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
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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
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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
•
•
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.”
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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?
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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