Debates over gender and sexuality have been central to American politics since the days of the Founding Fathers. At stake have been conflicting definitions of men’s and women’s proper roles, both in the family and in relation to state and nation. These disputes are significant, in part, for their enduring rhetorical appeal: few politicians have sought to depict themselves as “antifamily,” while many have criticized their male opponents as weak and effeminate or, conversely, violent and piratical. In a deeper sense, recurring conflicts over public policy—over the outcome of politics—have also had crucial gender dimensions. Over two centuries, the accepted model of American family life moved from a patriarchal model to one centered on domesticity and women’s indirect moral influence, then gradually, in the twentieth century, toward an egalitarian ideal. Political parties and movements not only responded to these long-term shifts, they helped articulate and advance them.
The centrality of aggressive masculinity in U.S. empire building has had a critical impact on the nation’s politics at many junctures, from at least the 1840s through the cold war. Masculine “toughness” has served as a potent rallying cry for military mobilization and, at moments of crisis, has proven difficult for both male and female peace advocates to counter. Consistently, calls for manliness have been racially charged, a phenomenon that has had clear domestic racial parallels in, for example, the era of “Redemption,” when Southern white supremacists called upon white men to overthrow Reconstruction by armed force, in the name of protecting white womanhood. Women, meanwhile, have steadily gained a place within party organizations and electoral campaigns beginning as early as the antebellum era. But women remain a minority among convention delegates, candidates, and decision makers. Exclusion from power has prompted politically active women to develop a rich array of extrapartisan strategies and organizations. Both inside and outside the parties, women have often cultivated a politics of moral zeal that has drawn upon domestic ideology, perceptions of female purity and selflessness, and women’s very real status as political outsiders.
The American Revolution, grounded in an Enlightenment vision of human equality, opened new possibilities for both men and women in politics. The victory of the new United States established the world’s first modern republic, with political power vested in the individual citizen. Americans viewed voters’ “civic virtue” as crucial for the nation’s survival. Though the vast majority of Americans considered citizenship a male prerogative, prominent thinkers like Judith Sargent Murray argued that American women had a special role to play in promoting civic virtue. As “republican mothers,” they should educate themselves and take an interest in political affairs, in order to raise their sons to be virtuous citizens and their daughters to become republican mothers in the next generation.
With suffrage confined at first to property-holding white men (except for a brief extension of the franchise to propertied women in New Jersey), the very core of American politics lay in a gentlemen’s code of honor. Within that code, hierarchies of wealth, family connections, and reputation pitted men against one another. Early American politics relied on personal networks of friendship, obligation, and gossip. When a man’s honor was attacked, political duels were not uncommon. While a few women became partisan writers and editors, most who exercised political influence did so informally, through social networks. As parties developed, the more elite-based Federalists proved particularly welcoming to female participation in campaign work. While Democratic-Republicans achieved a more radical vision in class terms, granting full citizenship rights to nonpropertied men by the 1820s, they were hostile to women’s participation. The fading of Revolutionary radicalism and the Federalist Party’s demise caused women’s place in politics to decline by the 1810s.
The election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 ushered in a vibrant era of mass-based party politics. Drawing first on Jackson’s public persona as a military hero and aggressive Indian fighter, Democrats celebrated a “white man’s democracy” with overt gender dimensions as well as racial ones: they defended the authority of white men over all dependents in their households, including wives, children, bound laborers, and slaves. Patriarchal manhood helped unite Democrats across class and regional lines and informed the party’s small-government stance. Consistently, Democrats attacked “paternalistic” government policies as intrusions on the rights of white male citizens. During the Jacksonian era, when most states extended suffrage to all white men, politicians gradually began to cultivate a folksy style and depict themselves as “men of the people.” Slaveholding complicated this pattern in the South, where political power continued to be equated with mastery, and thus to some extent with wealth. In a region that disciplined labor through direct, brutal violence rather than through the exigencies of survival through wage work, duels and physical violence persisted longer than in the North.
In the meantime, a powerful domestic ideology began to emerge in the growing northern cities and factory towns. Increasingly, prosperous urban men worked outside the home, while wives and mothers, responsible for a domestic space that had allegedly been stripped of its productive role, came to be seen as conservators of morality and noncommercial values. For men, domesticity prescribed temperance, self-control, and deference to womanly moral influence. Political conflicts over such issues emerged as early as 1828, when Jackson’s opponents caricatured him as a violent man, prey to the vices of lust and liquor, and alleged that he had seduced his wife Rachel into bigamy. After Rachel’s death, Jackson’s opponents lamented that she could no longer “control the violence of his temper” or serve as a “restraining and benign influence” over the new president. Domesticity quickly spread beyond the northern urban middle classes to many other sectors of American society. It filtered into politics, predominantly through the vehicles of the Whig and Republican parties, and it is hard to overemphasize its significance in American politics thereafter. Seeking to build a “benevolent empire” for reform, Whigs embraced an ideal of manly restraint and a cautious acceptance of indirect female influence in the public sphere. Domesticity had overt class dimensions: Whigs criticized undisciplined, poor men who allegedly drank, brawled, and failed to support their families. By the late 1840s, such critiques included a strong streak of anti-Irish prejudice. The Democrats, meanwhile, championed working-class manhood and largely opposed and ridiculed female political participation.
By the 1840s and 1850s, race and gender became intertwined in an array of political issues, as Americans debated Manifest Destiny and the seizure of lands from native peoples. Democrats, in particular, justified military aggression through appeals to manhood, urging “Anglo-Saxon” men to seek their destinies on the frontier and in Latin America. Such arguments had special appeal for Southerners, who sought to expand the empire of slavery, and for white working-class men, many of whom were losing ground in the new commercial economy. On the other hand, proponents of masculine restraint and self-control, who tended to be Whigs, deplored violent conquest and criticized expansionists as bullies and pirates.
Gendered conflicts between an aggressive, racialized manhood on the Democratic side and restrained manhood and domesticity among their opponents also played a central role in debates over slavery. Radical abolitionists, strongly committed to domesticity, emphasized slavery’s perversion of both white and black family life. The Liberty Party and Free Soil Party carried these ideas into the electoral arena, with female editors playing a major role in shaping arguments against slavery. While Free Soil men depicted themselves as moderate compromisers who merely sought to prevent the extension of slavery into federal territories, Free Soil women took the role of moral crusaders: outsiders demanding immediate, unconditional abolition. At the same time, the most radical abolitionists began to call for equal rights for women. These women’s rights abolitionists began to move beyond domesticity, critiquing its glorification of “women’s sphere” and arguing that female citizens had not only a right but a duty to act as public speakers, writers, and voters.
