil War— schools and colleges, churches, businesses, women’s clubs, and the like—served as the foundation for increasingly diverse black urban communities. They supported the growth of a black middle class, mostly professionals like teachers and physicians, or businessmen like undertakers and shopkeepers serving the needs of black customers. But the labor market was rigidly divided along racial lines. Black men were excluded from supervisory positions in factories and workshops and white-collar jobs such as clerks in offices. A higher percentage of black women than white worked for wages, but mainly as domestic servants. They could not find employment among the growing numbers of secretaries, typists, and department store clerks. The Kansas Exodus Overall, one historian has written, the New South was “a miserable landscape dotted only by a few rich enclaves that cast little or no light upon the poverty surrounding them.” Trapped at the bottom of a stagnant economy, some blacks sought a way out through emigration from the South. In 1879 and 1880, an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 African-Americans migrated to Kansas, seeking political equality, freedom from violence, access to education, and economic opportunity. The name participants gave to this migration—the Exodus, derived from the biblical account of the Jews escaping slavery in Egypt—indicated that its roots lay in deep longings for the substance of freedom. Those promoting the Kansas Exodus, including former fugitive slave Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, the organizer of a real estate company, distributed flyers and lithographs picturing Kansas as an idyllic land of rural plenty. Lacking the capital to take up farming, however, most black migrants ended up as unskilled laborers in towns and cities. But few chose to return to the South. In the words of one minister active in the movement, “We had rather suffer and be free.” Despite deteriorating prospects in the South, most African-Americans had little alternative but to stay in the region. The real expansion of job opportunities was taking place in northern cities. But most northern employers refused to offer jobs to blacks in the expanding industrial economy, preferring to hire white migrants from rural areas and immigrants from Europe. Not until the outbreak of World War I in Europe in 1914 cut off immigration did northern employers open industrial jobs to blacks, setting in motion the Great Migration T H E S E G R E G AT E D SO U T H ★ 661 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 661 7/13/16 1:34 PM A photograph of townspeople in Nicodemus, a community established by members of the 1879–1880 “Exodus” of southern African-Americans to Kansas. discussed in Chapter 19. Until then, the vast majority of African-Americans remained in the South. The Decline of Black Politics Neither black voting nor black officeholding came to an abrupt end in 1877. Blacks continued to cast ballots in large numbers, although Democrats solidified their control of state and local affairs by redrawing district lines and substituting appointive for elective officials in counties with black majorities. A few blacks even served in Congress in the 1880s and 1890s. Nonetheless, political opportunities became more and more restricted. Not until the 1990s would the number of black legislators in the South approach the level seen during Reconstruction. For black men of talent and ambition, other avenues—business, the law, the church—increasingly seemed to offer greater opportunities for personal advancement and community service than politics. The banner of political leadership passed to black women activists. The National Association of Colored Women, founded in 1896, brought together local and regional women’s clubs to press for both women’s rights and racial uplift. Most female activists emerged from the small urban black middle class and preached the necessity of 662 ★ CHA PTER 17 Freed om ’s B ou nd ari es , a t H ome an d A bro ad 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 662 7/13/16 1:35 PM How did the liberties of blacks after 1877 give way to legal segregation across the South? “respectable” behavior as part and parcel of the struggle for equal rights. They aided poor families, offered lessons in home life and childrearing, and battled gambling and drinking in black communities. Some poor blacks resented middle-class efforts to instruct them in proper behavior. But by insisting on the right of black women to be considered as “respectable” as their white counterparts, the women reformers challenged the racial ideology that consigned all blacks to the status of degraded second-class citizens. For nearly a generation after the end of Reconstruction, despite fraud and violence, black southerners continued to cast ballots. In some states, the Republican Party remained competitive. In Virginia, a coalition of mostly black Republicans and anti-Redeemer Democrats formed an alliance known as the Readjuster movement (the name derived from their plan to scale back, or “readjust,” the state debt). They governed the state between 1879 and 1883. Tennessee and Arkansas also witnessed the formation of biracial political coalitions that challenged Democratic Party rule. Despite the limits of the Populists’ interracial alliance, the threat of a biracial political insurgency frightened the ruling Democrats and contributed greatly to the disenfranchisement movement. The Elimination of Black Voting Between 1890 and 1906, every southern state enacted laws or constitutional provisions meant to eliminate the black vote. Since the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited the use of race as a qualification for the suffrage, how were such measures even possible? Southern legislatures drafted laws that on paper appeared color-blind, but that were actually designed to end black voting. The most popular devices were the poll tax (a fee that each citizen had to pay in order to retain the right to vote), literacy tests, and the requirement that a prospective voter demonstrate to election officials an “understanding” of the state constitution. Six southern states also adopted a grandfather clause, exempting from the new requirements descendants of persons eligible to vote before the Civil War (when only whites, of course, could cast ballots in the South). The racial intent of the grandfather clause was so clear that the Supreme Court in 1915 invalidated such laws for violating the Fifteenth Amendment. The other methods of limiting black voting, however, remained on the books. Some white leaders presented disenfranchisement as a “good government” measure—a means of purifying politics by ending the fraud, violence, and manipulation of voting returns regularly used against Republicans and Populists. But ultimately, as a Charleston newspaper declared, the aim was to make clear that the white South “does not desire or intend ever to include black men among its citizens.” Although election officials often allowed whites who did not meet the new qualifications to register, numerous poor and illiterate T H E S E G R E G AT E D SO U T H ★ 663 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 663 7/13/16 1:35 PM whites also lost the right to vote, a result welcomed by many planters and urban reformers. Louisiana, for example, reduced the number of blacks registered to vote from 130,000 in 1894 to 1,342 a decade later. But 80,000 white voters also lost the right. Disenfranchisement led directly to the rise of a generation of southern “demagogues,” who mobilized white voters by extreme appeals to racism. Tom Watson, who as noted above had tried to forge an interracial Populist coalition in the 1890s, reemerged early in the twentieth century as a power in Georgia public life through vicious speeches whipping up prejudice against blacks, Jews, and Catholics. As late as 1940, only 3 percent of adult black southerners were registered to vote. The elimination of black and many white voters, which reversed the nineteenth-century trend toward more inclusive suffrage, could not have been accomplished without the acquiescence of the North. In 1891, the Senate defeated a proposal for federal protection of black voting rights in the South. Apart from the grandfather clause, the Supreme Court gave its approval to disenfranchisement laws. According to the Fourteenth Amendment, any state that deprived male citizens of the franchise was supposed to lose part of its representation in Congress. But like much of the Constitution, this provision was consistently violated so far as African-Americans were concerned. As a result, southern congressmen wielded far greater power on the national scene than their tiny electorates warranted. As for blacks, for decades thereafter, they would regard “the loss of suffrage as being the loss of freedom.” The Law of Segregation Along with disenfranchisement, the 1890s saw the widespread imposition of segregation in the South. Laws and local customs requiring the separation of the races had numerous precedents. They had existed in many parts of the pre–Civil War North. Southern schools and many other institutions had been segregated during Reconstruction. In the 1880s, however, southern race relations remained unsettled. Some railroads, theaters, and hotels admitted blacks and whites on an equal basis while others separated them by race or excluded blacks altogether. In 1883, in the Civil Rights Cases, the Supreme Court invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had outlawed racial discrimination by hotels, theaters, railroads, and other public facilities. The Fourteenth Amendment, the Court insisted, prohibited unequal treatment by state authorities, not private businesses. In 1896, in the landmark decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court gave its approval to state laws requiring separate facilities for blacks and whites. The case arose in Louisiana, where the legislature had required railroad companies to maintain a separate car or section for black passengers. A Citizens 664 ★ CHA PTER 17 Freed om ’s B ou nd ari es , a t H ome an d A bro ad 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 664 7/13/16 1:35 PM How did the liberties of blacks after 1877 give way to legal segregation across the South? Committee of black residents of New Orleans came together to challenge the law. To create a test case, Homer Plessy, a light-skinned African-American, refused a conductor’s order to move to the “colored only” part of his railroad car and was arrested. To argue the case before the Supreme Court, the Citizens Committee hired Albion W. Tourgée, who as a judge in North Carolina during Reconstruction had waged a courageous battle against the Ku Klux Klan. “Citizenship is national and knows no color,” he insisted, and racial segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection before the law. But in a 7-1 decision, the Court upheld the Louisiana law, arguing that segregated facilities did not discriminate so long as they were “separate but equal.” The lone dissenter, John Marshall Harlan, reprimanded the majority with an oft-quoted comment: “Our constitution is color-blind.” Segregation, he insisted, sprang from whites’ conviction that they were the “dominant race” (a phrase used by the Court’s majority), and it violated the principle of equal liberty. To Harlan, freedom for the former slaves meant the right to participate fully and equally in American society. Segregation and White Domination As Harlan predicted, states reacted to the Plessy decision by passing laws mandating racial segregation in every aspect of southern life, from schools to hospitals, waiting rooms, toilets, and cemeteries. Some states forbade taxi drivers to carry members of different races at the same time. Despite the “thin disguise” (Harlan’s phrase) of equality required by the Court’s “separate In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that laws establishing racial segregation did not violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, so long as facilities were “separate but equal.” In fact, this was almost never the case, as illustrated by these photographs of the elementary schools for black and white children in South Boston, Virginia, in the early twentieth century. T H E S E G R E G AT E D SO U T H ★ 665 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 665 7/13/16 1:35 PM but equal” doctrine, facilities for blacks were either nonexistent or markedly inferior. In 1900, no public high school for blacks existed in the entire South. Black elementary schools, one observer reported, occupied buildings “as bad as stables.” More than a form of racial separation, segregation was one part of an all encompassing system of white domination, in which each component— disenfranchisement, unequal economic status, inferior education—reinforced the others. The point was not so much to keep the races apart as to ensure that when they came into contact with each other, whether in politics, labor relations, or social life, whites held the upper hand. For example, many blacks could be found in “whites-only” railroad cars. But they entered as servants and nurses accompanying white passengers, not as paying customers entitled to equal treatment. An elaborate social etiquette developed, with proper behavior differentiated by race. One sociologist who studied the turn-of-the-century South reported that in places of business, blacks had to stand back and wait until whites had been served. They could not raise their voices or in other ways act assertively in the presence of whites, and they had to “give way” on the streets. In shops, whites but not blacks were allowed to try on clothing. Segregation affected other groups as well as blacks. In some parts of Mississippi where Chinese laborers had been brought in to work the fields after the Civil War, three separate school systems—white, black, and Chinese—were established. In California, black, Hispanic, and American Indian children were frequently educated alongside whites, but state law required separate schools for those of “mongolian or Chinese descent.” In Texas and California, although Mexicans were legally considered “white,” they found themselves barred from many restaurants, places of entertainment, and other public facilities. The Rise of Lynching Those blacks who sought to challenge the system, or who refused to accept the demeaning behavior that was a daily feature of southern life, faced not only overwhelming political and legal power but also the threat of violent reprisal. In every year between 1883 and 1905, more than fifty persons, the vast majority of them black men, were lynched in the South—that is, murdered by a mob. Lynching continued well into the twentieth century. By mid-century, the total number of victims since 1880 had reached nearly 4,000. Some lynchings occurred secretly at night; others were advertised in advance and attracted large crowds of onlookers. Mobs engaged in activities that shocked the civilized world. In 1899, Sam Hose, a plantation laborer who killed his employer in self-defense, was brutally murdered near Newman, Georgia, before 2,000 666 ★ CHA PTER 17 Freed om ’s B ou nd ari es , a t H ome an d A bro ad 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 666 7/13/16 1:35 PM How did the liberties of blacks after 1877 give way to legal segregation across the South? A crowd at the aftermath of the lynching of Laura Nelson and her teenage son L. D. Nelson, African-American residents of Okemah, Oklahoma, in 1911. They were accused of shooting to death a deputy sheriff who had come to the Nelson home to investigate the theft of livestock. A week after being lodged in jail, they were removed by a mob and taken to the bridge. Members of the mob raped Mrs. Nelson before the lynching. The photograph was reproduced as a postcard, sold at local stores. As in most lynchings, no one was prosecuted for the crime. onlookers, some of whom arrived on a special excursion train from Atlanta. A crowd including young children watched as his executioners cut off Hose’s ears, fingers, and genitals, burned him alive, and then fought over pieces of his