In gender terms, meanwhile, the new Republican Party of the 1850s inherited and expanded the Whigs’ passion for domesticity. Republican leaders drew on the gendered rhetoric of Free Soil men, for example, to oppose extension of slavery into the territories. In some areas, Republicans also attacked immigrant men for their supposed violence and intemperance, arguments that were also made in the 1850s by the short-lived American (or Know-Nothing) Party. Across the North, Midwest, and West, Republicans vigorously attacked the Mormon practice of plural marriage. The party’s first presidential candidate, John Frémont, was hailed as “Jessie’s choice” because his young and attractive wife, Jessie Benton Frémont, was rumored to have antislavery sympathies. Republicans simultaneously denounced Frémont’s opponent, James Buchanan, as an aging bachelor and possibly a homosexual.
During and after the Civil War, the rise to power of the Republican Party brought a revolution in many aspects of national politics, including gendered political values. As part of their commitment to expanded government power, Republicans vested manhood in the state rather than in the authority of autonomous, patriarchal heads of household, as Democrats had done. Party leaders and rank-and-file members celebrated both Union victory and emancipation as defeats for a violent, tyrannical aristocracy of slaveholders. Though few yet conceived of a modern welfare state, they did lay the foundations for that development in a modest “breadwinner” state. For example, Republicans provided generous Union pensions to widows and disabled Union veterans, and after 1890 to all Union veterans, in legislation that modestly prefigured Social Security. Republicans also defended their economic policies—especially high protective tariffs—on the grounds that they extended domesticity to millions of Americans, helping working-class breadwinners earn a family wage to support their wives and children.
Republicans sought to extend or enforce domesticity among African Americans and native peoples, viewing male breadwinning and female domesticity as the keys to “race uplift” and civilization. Many freedmen and freedwomen in fact embraced domesticity, and African American editors and political leaders preached the gospel of homemaking for women and temperance and self-discipline for men. The late nineteenth century thus represented a kind of apex of political domesticity, exemplified by such models of hearthside happiness as First Lady Lucy Webb Hayes, a temperance advocate who was widely viewed as the force behind her husband’s ban on liquor at the White House. The term first lady itself, as a semiofficial title for the president’s wife, came into use near the end of the Civil War, a sign of the increasing symbolic importance of presidents’ wives and families.
But the patriarchal manhood of the antebellum era did not remain defeated after the Civil War, and by 1900 Republicans also proved susceptible to its appeal. It reemerged most obviously in the South, as ex-Confederates and their allies engineered the violent overthrow of Reconstruction. In so doing, they appealed directly to white men in gendered terms, claiming falsely that enfranchised black men were responsible for an epidemic of rape against white women. The extension of voting rights to African American men was frequently cited as the alleged cause of interracial rape, suggesting the continued political and psychological link that many men drew between voting, sexuality, and men’s control over their female dependents. (Several historians have observed that the struggle over “long ballots” versus “short ballots” in this era had phallic overtones; party loyalists who organized campaign pole raisings celebrated the rapidity with which they raised their poles, and they often accused opponents of not being able to raise their poles or failing to keep them “in an upright position.”)
“Martial manhood” also reemerged in the Spanish-American War, especially in the figure of Theodore Roosevelt. Yet, departing from the antebellum model of martial manhood, turn-of-the-century imperialists also gave prominent attention to the role of white women as civilizers. They argued that inferior races needed to see the example set by white Christian wives and mothers, in order to adopt domesticity and uplift themselves. Such arguments were advanced not only by government agents in the U.S.-occupied Philippines but on Indian reservations, where missionaries and agents tried to force Native Americans to conform to the model of male breadwinning and female domesticity.
The era of Republican dominance paved the way for many other uses of domesticity in politics. The mantle of moral and economic reform passed first to the Prohibition and Populist parties, both of which called for women’s political rights while appealing for Americans to “protect the home” by increasing government intervention in the economy. Proposals to protect, support, or supplement family incomes abounded between the Civil War and the New Deal, especially during the Progressive Era. These were often championed by coalitions of politically active women who appealed to their maternal roles as justification to engage in “municipal housekeeping.” After the Civil War, these powerful grassroots women’s movements became fixtures in national politics. The most popular, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), counted over a million members at its peak and advanced an explicitly nativist, Christian agenda with its appeal for women to work for “God and Home and Native Land.” Despite its initial focus on liquor, the WCTU undertook an array of reform activities, from soup kitchens to the creation of kindergartens; its charismatic leader, Frances Willard, became a strong ally of labor and advocate for the eight-hour workday.
Between 1865 and 1920, women’s clubs and missionary societies joined the chorus of female-led groups active in politics. Such groups succeeded, for example, in getting legislators to raise the age of sexual consent in many states, which had been as low as 10 years of age in 14 states and 7 in Delaware. They also helped pass laws to restrict women’s working hours and grant mothers’ pensions for “deserving” women who found themselves bereft of a breadwinner. Reformers succeeded in adding a Women’s Bureau and Children’s Bureau to the national Department of Labor. The broad scope of these agencies’ work is suggested by the mandate Congress gave the Children’s Bureau upon its creation in 1912. The bureau was instructed to investigate child labor and working conditions and to make recommendations on “infant mortality, the birth-rate, orphanages, juvenile courts, desertion, dangerous occupations, and accidents and diseases of children.”
The woman suffrage movement, still small at the end of the Civil War, flourished in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Women began voting in some western states and territories as early as 1869, and by the early 1910s, most women in states west of the Mississippi had achieved full suffrage. By that same decade, suffrage had become a mainstream cause with widespread support across class and regional lines. The exception, unsurprisingly, was in the South, where suffragists made little headway even when they argued that white women’s votes would help sustain white supremacy. When the federal woman’s suffrage amendment achieved ratification in 1921, it did so with the support of only one legislature in an ex-Confederate state—that of Tennessee.
The Progressive Era thus offered new opportunities for women in the public sphere, including full voting rights, but it also vividly demonstrated the limits of women’s power, especially on subjects such as foreign policy, where calls to martial manhood still had a powerful appeal. When the United States entered World War I, proponents of war mobilization fiercely attacked women who worked for disarmament and arbitration through groups like the Woman’s Peace Party. (Theodore Roosevelt, still on the national scene, declared that the place for such women was “in China—or by preference in a harem—and not in the United States.”) At the same time, reformers who appealed for government action on the basis of motherhood and domesticity reinscribed the very outsider status that made it hard for women to implement laws in the first place.