bones as souvenirs. Law enforcement authorities made no effort to prevent the lynching or to bring those who committed the crime to justice. Like many victims of lynchings, Hose was accused after his death of having raped a white woman. Many white southerners considered preserving the purity of white womanhood a justification for extralegal vengeance. Yet in nearly all cases, as activist Ida B. Wells argued in a newspaper editorial after a Memphis lynching in 1892, the charge of rape was a “bare lie.” Born a slave in Mississippi in 1862, Wells had become a schoolteacher and editor. Her essay condemning the lynching of three black men in Memphis led a mob to destroy her newspaper, the Memphis Free Press, while she was out of the city. Wells moved to the North, where she became the nation’s leading antilynching crusader. She bluntly insisted that given the conditions of southern blacks, the United States had no right to call itself the “land of the free.” T H E S E G R E G AT E D SO U T H ★ 667 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 667 7/13/16 1:35 PM Although many countries have witnessed outbreaks of violence against Lynchings, 1889–1918 minority racial, ethnic, or religious Number of groups, widespread lynching of individState Lynchings uals over so long a period was a phenomGeorgia 386 enon unknown elsewhere. Canada, for example, has experienced only one lynchMississippi 373 ing in its history—in 1884, when a mob Texas 335 from the United States crossed the border Louisiana 313 into British Columbia to lynch an Indian teenager who had fled after being accused Alabama 276 of murder. Arkansas 214 Years later, black writer Blyden Jackson recalled growing up in earlytwentieth-century Louisville, Kentucky, a city in many ways typical of the New South. It was a divided society. There was the world “where white folks lived . . . the Louisville of the downtown hotels, the lower floors of the big movie houses . . . the inner sanctums of offices where I could go only as a humble client or a menial custodian.” Then there was the black world, “the homes, the people, the churches, and the schools,” where “everything was black.” “I knew,” Jackson later recalled, “that there were two Louisvilles and . . . two Americas.” Table 17.1 States with over 200 Politics, Religion, and Memory As the white North and South moved toward reconciliation in the 1880s and 1890s, one cost was the abandonment of the dream of racial equality written into the laws and Constitution during Reconstruction. In popular literature and memoirs by participants, at veterans’ reunions and in public memorials, the Civil War came to be remembered as a tragic family quarrel among white Americans in which blacks had played no significant part. It was a war of “brother against brother” in which both sides fought gallantly for noble causes—local rights on the part of the South, preservation of the Union for the North. Slavery increasingly came to be viewed as a minor issue, not the war’s fundamental cause, and Reconstruction as a regrettable period of “Negro rule” when former slaves had power thrust upon them by a vindictive North. This outlook gave legitimacy to southern efforts to eliminate black voting, lest the region once again suffer the alleged “horrors” of Reconstruction. Southern governments erected monuments to the Lost Cause, a romanticized version of slavery, the Old South, and the Confederate experience. Religion was central to the development of Lost Cause mythology—it offered 668 ★ CHA PTER 17 Freed om ’s B ou nd ari es , a t H ome an d A bro ad 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 668 7/13/16 1:35 PM In what ways did the boundaries of American freedom grow narrower in this period? a way for white southerners to come to terms with defeat in the Civil War without abandoning white supremacy. The death of the Confederacy, in many sermons, was equated with the death of Christ, who gave his life for the sins of mankind. Even as white northern Protestants abandoned concern for racial justice and embraced the idea of sectional reconciliation, southern churches played a key role in keeping the values of the Old South alive by refusing to reunite with northern counterparts. In the 1840s, the Methodist and Baptist churches had divided into northern and southern branches. Methodists would not reunite until well into the twentieth century; Baptists have yet to do so. In both North and South, school history textbooks emphasized happy slaves and the evils of Reconstruction, and the role of black soldiers in winning the war was all but forgotten. When a group of black veterans attempted to participate in a Florida ceremony commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War in 1911, a white mob tore the military insignias off their jackets and drove them away. R EDR AW ING T HE BOUNDA R IES The effective nullification of the laws and amendments of Reconstruction and the reduction of blacks to the position of second-class citizens reflected nationwide patterns of thought and policy. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, American society seemed to be fracturing along lines of both class and race. The result, commented economist Simon Patten, was a widespread obsession with redrawing the boundary of freedom by identifying and excluding those unworthy of the blessings of liberty. “The South,” he wrote, “has its negro, the city has its slums. . . . The friends of American institutions fear the ignorant immigrant, and the workingman dislikes the Chinese.” As Patten suggested, many Americans embraced a more and more restricted definition of nationhood. The New Immigration and the New Nativism The 1890s witnessed a major shift in the sources of immigration to the United States. Despite the prolonged depression, 3.5 million newcomers entered the United States during the decade, seeking jobs in the industrial centers of the North and Midwest. Over half arrived not from Ireland, England, Germany, and Scandinavia, the traditional sources of immigration, but from southern and eastern Europe, especially Italy and the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. The new immigrants were widely described by native-born Americans as members of distinct “races,” whose lower level of civilization explained R E D R AWI N G T H E B O U N D A R I E S ★ 669 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 669 7/13/16 1:35 PM everything from their willingness to work for substandard wages to their supposed inborn tendency toward criminal behavior. They were “beaten men from beaten races,” wrote economist Francis Amasa Walker, representing “the worst failures in the struggle for existence.” American cities, said an Ohio newspaper, were being overrun by foreigners who “have no true appreciation of the meaning of liberty” and therefore posed a danger to democratic government. Founded in 1894 by a group of Boston professionals, the Immigration Restriction League called for reducing immigration by barring the illiterate from entering the United States. Such a measure was adopted by Congress early in 1897 but was vetoed by President Cleveland. Like the South, northern and western states experimented with ways to eliminate undesirable voters. Nearly all the states during the 1890s adopted the secret or “Australian” ballot, meant both to protect voters’ privacy and to limit the participation of illiterates (who could no longer receive help from party officials at polling places). Several states ended the nineteenth-century practice of allowing immigrants to vote before becoming citizens and adopted stringent new residency and literacy requirements. None of these measures approached the scope of black disenfranchisement in the South or the continued denial of voting rights to women. But suffrage throughout the country was increasingly becoming a privilege, not a right. Chinese Exclusion and Chinese Rights The boundaries of nationhood, expanded so dramatically in the aftermath of the Civil War, slowly contracted. Leaders of both parties expressed vicious opinions regarding immigrants from China—they were “odious, abominable, dangerous, revolting,” declared Republican leader James G. Blaine. In 1875, Congress excluded Chinese women from entering the country. California congressman Horace Page, the bill’s author, insisted that it was intended to preserve the health of white citizens by barring Chinese prostitutes. But immigration authorities enforced the Page law so as to keep out as well the wives and daughters of arriving men and of those already in the country. Beginning in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act, Congress abrogated the Burlingame Treaty ratified during Reconstruction and temporarily excluded all immigrants from China from entering the country. Although non-whites had long been barred from becoming naturalized citizens, this was the first time that race had been used to exclude an entire group of people. Congress renewed the restriction ten years later and made it permanent in 1902. Chinese in the United States were required to register with the government and carry identification papers or face deportation. Indeed, the use of photographs for personal identification first came into widespread use as a means of enforcing Chinese 670 ★ CHA PTER 17 Freed om ’s B ou nd ari es , a t H ome an d A bro ad 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 670 7/13/16 1:35 PM In what ways did the boundaries of American freedom grow narrower in this period? Beginning in 1909, as part of the enforcement of Chinese exclusion, all Chinese in the United States were required to carry a government-issued certificate, the first widespread use of photographs as proof of identity. This certificate, issued in 1924, belonged to Anna May Wong, an American-born movie star. exclusion. One Chinese activist complained that the photos, which bore a striking resemblance to “mug shots” of persons under arrest, criminalized people “innocent of any crime” and created a “national rogues’ gallery” of Chinese residents. In 2012, Congress passed a Resolution of Regret apologizing for the exclusion laws and acknowledging their role in exacerbating racial discrimination. It was sponsored by Judy Chu, a Chinese-American member of the House of Representatives from California. By 1930, because of exclusion, the number of Chinese had declined to 75,000. On the West Coast, the Chinese suffered intense discrimination and periodic mob violence. In the late-nineteenth-century West, thousands of Chinese immigrants were expelled from towns and mining camps, and mobs assaulted Chinese residences and businesses. Chinese fought these measures with methods both illegal and legal. Many refused to carry identification as a protest against what they called the “dog tag” law. Some obtained fraudulent documents that created “paper identities” showing them to be a family member of a U.S. resident, or a member of a group exempted from exclusion, and thus eligible to enter the country. After the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, some claimed their citizenship papers had been destroyed in the fire that devastated much of the city. Drawing on the legislation of the Reconstruction era, Chinese victims sued local governments for redress when their rights were violated and petitioned Congress for indemnity. Their demands for equal rights forced the state and federal courts to define the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment. For example, between 1871 and 1885, San Francisco provided no public education for Chinese children. In 1885, the California Supreme Court, in Tape v. Hurley, ordered R E D R AWI N G T H E B O U N D A R I E S ★ 671 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 671 7/13/16 1:35 PM the city to admit Chinese students to public schools. The state legislature responded by passing a law authorizing segregated education, and the city established a school for Chinese. But Joseph and Mary Tape, who had lived in the United States since the 1860s, insisted that their daughter be allowed to attend her neighborhood school like other children. “Is it a disgrace to be born a Chinese?” Mary Tape wrote. “Didn’t God make us all!” But her protest failed. Not until 1947 did California repeal the law authorizing separate schools for the Chinese. The U.S. Supreme Court also considered the legal status of ChineseAmericans. In Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), the Court unanimously ordered San Francisco to grant licenses to Chinese-operated laundries, which the city government had refused to do. To deny a person the opportunity to earn a living, the Court declared, was “intolerable in any country where freedom prevails.” Twelve years later, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment awarded citizenship to children of Chinese immigrants born on American soil. Yet the justices also affirmed the right of Congress to set racial restrictions on immigration. And in its decision in Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893), the Court authorized the federal government to expel Chinese aliens without due process of law. In his dissent, Justice David J. Brewer acknowledged that the power was now directed against a people many Americans found “obnoxious.” But “who shall say,” he continued, “it will not be exercised tomorrow against other classes and other people?” Brewer proved to be an accurate prophet. In 1904, the Court cited Fong Yue Ting in upholding a law barring anarchists from entering the United States, demonstrating how restrictions on the rights of one group can become a precedent for infringing on the rights of others. Exclusion profoundly shaped the experience of Chinese-Americans, long stigmatizing them as incapable of assimilation and justifying their isolation from mainstream society. Congress for the first time also barred groups of whites from entering the country, beginning in 1875 with prostitutes and convicted felons, and in 1882 adding “lunatics” and those likely to become a “public charge.” “Are we still a [place of refuge] for the oppressed of all nations?” wondered James B. Weaver, the Populist candidate for president in 1892. The Emergence of Booker T. Washington The social movements that had helped to expand the nineteenth-century boundaries of freedom now redefined their objectives so that they might be realized within the new economic and intellectual framework. Prominent black leaders, for example, took to emphasizing economic self-help and individual advancement into the middle class as an alternative to political agitation. 672 ★ CHA PTER 17 Freed om ’s B ou nd ari es , a t H ome an d A bro ad 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 672 7/13/16 1:35 PM In what ways did the boundaries of American freedom grow narrower in this period? Symbolizing the change was the juxtaposition, in 1895, of the death of Frederick Douglass with Booker T. Washington’s widely praised speech, titled the “Atlanta Compromise,” at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition that urged blacks to adjust to segregation and abandon agitation for civil and political rights. Born a slave in 1856, Washington had studied as a young man at Hampton Institute, Virginia. He adopted the outlook of Hampton’s founder, General Samuel Armstrong, who emphasized that obtaining farms or skilled jobs was far more important to African-Americans emerging from slavery than the rights of citizenship. Washington put this view into prac- Booker T. Washington, advocate of industrial tice when he became head of Tuskegee education and economic self-help. Institute in Alabama, a center for vocational education (education focused on training for a job rather than broad learning). In his Atlanta speech, Washington repudiated the abolitionist tradition that stressed ceaseless agitation for full equality. He urged blacks not to try to combat segregation: “In all the things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Washington advised his people to seek the assistance of white employers who, in a land racked by labor turmoil, would prefer a docile, dependable black labor force to unionized whites. Washington’s ascendancy rested in large