With the passage of national woman suffrage after World War I, candidates at all levels faced new pressures to tailor their appeals to both women and men. Anxious party leaders began including women more fully in their organizations and worked for passage of national Prohibition. In cities like Chicago, African American women who had worked for racial justice used their new clout as voters to bring pressure for change. Many candidates appealed to women as housekeepers and shoppers. Herbert Hoover, who had coordinated domestic conservation and food aid during and after World War I appealed directly to female voters. In the 1928 campaign, Republicans recruited “Hoover Hostesses” who invited friends into their homes to hear Hoover’s radio campaign speeches.
But equality in voting and representation proved elusive despite the achievement of suffrage. Though women accounted for over half the U.S. population, their voting turnout was low and did not exceed 50 percent until 1980. Those women who did vote were, despite suffragists’ hopes, divided along geographic, economic, racial, and religious lines. Advancement of women’s rights suffered a serious blow in the 1920s in struggles over the first proposed equal rights amendment (ERA). Progressive reformers who had achieved gender-based protective labor legislation limiting women’s working hours, helped defeat the ERA, fearing it would undermine such laws. Meanwhile, despite suffrage, many states refused to permit women to serve on juries, and an array of other discriminatory practices remained legal.
The onset of the Great Depression intensified conflicts between the old ideal of domesticity and the realities of an increasingly urban and industrial society. It became obvious in the 1930s that, through no fault of their own, millions of men could not support their families. The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 firmly established Democrats as the party of government activism, and reformers who sought to protect workers and families gained tremendous clout. The substantial welfare initiatives of the New Deal followed earlier gendered patterns. Programs that aided breadwinners, such as Social Security, provided direct entitlements, while mothers who sought government support had to prove their “moral fitness” to receive aid. Gender and racial exclusion moved, again, in tandem: at the insistence of southern Democrats in Congress, the Social Security Act excluded agricultural and domestic workers, who in the South were overwhelmingly black. African American women thus suffered a double exclusion, both from welfare programs that denied coverage to most black workers and from a “breadwinner model” of government aid that refused to recognize women as wage earners with equal status to men.
Despite Americans’ continued faith in the domestic ideal and their widespread blindness or indifference to the needs of wage-earning women, industrialization and urbanization kept issues of sexuality and gender in the political arena. The percentage of married women working outside the home rose to 30 percent by 1960, as women entered the paid workforce in enormous numbers. Urban neighborhoods witnessed a day-care crisis. Unequal pay, gender-segregated job markets, glass ceilings, and sexual harassment gained increasing recognition among working women but negligible attention from political leaders. Instead, Americans publicly celebrated women’s “return to domesticity” during the baby boom era. But the number of women working outside the home, including married women with children, continued to climb, and grassroots women’s organizations, along with their allies in government agencies like the Women’s Bureau, kept alive issues of women’s rights.
These efforts culminated in President John F. Kennedy’s appointment of a Presidential Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW), which played a high-profile role in calling attention to women’s issues between 1961 and 1963. The commission, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, considered numerous legislative measures to enhance women’s rights. Members of the PCSW, galvanized by their experiences on the commission, played a central role in the creation of the National Organization of Women (NOW) in 1966. In the meantime, when Congress debated the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a conservative southern representative tried to derail the bill by adding language that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex; the law passed with this language included, providing a basis for federal prosecution of both race- and gender-based discrimination. By the time NOW came into existence, most states had created their own commissions to investigate such issues as domestic violence, unequal pay, female poverty, and sexual harassment in the workplace.
Urgent domestic needs had been long neglected, in part, because the United States had remained on a war footing after the defeat of Germany and Japan. Fear of Soviet power abroad and communism at home had a chilling effect on both political dissent and domestic reform. Cold war politicians, like their predecessors who advocated aggressive exploits on the frontier or overseas, perceived a need for “toughness” in both their public stances and internal decision making. Belligerent anticommunism ran as a connecting thread through a long line of otherwise diverse administrations during the cold war, from that of Harry Truman through those of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Like the Woman’s Peace Party of the 1910s, antinuclear and peace advocates regularly faced charges that they were effeminate or “soft.” The civil rights movement offered a strikingly different model of manhood, centered on courageous nonviolence. The movement achieved early successes in the 1960s through appeals to Christian theology and principled civil disobedience. By late in that decade, however, poverty and growing anger among younger, poor urban African Americans, as well as growing unrest over American militarism abroad, led to the rise of a militant Black Power stance. Black Power advocates critiqued America’s involvement in Vietnam, identified with postcolonial black nationalists in Africa, and urged black men to engage in aggressive self-defense. Like earlier African American men, civil rights leaders struggled between seeking access to the masculine prerogatives of American politics and critiquing the highly racialized prerogatives and distinctive models of political manhood.
By the 1970s, national grassroots coalitions were pressuring politicians to address the long-deferred issues of day care and workplace equity as well as sex education, contraception, and abortion rights. Despite the political uses of domesticity, a majority of American families had never achieved the “domestic ideal” of a male breadwinner whose earnings enabled his wife to refrain from productive labor. Feminists proposed sweeping measures to address poverty and the needs of families with children, as well as a vigorous campaign to end discrimination against women. Feminism faced its most crucial public test over the second equal rights amendment, which failed to win ratification by a margin of only one state. Opponents of the ERA rallied on the basis of domesticity, arguing that the ERA would weaken families, undermine women’s central identities as wives and mothers, usher in a military draft for women, and lead to such unacceptable innovations as unisex toilets.
In the decades that followed, preservation of traditional gender roles remained a central concern of many conservatives who feared a breakdown of older social mores, especially domesticity. These arguments played a critical role in the rise of the New Right, but the women who joined this movement were hardly united. One group, libertarian women, emphasized the protection of individual rights; like patriarchal Democrats of the antebellum years, they mistrusted government intrusion, but they applied that argument to themselves as women, rather than to men’s prerogatives as household heads. The second group, evangelical or social conservatives, focused on enforcing traditional marriage laws, ending abortion, and opposing homosexuality. In some ways these two groups recapitulated gendered political divisions that had emerged in the 1920s, over whether government should protect women or leave them alone, and whether “free markets” or antidiscrimination laws would best ensure women a level playing field.
Probably due to the impact of feminism by the 1980s, social scientists began to identify for the first time differences in the voting patterns of women and men. The so-called gender gap actually appeared less often on obviously gender-based issues such as abortion and marriage law and more often on issues of social welfare and national security. From the Reagan era onward, more women than men favored antipoverty initiatives, opposed the death penalty, and sought reductions in military spending. Another long-term change was the growing success of the gay rights movement. Men and women who identified themselves as gay or lesbian not only gained increasing public acceptance, but they began to run as political candidates and win. While the prospect of gay marriage provoked many of the same anxieties and debates that domesticity did in an earlier era, the emergence of gays and lesbians into public life was one of the clear triumphs of the movement for equal gender rights.