part on his success in channeling aid from wealthy northern whites to Tuskegee and to black politicians and newspapers who backed his program. But his support in the black community also arose from a widespread sense that in the world of the late nineteenth century, frontal assaults on white power were impossible and that blacks should concentrate on building up their segregated communities. The Rise of the AFL Within the labor movement, the demise of the Knights of Labor and the ascendancy of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) during the 1890s reflected a similar shift away from a broadly reformist past to more limited goals. As R E D R AWI N G T H E B O U N D A R I E S ★ 673 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 673 7/13/16 1:35 PM VOICES OF FREEDOM From Booker T. Washington, Address at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition (1895) In 1895, the year of the death of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington delivered a speech at an exposition in Atlanta advocating a new strategy for racial progress. Blacks, he declared, should remain in the South, turn away from agitation for civil and political rights, adjust to segregation, and seek, with white cooperation, to improve their economic condition. A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal, “Water, water; we die of thirst!” The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” . . . The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River. To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are”— cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded. Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. . . . Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life. . . . No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. . . . Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities. To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes. . . . In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress. . . . The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. 674 ★ CHA PTER 17 Freed om ’s B ou nd ari es , a t H ome an d A bro ad 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 674 7/13/16 1:35 PM From W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” (1903) The most powerful critique of Washington’s program came from the pen of the black educator and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. In The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of essays on the state of American race relations, he sought to revive the tradition of agitation for basic civil, political, and educational rights. Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T. Washington. . . . The time is come when one may speak in all sincerity and utter courtesy of the mistakes and shortcomings of Mr. Washington’s career, as well as of his triumphs. . . . This is an age of unusual economic development, and Mr. Washington’s programme naturally takes an economic cast, becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life. . . . The reaction from the sentiment of wartime has given impetus to race prejudice against Negroes, and Mr. Washington withdraws many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens. In other periods of intensified prejudice all the Negro’s tendency to self assertion has been called forth; at this period a policy of submission is advocated. In the history of nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preached at such crises has been that manly self respect is worth more than lands and houses, and that a people who voluntarily surrender such respect, or cease striving for it, are not worth civilizing. Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things,—First, political power, Second, insistence on civil rights, Third, higher education of Negro youth,—and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. . . . The question then comes: Is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meagre chance for developing their exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic No. . . . [Blacks are] bound to ask of this nation three things. 1. The right to vote. 2. Civic equality. QU E ST IONS 3. The education of youth according to ability. . . . 1. What does Washington believe are the Negroes must insist continually, in main routes to black advancement? season and out of season, that voting 2. Why does Du Bois think that Washington’s is necessary to modern manhood, that outlook reflects major elements of social color discrimination is barbarism, and thought in the 1890s? that black boys need education as well as white boys. . . . By every civilized and 3. How do the two men differ in their underpeaceful method we must strive for the standing of what is required for blacks to rights which the world accords to men. enjoy genuine freedom? V O I C E S O F F R E E D O M ★ 675 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 675 7/13/16 1:35 PM the Homestead and Pullman strikes demonstrated, direct confrontations with the large corporations were likely to prove suicidal. Unions, declared Samuel Gompers, the AFL’s founder and longtime president, should not seek economic independence, pursue the Knights’ utopian dream of creating a “cooperative commonwealth,” or form independent parties with the aim of achieving power in government. Rather, the labor movement should devote itself to negotiating with employers for higher wages and better working conditions for its members. Like Washington, Gompers spoke the language of the era’s business culture. Indeed, the AFL policies he pioneered were known as “business unionism.” Gompers embraced the idea of “freedom of contract,” shrewdly turning it into an argument against interference by judges with workers’ right to organize unions. During the 1890s, union membership rebounded from its decline in the late 1880s. But at the same time, the labor movement became less and less inclusive. Abandoning the Knights’ ideal of labor solidarity, the AFL restricted membership to skilled workers—a small minority of the labor force—effectively excluding the vast majority of unskilled workers and, therefore, nearly all blacks, women, and new European immigrants. AFL membership centered on sectors of the economy like printing and building construction that were dominated by small competitive businesses. AFL unions had little presence in basic industries like steel and rubber, or in the large-scale factories that now dominated the economy. The Women’s Era Changes in the women’s movement reflected the same combination of expanding activities and narrowing boundaries. The 1890s launched what would later be called the “women’s era”—three decades during which women, although still denied the vote, enjoyed larger opportunities than in the past for economic independence and played a greater and greater role in public life. By now, nearly every state had adopted laws giving married women control over their own wages and property and the right to sign separate contracts and make separate wills. Nearly 5 million women worked for wages in 1900. Although most were young, unmarried, and concentrated in traditional jobs such as domestic service and the garment industry, a generation of college-educated women was beginning to take its place in better-paying clerical and professional positions. Through a network of women’s clubs, temperance associations, and social reform organizations, women exerted a growing influence on public affairs. Founded in 1874, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) grew to become the era’s largest female organization, with a membership by 1890 of 150,000. Under the banner of Home Protection, it moved from demanding the 676 ★ CHA PTER 17 Freed om ’s B ou nd ari es , a t H ome an d A bro ad 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 676 7/13/16 1:35 PM How did the United States emerge as an imperial power in the 1890s? prohibition of alcoholic beverages (blamed for leading men to squander their wages on drink and treat their wives abusively) to a comprehensive program of economic and political reform, including