Certain themes have emerged repeatedly in the history of gender and sexuality in American politics. On the domestic front, the parties that have sought more robust government intervention in the economy (Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans), and in the twentieth century enhanced social welfare programs (most often Democrats), have tended to seek women’s support and participation more eagerly than their opponents—whichever party has been, at that moment, resisting the growth of domestic government power. Meanwhile, defense of the patriarchal family model has consistently been associated with white supremacy and racialized nationalism in both domestic and foreign affairs. With a few notable exceptions, parties that have advocated an aggressive foreign policy have tended to be those less committed to government intervention in the domestic economy and on behalf of social welfare.
This perhaps explains why the cause of women’s rights advanced rapidly after the Civil War and World War I, when women demonstrated that, in times of extreme national crisis, they had shown courage and patriotism—a kind of “martial womanhood.” In both the Civil War and the civil rights era, proto-feminism and feminism emerged out of grassroots movements for racial justice, and the party more sympathetic to African American rights has tended to show more sympathy to women’s rights, as well.
At critical junctures, women have mobilized on behalf of political causes ranging from “free soil” to Prohibition and for and against equal rights amendments in the 1920s and 1970s. As longtime outsiders to formal politics, women frequently adopted the stance of moral crusaders, from Free Soil women’s call for immediate and unconditional abolition, to the temperance movement’s call to “protect the home.” Since 1920, tensions between women’s new status as partial insiders and the power they have long drawn from domesticity and their “outsider” status have continued to resonate among both feminists and neoconservatives. Calls to preserve domesticity and “protect the home” still arise in debates over such issues as day-care funding, abortion, and gay marriage.
Among the many implications of gender and sexuality in American politics is the continuing struggle of public officials and their families to reconcile the realities of political life with the domestic ideal handed down from the nineteenth century. Americans still want their political leaders to display normative gender behavior: no unmarried man became a major presidential candidate in the twentieth century, and marital fidelity has long been a presumed measure of a president’s character. The public exposure and resignation of New Jersey governor James McGreevy in 2004, when he revealed that he was gay, suggest that old assumptions had not vanished. Even when polls indicate that a majority of voters are not concerned about private sexual matters—as in the celebrated case of President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky—such perceived misbehavior remains a powerful tool for opponents when it becomes publicly known.
Meanwhile, political wives are pressured to demonstrate proper wifely and motherly qualities, and Americans continue to show profound ambivalence over the appropriate role for First Ladies. Eleanor Roosevelt served as a transitional figure, playing an influential part in internal debates during her husband’s presidency but achieving her greatest political impact after his death. Later First Ladies who took outspoken political positions included Betty Ford, who supported the equal rights amendment and was widely admired for her frankness about her personal struggles with drug dependency and breast cancer. Former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton pursued a political career, as a U.S. Senator and then as a leading presidential candidate in 2008.
During the Ohio Democratic primary in the 2008 race, Hillary Clinton’s campaign produced an advertisement depicting a sleeping white woman and her children, imperiled by an unseen force. Viewers were invited to ask themselves, when such dangers loomed, who should answer the “red telephone” in the White House. It is both ironic and significant that such an ad—a staple of cold war political campaigns, in its appeal to both executive toughness and white female vulnerability—should resurface in the campaign of the first woman to become a major presidential candidate. The episode, like others in recent years, suggests that gender and sexuality, as well as the underlying hopes and fears on which those constructions rest, will continue to play a central role in both political campaigns and public policy.
See also homosexuality; race and politics; woman suffrage.
FURTHER READING. Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era, 1997; Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic, 2001; Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935, 1995; Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire, 2005; Melanie Gustafson, Kristie Miller, and Elisabeth Israels Perry, We Have Come to Stay: American Women and Political Parties, 1880–1960, 1999; Kirstin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, 1998; Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935, 1991; Michael D. Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics, 2003; Catherine E. Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right, 2006; Louise A. Tilly and Patricia Gurin, eds., Women, Politics, and Change, 1990; Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia, 1998; Lois Duke Whitaker, Voting the Gender Gap, 2007; Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic, 2007.
REBECCA EDWARDS
The Gilded Age, a descriptive label for the period from the end of Reconstruction to the start of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency in 1901, came into general use during the middle of the twentieth century. In political history these decades carry a pejorative connotation that has persisted despite much scholarly work on the complexity of the period’s public life. Broadly speaking, the Gilded Age is regarded as a time when politicians failed to engage the issues of industrialism, urbanization, and agricultural discontent. Instead, so the argument runs, Republicans and Democrats wasted their time and energies on such peripheral issues as the protective tariff and civil service. By 1901, according to this interpretation, the United States was no better off than it had been when Ulysses S. Grant left the presidency in March 1877.
Historical scholarship has challenged this pejorative view of the late nineteenth century, but the stereotype remains powerful. The term Gilded Age itself derives from a novel of the same name by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, published in 1873, that depicted economic life as a speculative excess where fraud and chicanery abounded. More than half a century later, the phrase seemed to capture the essence of the period between Reconstruction and the emergence of the reform spirit called progressivism.
Americans faced daunting challenges in the fast-moving era of the Gilded Age. The United States industrialized, became more urban, settled the West, and expanded overseas. Racism marred the way citizens interacted. Workers, farmers, and city dwellers faced major inequities and struggled to exist on meager salaries. Ample social problems demanded solutions, and politicians struggled to find useful answers to new dilemmas.
But the Gilded Age, in the minds of its critics, had a larger failing. The men in power and the electorate who supported them should have known that future generations would criticize the record of those in authority between 1877 and 1901. The centers of power in the society should have adopted the reform measures of the New Deal half a century before the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. This lack of prescience about the direction of American life created, with deliberation and malice, an unjust society at the end of the nineteenth century.
There is much that is unhistorical about these generalizations. By projecting twentieth-century assumptions back to nineteenth-century Americans, critics have imposed on the Gilded Age the impossible task of correctly predicting the future. In the process, the real contributions and limitations of national politics during these years have become obscured. Much of the way Americans view politics now stems from the evolution of public life after 1877. When the polemical aspects of the era are removed, the political importance of the Gilded Age can be judged with more accuracy.
The most salient features of this time period were the high degree of voter involvement in politics and the relatively even balance of the two major parties. The figures indicating a substantial level of electoral participation are striking. Turnout in state, congressional, and presidential contests far exceeded what was common during the twentieth century. In 1896, when William McKinley ran against William Jennings Bryan, some 78 percent of eligible voters outside of the South cast ballots. Of course, African Americans, Hispanics, and women were denied the right to vote throughout much of the country. (It is worth noting that African American men had been granted the right to vote by the Fifteenth Amendment, but that right had been stripped away in a campaign of terror and disenfranchisement culminating in the 1890s. Those African American men who managed to continue to vote through the end of the century almost all supported the Republican Party.) Nonetheless, the extent of voter mobilization during the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s reflected the strong partisan identifications among Americans.
Within this political universe, Democrats and Republicans battled on equal terms. Neither party achieved an absolute majority in the four contests for president from 1880 through 1892. On Capitol Hill, it was rare for a single party to control both houses (though it did occur on four occasions from 1874 to 1896). In the battleground states of the Middle West, elections often turned on a small percentage of the vote, with the outcome hinging on which party’s adherents came to the polls on voting day. Participants at the time believed that the fate of the nation turned on the outcome of voting.
During the Gilded Age, Americans debated with passion an issue that had dominated domestic politics for most of the century: the extent to which government should promote the growth of the economy. The question of regulating the economy and society through government action was not yet a mainstream concern. But the two major parties took positions on the questions at odds with modern perceptions of their ideological differences.
The Republicans were then the party of an active government. They believed that protective tariffs to develop native industries could diffuse the benefits of a prosperous economy through all levels of society. In the arguments of men such as James G. Blaine and William McKinley, the tariff fused economic appeals with nationalistic pride. The doctrine served the interests of the business community, but protectionism also appealed to labor, small business, and farmers who faced competition from Mexico and Canada. For some adherents, the tariff acquired an almost religious significance.
Republican activism carried over into other areas of economic and cultural life. The party favored subsidies to railroads, land grants to farmers, and federal support of public education. It put in place an elaborate, expanding, and expensive program of pension payments to Civil War veterans and their families. Pensions became one of the largest expenditures of the federal government. While there were regional differences about money and banking policy, the Grand Old Party (as it became known) endorsed the gold standard and opposed inflation. On social issues, most Republicans favored laws against entertainment on the Sabbath, supported the prohibition of alcohol, and sought to have public schools teach all students in English. These positions aroused opposition from immigrant groups. Above all, the Republicans saw themselves as the party of progress and the Democrats as advocates of obstruction.
The Democratic Party (or the Democracy as it was often called) still believed in the core principles that Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson had advanced earlier in the century. The smaller the government and the closer to the people in its operations the better off the country would be. Democrats stood for the rights of the states against the power of the federal government. Since the South was a major bastion of Democratic strength in elections, the ability of white Southerners to maintain racial supremacy was a key element in the appeal of “the party of the fathers.” Democrats also supported a smaller government role in the cultural issues of Prohibition and Sunday closings that Republicans favored.
On the tariff, the Democrats identified with the interest of consumers, doubted the constitutionality of customs duties, and stood for freer trade. The most that the party would accept as an official doctrine was “a tariff for revenue only.” Since Democrats wanted the government to remain small, in practice, they believed that tariff rates should be as low as possible. Some elements of the party in industrial states favored a degree of protection. Nonetheless, the tariff issue represented a major dividing line between the parties throughout these years.
With the Civil War and Reconstruction a tangible memory for most politicians, the two parties reflected the lingering consequences of that conflict. The Republicans stood for political equality for African Americans, although their fervor for that position waned as the years passed. By the 1890s, many members of the Grand Old Party (GOP) believed that the racial issues of the war and its aftermath should be muted or abandoned.
The Democrats, on the other hand, were unapologetic champions of white domination in the South. A belief in states’ rights and the rule of white men was a quasi-religious conviction among southern Democrats. These party members tolerated the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Amendment because they had no choice. In their true convictions, they believed that all such legislation should be repealed. As a result, African Americans had at most a marginal position in the public life of the Gilded Age.
Both major parties felt the pressure from reform elements in society to professionalize politics and reduce the impact of partisanship. Calls for changing the ways in which public officials were chosen for government offices became known as civil service reform, and the idea gained popularity in the 1870s and early 1880s. The Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883 began the process of diminishing the role of parties in the appointment process.
Stalemate characterized the first ten years of the Gilded Age. The Republicans elected Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 over Samuel J. Tilden in a disputed contest that reflected the even balance between the parties nationally. Hayes served one reasonably successful term and was succeeded by James A. Garfield, who carried the Republicans to victory in 1880. The president’s assassination in the summer of 1881 put Chester Alan Arthur in the White House. After 24 years of successful elections to office, the Republicans were losing their ascendancy in national politics. They nominated their most popular leader, James G. Blaine, in 1884. But the taint of scandal that surrounded him put their chances in serious doubt.
The Democrats selected the governor of New York, Grover Cleveland, to oppose Blaine. In an election notable for its emphasis on personal issues, such as whether Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child and whether Blaine was corrupt, the Democrats won in a close vote. Cleveland served a solid if undistinguished term and faced uncertain prospects for reelection. In late 1887 he made the issue of the tariff the centerpiece of his impending campaign. Delighted Republicans jumped at the opportunity to wage a presidential race on that topic. Making a unified campaign, the GOP nominated Benjamin Harrison of Indiana, who proved effective in delivering the party’s message. Although Cleveland prevailed in the popular vote, Harrison triumphed in the electoral count. The Republicans also controlled both houses of Congress.
In the two years that followed, the Republicans implemented a program of governmental activism with the passage of the McKinley Tariff to raise rates and the Sherman Antitrust Act. Their effort to protect the voting rights of African Americans in the South through a federal elections bill failed in the face of opposition from the Democrats. Most voters turned against the Republicans and repudiated their initiatives.
By the election of 1890, long-simmering discontent among farmers in the South and West produced a third party in the congressional races. Low crop prices and a heavy burden of debt impelled many agrarians to support candidates for the Farmers Alliance and the People’s, or Populist, Party. These candidates spoke out for inflating the currency by coining silver into money on an equal basis with gold. This strategy would, they believed, raise prices and make debts easier to pay back. Congress had enacted the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1890 to provide support for silver, but Populists argued that the measure did too little to address the problem. In the 1890 elections, the Republicans lost control of the House as the Democrats and the Populists made impressive gains.
The resurgent Democrats continued their success in the presidential contest in 1892. Cleveland won an impressive victory over Harrison, and his party now controlled both the House and the Senate. The Populists had fielded their own presidential ticket, which carried four states in the West. The new third party had produced significant gains in its effort to become a viable alternative to the Republicans and Democrats.
Economic hard times hit in the spring of 1893 with a panic in the banking sector that soon spread across the nation. Cleveland called Congress into special session in August to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which the president blamed for the economic crisis. He achieved his goal but split his party into two warring factions. The situation then deteriorated further for the Democrats. Beyond the monetary issue, the Pullman Strike in the summer of 1894 and other examples of social unrest during hard economic times gave both the Republicans and the Populists an opportunity to capitalize on pervasive discontent.