the right to vote. Women, insisted Frances Willard, the group’s president, must abandon the idea that “weakness” and dependence were their nature and join assertively in movements to change society. “A wider freedom is coming to the women of America,” she declared in an 1895 speech to male and female strikers in a Massachusetts shoe factory. “Too long has it been held that woman has no right to enter these movements. So much for the movements. Politics is the place for woman.” At the same time, the center of gravity of feminism shifted toward an outlook more in keeping with prevailing racial and ethnic norms. The earlier “feminism of equal rights,” which claimed the ballot as part of a larger transformation of women’s status, was never fully repudiated. The movement continued to argue for women’s equality in employment, education, and politics. But with increasing frequency, the native-born, middle-class women who dominated the suffrage movement claimed the vote as educated members of a “superior race.” A new generation of suffrage leaders suggested that educational and other voting qualifications did not conflict with the movement’s aims, so long as they applied equally to men and women. Immigrants and former slaves had been enfranchised with “ill-advised haste,” declared Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (created in 1890 to reunite the rival suffrage organizations formed after the Civil War). Indeed, Catt suggested, extending the vote to native-born white women would help to counteract the growing power of the “ignorant foreign vote” in the North and the dangerous potential for a second Reconstruction in the South. Elitism within the movement was reinforced when many advocates of suffrage blamed the “slum vote” for the defeat of a women’s suffrage referendum in California. In 1895, the same year that Booker T. Washington delivered his Atlanta address, the National American Woman Suffrage Association held its annual convention in that segregated city. Eight years later, the association met in New Orleans, where the delegates sang “Dixie” and listened to speeches by former Confederate officers that denounced blacks as barbarians. Like other American institutions, the organized movement for women’s suffrage had made its peace with nativism and racism. BECOMING A WORLD POWER The New Imperialism In the last years of the 1890s, the narrowed definition of nationhood was projected abroad, as the United States took its place as an imperial power on the international stage. In world history, the last quarter of the nineteenth century B E C O M IN G A W O R LD PO WE R ★ 677 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 677 7/13/16 1:35 PM is known as the age of imperialism, when rival European empires carved up large parts of the world among themselves. For most of this period, the United States remained a second-rate power. In 1880, the head of the Ottoman empire decided to close three foreign embassies to reduce expenses. He chose those in Sweden, Belgium, and the United States. In that year, the American navy was smaller than Denmark’s or Chile’s. When European powers met at the Berlin Congress of 1884–1885 to divide most of Africa among themselves, the United States attended because of its relationship with Liberia but did not sign the final agreement. Throughout the nineteenth century, large empires dominated much of the globe. After 1870, a “new imperialism” arose, dominated by European powers and Japan. Belgium, Great Britain, and France consolidated their hold on colonies in Africa, and newly unified Germany acquired colonies there as well. The British and Russians sought to increase their influence in Central Asia, and all the European powers struggled to dominate parts of China. By the early twentieth century, most of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Pacific had been divided among these empires. The justification for this expansion of imperial power was that it would bring modern “civilization” to the supposedly backward peoples of the non-European world. The natives, according to their colonial occupiers, would be instructed in Western values, labor practices, and the Christian religion. Eventually, they would be accorded the right of self-government, although no one could be sure how long this would take. In the meantime, “empire” was another word for “exploitation.” American Expansionism Territorial expansion, of course, had been a feature of American life from well before independence. But the 1890s marked a major turning point in America’s relationship with the rest of the world. Americans were increasingly aware of themselves as an emerging world power. “We are a great imperial Republic destined to exercise a controlling influence upon the actions of mankind and to affect the future of the world,” proclaimed Henry Watterson, an influential newspaper editor. Until the 1890s, American expansion had taken place on the North American continent. Ever since the Monroe Doctrine (see Chapter 10), to be sure, many Americans had considered the Western Hemisphere an American sphere of influence. There was persistent talk of acquiring Cuba, and President Grant had sought to annex the Dominican Republic, only to see the Senate reject the idea. The last territorial acquisition before the 1890s had been Alaska, purchased from Russia by Secretary of State William H. Seward in 1867, to much derision from those who could not see the purpose of American 678 ★ CHA PTER 17 Freed om ’s B ou nd ari es , a t H ome an d A bro ad 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 678 7/13/16 1:35 PM How did the United States emerge as an imperial power in the 1890s? ownership of “Seward’s icebox.” Seward, however, was mostly interested in the Aleutian Islands, a part of Alaska that stretched much of the way to Asia (see the map on p. 685) and that, he believed, could be the site of coaling stations for merchant ships plying the Pacific. Most Americans who looked overseas were interested in expanded trade, not territorial possessions. The country’s agricultural and industrial production could no longer be entirely absorbed at home. By 1890, companies like Singer Sewing Machines and John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company aggressively marketed their products abroad. Especially during economic downturns, business leaders insisted on the necessity of greater access to foreign customers. Middle-class American women, moreover, were becoming more and more desirous of clothing and food from abroad, and their demand for consumer goods such as “Oriental” fashions and exotic spices for cooking spurred the economic penetration of the Far East. The Lure of Empire One group of Americans who spread the nation’s influence overseas were religious missionaries, thousands of whom ventured abroad in the late nineteenth century to spread Christianity, prepare the world for the second coming of Christ, and uplift the poor. Inspired by Dwight Moody, a Methodist evangelist, the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions sent more than 8,000 missionaries to “bring light to heathen worlds” across the globe. Missionary work offered employment to those with few opportunities at home, including blacks and women, who made up a majority of the total. A small group of late-nineteenth-century thinkers actively promoted American expansionism, warning that the country must not allow itself to be shut out of the scramble for empire. In Our Country (1885), Josiah Strong, a prominent Congregationalist clergyman, sought to update the idea of manifest destiny. Having demonstrated their special aptitude for liberty and self-government on the North American continent, Strong announced, Anglo-Saxons should now spread their institutions and values to “inferior races” throughout the world. The economy would benefit, he insisted, since one means of civilizing “savages” was to turn them into consumers of American goods. Naval officer Alfred T. Mahan, in The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), argued that no nation could prosper without a large fleet of ships