The congressional elections in 1894 brought dramatic Republican gains. The Democrats lost more than 100 seats in the House and lost their majority. The GOP also gained in the Senate. The Populists saw their vote totals rise to a limited extent. The outcome in 1894 signaled a probable Republican victory in 1896 and also suggested that the appeal of the People’s Party was limited to the agrarian regions of the South and West. As it turned out, the Republican triumphs in 1894 proved enduring, and the party held control of the House for the next 16 years.
The political climax of Gilded Age politics came in the presidential election of 1896 in the race between William McKinley for the Republicans and William Jennings Bryan for the Democrats and Populists. Bryan stood for free silver; McKinley defended the gold standard. Voter turnout was very high in the North and Middle West. McKinley won a decisive victory with a nearly 600,000-ballot majority in the popular vote. The stalemated politics that had characterized the Gilded Age had come to an end with the Republicans triumphant.
During McKinley’s administration, the nation went to war with Spain over the independence of Cuba, and, in the process, acquired the Philippine Islands in 1898. This overseas adventure sparked debate about the nation’s future as an imperial power. At the same time, with the return of prosperity after 1897, concerned citizens argued that the growth of big business required expanded government power to regulate the economy. There was a sense that, for all the material achievements of the late nineteenth century, political and economic reform had become imperative. In 1900, McKinley’s second victory over Bryan confirmed Republican dominance, even as there were calls for lowering the tariff, addressing the power of big business, and redressing social injustice. In waging the war with Spain and administering the colonial empire that ensued, McKinley became the first president to administer the United States as a world power. His assassination in September 1901 brought his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, to the White House. Soon there was talk of “progressive” change and a need to depart from the ideas and policies of the late nineteenth century. The reputation of the Gilded Age sagged and has never recovered.
What did these decades mean for American politics? The intensive voter interest in elections of that time has never been repeated. The issues of the tariff and money have survived in other forms but have never again dominated political discourse. Debate over the role of government in regulating the economy has supplanted the controversy over promoting national growth. The processes of choosing candidates became more democratic with woman suffrage, direct election of U.S. senators, and procedural changes such as the direct primary, the initiative, and referendum. In many respects, the Gilded Age seems a lost world in national politics.
But, the period had a significant legacy. Racial segregation, established after the Civil War and solidified in the Gilded Age, took years to address and still shapes voter attitudes in the South. The power of corporations to influence policy and finance politics has survived all attempts at reform. The two-party system that emerged intact from the late nineteenth century still precludes alternatives. While the Gilded Age may seem a receding era in the political history of the United States, its impact endures.
See also banking policy; Democratic Party, 1860–96; economy and politics, 1860–1920; elections and electoral eras; Republican Party to 1896; Spanish-American War and Filipino Insurrection; tariffs and politics.
FURTHER READING. Charles W. Calhoun, Conceiving a New Republic: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869–1900, 2006; Charles W. Calhoun, ed., The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, 2nd ed., 2007; Robert W. Cherny, American Politics in the Gilded Age, 1868–1900, 1997; Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865–1905, 2006; Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, 1980; H. Wayne Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877–1896, 1969; H. Wayne Morgan, ed., The Gilded Age: A Reappraisal, Revised ed., 1970; Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Gilded Age or, the Hazard of New Functions, 1997; Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920, 1967; R. Hal Williams, Years of Decision: American Politics in the 1890s, 1993.
LEWIS L. GOULD
Globalization refers to the process of increasing the ease with which goods, people, and money move across borders or, in the more precise language of economic historians, the integration of international markets in commodities, labor, and capital. These markets depend on the support of political institutions, and in turn, the operation of these markets affects political institutions—often in such a way as to create a backlash against globalization.
Trade, migration, and investment across borders characterize the modern world, and so globalization becomes a useful term of historical analysis only when we can identify a marked increase or decrease in the volume of these international movements during a particular period and track its effects on politics and culture. We might therefore say that globalization meaningfully shaped the Islamic civilizations of the eleventh-century Near East, whose peoples traded spices, silver, and silks to Europe; salt and swords to Africa; and horses and gold to Asia while a similar claim about the eleventh-century civilizations of North America would necessarily rest on much slimmer evidence. So globalization waxes and wanes, and we need to speak as precisely as we can about its magnitude and local influence if we wish meaningfully to discuss its effects.
The Americas first became important to the history of globalization during the era of European discovery, when the flow of riches from the New World affected the shape of the Old World. Despite the early establishment of Iberian empires, the Dutch benefited greatly from colonial loot because their cities served as entrepôts for colonial trade. Likewise, this early process of globalization dramatically affected the peoples of the Americas, who died off in quantity from war and disease, which frequently go along with globalization. Moreover, the arrival of European goods, including horses, swine, and firearms, turned the Americas into what the historian Alfred Crosby identifies as ecological “Neo-Europes,” easing the transplantation of European institutions and politics into a new hemisphere.
With the establishment of European colonies in the Americas and the extension of European trade with Africa, the triangle trade in slaves from Africa, finished goods from Europe, and staple products from America—particularly sugar, tobacco, and cotton—altered the arrangement of power on all three continents. The trade fueled British textile mills, enabling the consequent technological innovation so important to the industrial revolution. It accounted for the forcible removal of around 11 million Africans over the two and a half centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. It built up the wealth and power of the southern colonies (later states) in the United States, permitting Virginia to dominate the new nation’s politics and planting the seeds of national self-immolation in the contradictions between racism and the republic’s professions of devotion to liberty. And these contradictions in turn provided the earliest instance of international skepticism about the new nation’s claims to virtue, often repeated in subsequent centuries: How, the British ministry-approved Answer to the Declaration asked, could rights be inalienable if “denied to ‘these wretched beings’ ”?
After the American Revolution, the wars of the French Revolution and their attendant blockades and embargoes slowed the processes of globalization considerably and for a period of some decades. Britain and France tried to keep each other from getting precious metals out of the New World. In the United States, the Nonimportation, Embargo, and Nonintercourse Acts of 1807–9 cut off trade to the belligerent nations. Thus barred from importing finished European goods, Americans began to manufacture ever more products for themselves. And as U.S. factory owners grew used to doing business without foreign competition, they began to lobby Congress—often successfully—for continued protective tariff legislation. Protectionism prevailed in Europe as well, with French manufacturing interests lobbying for tariffs and the Corn Laws largely keeping grain imports out of Britain until 1846.
A new era of increased globalization opened in the middle of the nineteenth century. Technological improvements pushed steamship costs downward, making it cheaper to ship goods and for people to book passage over oceans; the Suez Canal opened; new populations of migrants began streaming into the New World; and the lure of profitable expansion into frontiers drew investment from overseas, into the canals, roads, and railroads of new nations.
This early era of international investment in the development of America’s frontier ended poorly owing to the peculiar federal structure of the United States. Although Albert Gallatin and other statesmen of the early republic envisioned the government in Washington paying for a transportation network tying the country together, their plan foundered on the objections of Southerners and others already eager to promote the doctrine of state sovereignty. And so the states borrowed money—often from international investors—to build out their frontiers, each in their own way. Initial success, as in the case of the Erie Canal, which paid off its millions of dollars in debts to London, yielded to later failure; by 1841, eight states plus the territory of Florida were in default. “U.S. security” became a byword for worthless paper and fodder for jokes in England.
The institution of federalism coupled with the defaults had long-term consequences, including the rise of powerful American banks on Wall Street. As economic historians Lance Davis and Robert Gall-man note, “Governments with good reputations, Australia and Canada for example, did not have to draw on the services of international financial syndicates to underwrite and market their bonds. In the case of the United States such syndicates were required.” These syndicates included American banks with close ties to European banks, including Morgans, Brown Brothers, and Kuhn Loeb, and these American banks learned to intervene where American states had failed.
Meanwhile, the many unanticipated consequences of globalization included the chain of events by which the Irish potato famine helped spark the U.S. Civil War. Together with the failed revolutions of 1848, the famine spurred Irish migration to the United States. The nativist reaction and the short-lived American Party split and destroyed the Whig Party, making way for the rise of the antislavery Republican Party. The subsequent election of a Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, led to the secession of the South. Global trade scuttled the hopes of southern leaders that they could bring European countries to heel by choking off their supply of cotton; instead, other cotton-producing nations, like Egypt and India, increased their output and scuttled the thesis that American cotton was king of world trade.
The war itself contributed further to the rise of American investment banks. As is often the case during war, the effects of globalization diminished: few people wished to migrate to a country at war; blockades stopped trade; international investors shied away from betting on the bonds of a nation that might, in a few years’ time, have vanished or at least have repudiated the obligations of a war government. American financial syndicates also learned from this experience how to raise money and how to cloak themselves in patriotism: as Jay Cooke romantically insisted, just as the war freed slaves from their masters, so might it free Americans from the punishing “whip” of foreign capitalists.
Americans emerged from their wrenching sectional crisis into a new era of global openness. Money, people, and goods moved with increased freedom across borders. American banking syndicates channeled British pounds into railroads and ranches in the West, nearly unrestricted immigration let European laborers find better wages in American cities than they could at home, and—even considering the continuing pressure for tariff legislation—international trade ensured that the prices of commodities like wheat, bacon, coal, coffee, copper, cotton, hides, pig iron, tin, and wool converged in markets around the world. As open borders begot a global similarity in the basic stuff of commerce, the midcentury predictions of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto appeared to be coming true: “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. . . . [W]e have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. . . . National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible . . .”
Marx and Engels turned out to be wrong about this; globalization did not proceed smoothly to create cosmopolitan cultures but rather swiftly begot a backlash against it that, translated into policies, encouraged national one-sidedness. As Engels himself later observed with respect to the American working class, great diversity on the shop floor tended to suppress class consciousness and increase tribal feeling. With increasing energy and effectiveness, Americans lobbied for restrictions on immigration, securing the first of a series of Chinese Exclusion Acts in 1882. The second such act, in 1892, instituted a presumption of illegal presence for persons of Chinese appearance and began the process of requiring documentation for apparently racially different peoples. For decades, various groups including the American Federation of Labor lobbied for the restriction of immigrants by class background, finally getting a literacy test—coupled with further Asian exclusions—passed over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto in 1917. The economic crisis after World War I strengthened the forces opposing globalization, leading to a rise in tariffs and immigration quotas. This early postwar legislation saw firmer establishment in the Fordney-McCumber and Smoot-Hawley tariffs, as well as the National Origins Act of 1924. In addition, various states passed laws to prevent foreign ownership of land.
Apart from these efforts to shut globalization down and thus shield themselves from foreign competition, Americans reacted in other, less predictable ways. Some moved out of the cities of the East, where immigration from Europe was heaviest, into the new states of the West. The more such internal migrants the new states had, the more likely their voters were to support the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs. In American cities that became home to larger populations of immigrants, taxpayers responded with policies of self-defense, both cultural (through increased support for public education) and material (through increased support for public health programs). As a result of such investments, particularly in water purification and waste treatment, the American city finally became a healthier place to live than the countryside. Thus, the fear of immigration and its consequences sometimes led indirectly to an overall improvement in well-being.
American policies that slowed globalization in the 1920s must often shoulder at least part of the blame for the Great Depression. The British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in his 1919 forecast of the Economic Consequences of the Peace that a massive depression would result from the failure to reassemble the nineteenth-century global economy, noting that the world before the war, in allowing movement across borders, had helped relieve economic pressures: the unemployed could seek opportunity elsewhere rather than stay and suffer. But, Keynes noted, the postwar settlement included “no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe . . . or to adjust the systems of the Old World and the New.”American unwillingness to help rehabilitate Europe or adjust relations to the Old World might not have mattered, had the Old World, in working off wartime debt, not depended so thoroughly on continued loans from the New World. When those loans began to dry up in 1928–29, countries around the world slid into depression, and the United States followed.
During the Depression, globalization stood at low ebb. Immigrants had no place worth going, even if laws permitted them entry. Nations traded within autonomous blocs. Each country acted, as Franklin Roosevelt wrote in his telegram to the London Economic Conference of 1933, as if “[t]he sound internal economic system of a Nation is a greater factor in its well being” than its international economic relations. Barring a few gestures like the Anglo-American Trade agreement of 1938, the United States carried out its New Deal with (as Isaiah Berlin observed about FDR) “a minimum of relationship with the outside world.” During this period of relative isolation from the international arena, the Democratic Party put through some of America’s most clearly class-conscious legislation. It is possible, some historians suggest, that this correlation represents causation: with immigration restriction (and its attendant racial hierarchy) firmly in place, it might have been easier to appeal to class solidarity.
After World War II, the United States, with some help from Keynes, worked with its allies to create the system the world had lacked in 1919, to rehabilitate Europe and keep the Old World and the New World in balance. The Bretton Woods institutions—the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—especially as augmented by the European Recovery Program (or Marshall Plan), of 1947 created a degree of international stability while allowing countries the freedom to set their own economic policies. They created the conditions for Americans to invest in the reconstruction and development of the war-torn world and promote the sale of U.S.-manufactured goods overseas. They enabled the growth of trade worldwide, and of non-Communist labor movements in industrialized countries. During these institutions’ peak period of operations, per-capita incomes around the globe grew more than under previous or subsequent frameworks for international economic affairs.