engaged in international trade, protected by a powerful navy operating from overseas bases. Mahan published his book in the same year that the census bureau announced that there was no longer a clear line separating settled from unsettled land. Thus, the frontier no longer existed. “Americans,” wrote Mahan, “must now begin to look outward.” His arguments influenced B E C O M IN G A W O R LD PO WE R ★ 679 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 679 7/13/16 1:35 PM the outlook of James G. Blaine, who served as secretary of state during Benjamin Harrison’s presidency (1889–1893). Blaine urged the president to try to acquire Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Cuba as strategic naval bases. Although independent, Hawaii was already closely tied to the United States through treaties that exempted imports of its sugar from tariff duties and provided for the establishment of an American naval base at Pearl Harbor. Hawaii’s economy was dominated by American-owned sugar plantations that employed a workforce of native islanders and Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino laborers under long-term contracts. Early in 1893, a group of American planters organized a rebellion that A cartoon in Puck, December 1, 1897, imagines overthrew the Hawaii government of the annexation of Hawaii by the United States Queen Liliuokalani. On the eve of leavas a shotgun wedding. The minister, President ing office, Harrison submitted a treaty McKinley, reads from a book entitled Annexation of annexation to the Senate. After Policy. The Hawaiian bride appears to be looking determining that a majority of Hawaifor a way to escape. Most Hawaiians did not support annexation. ians did not favor the treaty, Harrison’s successor, Grover Cleveland, withdrew it. In July 1898, in the midst of the Spanish-American War, the United States finally annexed the Hawaiian Islands. In 1993, the U.S. Congress passed, and President Bill Clinton signed, a resolution expressing regret to native Hawaiians for “the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii . . . with the participation of agents and citizens of the United States.” The depression that began in 1893 heightened the belief that a more aggressive foreign policy was necessary to stimulate American exports. In the face of social conflict and the new immigration, government and private organizations promoted a unifying patriotism. These were the years when rituals like the Pledge of Allegiance and the practice of standing for the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” came into existence. Americans had long honored the Stars and Stripes, but the “cult of the flag,” including an official Flag Day, dates to the 1890s. New, mass-circulation newspapers also promoted nationalistic sentiments. By the late 1890s, papers like William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World—dubbed the “yellow press” by their critics after the 680 ★ CHA PTER 17 Freed om ’s B ou nd ari es , a t H ome an d A bro ad 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 680 7/13/16 1:35 PM How did the United States emerge as an imperial power in the 1890s? color in which Hearst printed a popular comic strip—were selling a million copies each day by mixing sensational accounts of crime and political corruption with aggressive appeals to patriotic sentiments. The “Splendid Little War” All these factors contributed to America’s emergence as a world power in the Spanish-American War of 1898. But the immediate origins of the war lay not at home but in the long Cuban struggle for independence from Spain. Ten years of guerrilla war had followed a Cuban revolt in 1868. The movement for independence resumed in 1895. As reports circulated of widespread suffering caused by the Spanish policy of rounding up civilians and moving them into detention camps, the Cuban struggle won growing support in the United States. Demands for intervention escalated after February 15, 1898, when an explosion—probably accidental, a later investigation concluded—destroyed the American battleship U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor, with the loss of nearly 270 lives. The yellow press blamed Spain and insisted on retribution. After Spain rejected an American demand for a cease-fire on the island and eventual Cuban independence, President McKinley in April asked Congress for a declaration of war. The purpose, declared Senator Henry Teller of Colorado, was to aid Cuban patriots in their struggle for “liberty and freedom.” To underscore the government’s humanitarian intentions, Congress adopted the Teller Amendment, stating that the United States had no intention of annexing or dominating the island. Secretary of State John Hay called the Spanish-American conflict a “splendid little war.” It lasted only four months and resulted in fewer than 400 American combat deaths. Having shown little interest in imperial expansion before 1898, McKinley now embraced the idea. The war’s most decisive engagement, in fact, took place not in Cuba but at Manila Bay, a strategic harbor in the Philippine Islands in the distant Pacific Ocean. Here, on May 1, the American navy under Admiral George Dewey defeated a Spanish fleet. Soon afterward, soldiers went ashore, becoming the first American army units to engage in combat outside the Western Hemisphere. July witnessed another naval victory off Santiago, Cuba, and the landing of American troops on Cuba and Puerto Rico. Roosevelt at San Juan Hill The most highly publicized land battle of the war took place in Cuba. This was the charge up San Juan Hill, outside Santiago, by Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. An ardent expansionist, Roosevelt had long believed that a war would reinvigorate the nation’s unity and sense of manhood, which had suffered, he felt, during the 1890s. A few months shy of his fortieth birthday when B E C O M IN G A W O R LD PO WE R ★ 681 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 681 7/13/16 1:35 PM T H E S PA N I S H - A M E R I C A N WA R : T H E PA C I F I C CHINA UNITED STATES FORMOSA (Taiwan) (Japanese) Hong Kong (British) Pa ci fic O c ea n y we De Hainan T H E S PA N I S H - A M E R I C A N WA R : T H E C A R I B B E A N Luz on PHILIPPINE ISLANDS Tampa CUBA Santiago Sulu Sea 400 miles 400 kilometers Manila surrenders August 13, 1898 an 200 200 DOMINICAN REPUBLIC Caribbean Sea ta 0 JAMAICA (British) Mindan ao Ba 0 PUERTO RICO HAITI SARAWAK (British) NETHERLANDS EAST INDIES Atlan tic Ocean BAHAMAS Havana South China Sea BRITISH NORTH BORNEO San Juan Hill July 1, 1898 Spanish fleet destroyed July 3, 1898 U.S.S. Maine sunk February 1898 Manila FRENCH INDOCHINA Santiago Corregid or Dewey Manila Spanish fleet destroyed May 1, 1898 Pacific Ocean 0 0 200 200 400 miles 400 kilometers American victories American forces American naval blockade Spanish forces Spanish possessions In both the Pacific and the Caribbean, the United States achieved swift victories over Spain in the Spanish-American War. war broke out, Roosevelt resigned his post as assistant secretary of the navy to raise a volunteer cavalry unit, which rushed to Cuba to participate in the fighting. Roosevelt envisioned his unit as a cross section of American society and enrolled athletes from Ivy League colleges, western cowboys, representatives of various immigrant groups, and even some American Indians. But with the army still segregated, he excluded blacks from his regiment. Ironically, when the Rough Riders reached the top of San Juan Hill, they found that black units had preceded them—a fact Roosevelt omitted in his reports of the battle, which were widely reproduced in the popular press. His exploits made Roosevelt a national hero. He was elected governor of New York that fall and in 1900 became McKinley’s vice president. An American Empire With the backing of the yellow press, the war quickly escalated from a crusade to aid the suffering Cubans to an imperial venture that ended with the United States in possession of a small overseas empire. McKinley became convinced 682 ★ CHA PTER 17 Freed om ’s B ou nd ari es , a t H ome an d A bro ad 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 682 7/13/16 1:35 PM How did the United States emerge as an imperial power in the 1890s? that the United States could neither return the Philippines to Spain nor grant them independence, for which he believed the inhabitants unprepared. In an interview with a group of Methodist ministers, the president spoke of receiving a divine revelation that Americans had a duty to “uplift and civilize” the Filipino people and to train them for self-government. In the treaty with Spain that ended the war, the United States acquired the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the Pacific island of Guam. As for Cuba, before recognizing its independence, McKinley forced the island’s new government to approve the Platt Amendment to the new Cuban constitution (drafted by Senator Orville H. Platt of Connecticut), which authorized the United States to intervene militarily whenever it saw fit. The United States also acquired a permanent lease on naval stations in Cuba, including what is now the facility at Guantánamo Bay. The Platt Amendment passed the Cuban Congress by a single vote. Cuban patriots were terribly disappointed. José Martí had fomented revolution in Cuba from exile in the United States and then traveled to the island to take part in the uprising, only to be killed in a battle with Spanish soldiers in 1895. “To change masters is not to be free,” Martí had written. And the memory of the betrayal of 1898 would help to inspire another Cuban revolution half a century later. American interest in its new possessions had more to do with trade than gaining wealth from natural resources or large-scale American settlement. Puerto Rico and Cuba were gateways to Latin America, strategic outposts from which American naval and commercial power could be projected throughout the hemisphere. The Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii lay astride shipping routes to the markets of Japan and China. In 1899, soon after the end of the Spanish-American War, Secretary of State John Hay announced the Open Door Policy, demanding that European powers that had recently divided China into commercial spheres of influence grant equal access to American exports. The Open Door referred to the free movement of goods and money, not people. Even as the United States banned the immigration of Chinese into this country, it insisted on access to the markets and investment opportunities of Asia. The Philippine War Many Cubans, Filipinos, and Puerto Ricans had welcomed American intervention as a way of breaking Spain’s long hold on these colonies. Large planters looked forward to greater access to American markets, and local elites hoped that the American presence would fend off radical changes proposed by rebellious nationalist movements. Nationalists and labor leaders admired America’s democratic ideals and believed that American participation in the destruction of Spanish rule would lead to social reform and political self-government. But the American determination to exercise continued control, direct or indirect, led to a rapid change in local opinion, nowhere more so than in the B E C O M IN G A W O R LD PO WE R ★ 683 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 683 7/13/16 1:35 PM Philippines. Filipinos had been fighting a war against Spain since 1896. After Dewey’s victory at Manila Bay, their leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, established a provisional government with a constitution modeled on that of the United States. But once McKinley decided to retain possession of the islands, the Filipino movement turned against the United States. The result was a second war, far longer (it lasted from 1899 to 1903) and bloodier (it cost the lives of more than 100,000 Filipinos and 4,200 Americans) than the Spanish-American conflict. Today, the Philippine War is perhaps the least remembered of all American wars. At the time, however, it was closely followed and widely debated in the United States. Both sides committed atrocities. Insurgents killed Filipinos who cooperated with the Americans. The U.S. Army burned villages and moved the inhabitants into camps where thousands perished of disease, and launched a widespread campaign of torture, including the infamous “water cure” or simulated drowning, later revived in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars of the 21st century and known as waterboarding. Press reports of these practices tarnished the nation’s self-image as liberators. “We do not intend to free the people of the Philippines,” complained Mark Twain. “We have gone there to conquer.” The McKinley administration justified its policies on the grounds that its aim was to “uplift and civilize and Christianize” the Filipinos (although most residents of the islands were already Roman Catholics). William Howard Taft, who became governor-general of the Philippines in 1901, believed it might take a century to raise Filipinos to the condition where they could appreciate “what Anglo-Saxon liberty is.” Once in control of the Philippines, the colonial administration took seriously the idea of modernizing the islands. It expanded railroads and harbors, brought in American schoolteachers and public health officials, and sought to modernize agriculture (although efforts to persuade local farmers to substitute corn for rice ran afoul of the Filipino climate and cultural traditions). The United States, said President McKinley, had an obligation to its “little brown brothers.” Yet in all the new possessions, American policies tended to serve the interests of land-based local elites—native-born landowners in the Philippines, American sugar planters in Hawaii and Puerto Rico—and such policies bequeathed enduring poverty to the majority of the rural population. Under American rule, Puerto Rico, previously an island of diversified small farmers, became a low-wage plantation economy controlled by absentee corporations. By the 1920s, its residents were among the poorest in the entire Caribbean. Citizens or Subjects? American rule also brought with it American racial attitudes. In an 1899 poem, the British writer Rudyard Kipling urged the United States to take up the “white man’s burden” of imperialism. American proponents of empire agreed that the 684 ★ CHA PTER 17 Freed om ’s B ou nd ari es , a t H ome an d A bro ad 225426_17_649-690_r2_as.indd 684 7/13/16 1:35 PM How did the United States emerge as an imperial power in the 1890s? AMERICAN EMPIRE, 1898 Alaska (purchased from Russia, 1867) RUSSIAN EMPIRE Bering Strait CANADA Aleutian Islands (1867) OUTER MONGOLIA KOREA CHINA UNITED STATES JAPAN Philippines (ceded by Spain after Spanish-American War, 1898) Midway Islands (annexed 1867) Hawaiian Islands (annexed 1898) Wake Island (annexed 1898) Guam (ceded by Spain after Spanish-American War, 1898) MEXICO A t la n t i c O c e an Puerto Rico (ceded by Spain, 1898) Pa c i f i c O c e an I n d ia n Ocean American Samoa (annexed 1899) 0 0 1,000 2,000 miles 1,000 2,000 kilometers United States territory As a result of the Spanish-American War, the United States became the ruler of a far-flung overseas empire. domination of non-white peoples by whites formed part of the progress of civilization. Among the soldiers sent to the Philippines to fight Aguinaldo were a number of black regiments. Their letters from the front suggested that American atrocities arose from white troops applying to the Filipino population the same “treatment for colored peoples” practiced at home. America’s triumphant entry into the ranks of imperial powers sparked an intense debate over the relationship among political democracy, race, and American citizenship. The American system of government had no provision for permanent colonies. The right of every people to self-government was one of the main principles of the Declaration of Independence. The idea of an “empire of liberty” assumed that new territories would eventually be admitted as equal states and their residents would...
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