In the later twentieth century, a new era of accelerated globalization began. After the Hart-Celler immigration act of 1965, the United States saw renewed immigration from non-European nations, and a new wave of anti-immigrant sentiment to greet it. The United States ran large current-account deficits, buying imports from developing countries, contributing to the growth of manufacturing in the historically poorer parts of the world. Central banks in the developing world—particularly in Asia—increasingly financed the U.S. deficit by buying federal debt. Under such circumstances, Americans could afford, at least for the near term, to save little money and run large government deficits. In the early twenty-first century, the dollar dropped in value, creating an incentive for individual investors in American debt to stop financing the United States, even as collectively their interest lay with continued support for the dollar. In the early years of the new century, there came a growing perception that as the Euro grew more attractive as an alternative investment, the longstanding arrangement might fail, and America might shift away from its historically fortunate place in the center of the global economy. While the world has generally favored the United States with a willingness to invest capital and labor within American borders, these inflows have depended more on historical incident—including reigning American policy and circumstances in the rest of the world—than on general laws.
See also banking policy; economy and politics; federalism; tariffs and politics.
FURTHER READING. Michael D. Bordo, Alan M. Taylor, and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “Introduction,” in Globalization in Historical Perspective, edited by Michael D. Bordo, Alan M. Taylor, and Jeffrey G. Williamson, 1–10, 2003; Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, 1993; Lance Edwin Davis and Robert E. Gallman, Evolving Financial Markets and International Capital Flows: Britain, the Americas, and Australia, 1870–1914, 2001; J. Bradford DeLong and Barry Eichengreen, “The Marshall Plan: History’s Most Successful Structural Adjustment Programme,” in Postwar Economic Reconstruction and Lessons for the East Today, edited by Rüdiger Dornbusch, Wilhelm Nölling, and Richard Layard, 189–230, 1993; Barry Eichengreen, Global Imbalances and the Lessons of Bretton Woods, 2007; Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, “Commodity Market Integration, 1500–2000,” in Globalization in Historical Perspective, edited by Michael D. Bordo, Alan M. Taylor, and Jeffrey G. Williamson, 13–62, 2003; Idem, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium, 2007; Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century, 2001; Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy, 1999; Eric Rauchway, Blessed among Nations: How the World Made America, 2006.
ERIC RAUCHWAY
See economy and politics, 1920–45; New Deal Era, 1932–52.
The Great Plains—a relatively flat, semiarid region along the east side of the Rocky Mountains—include the eastern parts of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, and the western parts of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Though none of these states are wholly in the Great Plains, all will be treated here.
Before Europeans arrived on the Great Plains, politics there were largely local and focused on authority within bands or tribes of Native Americans and with disputes between or among them. Europeans introduced new dimensions. After the United States acquired the plains in the early nineteenth century, politics there evolved into a regional variant of national patterns. The most distinctive aspects of plains politics appeared between 1890 and World War II, in the form first of Populism and then of progressivism. Since 1945 plains politics have moved close to national patterns.
Before the arrival of Europeans and horses, most indigenous people of the plains lived in villages along streams and rivers. A few were nomadic hunters. For most, the basic political unit was the village. The Pawnee, for example, consisted of four independent bands that formed a confederation, with the internal organization of each band based on villages. Village chiefs met periodically as a tribal council.
Patterns of leadership differed among the plains tribes, but the position of village chief was typically hereditary within certain lineages. A chief’s actual authority rested on his ability to resolve disputes, deal with traders, distribute goods, allocate farmlands, and negotiate with outsiders. Those from other families could exercise other forms of leadership. Thus, a village might have one or a few main chiefs, several shamans, and separate leaders for war, buffalo-hunting expeditions, and men’s societies. Occasionally, a woman became a shaman, but women did not hold other political roles.
In 1541 Vasquez Coronado and his men became the first Europeans to venture onto the Great Plains. French explorers and traders entered the plains by the early eighteenth century. The Treaty of Paris (1763) gave Spain title to the region between the Mississippi River and the crest of the Rocky Mountains, but in 1800 Spain sold to France the entire Louisiana country north of the Red River. Neither Spain nor France sought to exercise real political authority on the plains.
Though few Europeans came to the region, plains Indians experienced the consequences of European settlement elsewhere. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680, in what became New Mexico, brought horses to the plains. European settlers along the Atlantic traded with nearby Indian peoples, providing guns and manufactured goods. As European expansion pushed Indian people west, they, in turn, armed with guns and iron weapons, pressured the peoples into whose lands they moved. Such pressures bred conflict between plains tribes and westward migrating tribes and among plains tribes themselves. For example several Lakota bands and the Cheyenne moved onto the plains in the late eighteenth century, became nomadic, and came into conflict with the Crows. Horses and guns combined to populate the plains with bands of nomadic buffalo hunters.
Among nomadic plains tribes, the basic political unit was the band, comparable to the villages of the sedentary peoples. The band traveled, camped, hunted, and made war as a unit. Political leadership was typically fluid, with different leaders for different purposes, none with supreme authority. Bands of the same tribe or closely related tribes came together for religious ceremonies, councils, hunting, or war. As of about 1800, for example, the Cheyenne had ten bands, each with four chiefs. All ten came together each spring, and the four chiefs of each band plus a few other elders formed a tribal council.
The experience of Sitting Bull (Tatanka Iyotake) provides both example and exception. In 1857, when Sitting Bull was about 26 years old, the Hunkpapa Lakota named him a war chief in recognition of his bravery and his victories over the Crows. He also gained a reputation as a holy man, given to prophetic visions. In 1869 Sitting Bull’s supporters brought together a group of Lakotas and Cheyennes who named him to an unprecedented position: war chief of the Lakota nation. Given the fluidity of leadership among the Lakotas, however, not all Lakotas accepted this action.
After the United States purchased Louisiana from France in 1803, more explorers ventured onto the plains, notably the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–6, intended not only to explore but also to assert U.S. authority in the northern plains and lay claim to the region west of it. By the 1820s, the United States had planted small military posts along the Missouri River and had established a limited military presence on the plains. Federal policy makers considered the region a “permanent Indian frontier,” however, and political authority there still rested with villages, bands, and tribes. Eastern tribes were moved to the eastern parts of the plains states beginning in the 1830s.
Through the annexation of Texas (1845), war with Mexico (1846–48), and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), the United States acquired territories that included the southern plains. The new state of Texas claimed most of the area, but the residents of New Mexico contested that claim. In 1850 Congress attempted to resolve these and other issues through an elaborate compromise that, among other provisions, set the western boundary of Texas and established territorial government for New Mexico.
The Compromise of 1850 left most of the plains unorganized, even though they formed a vital part of the major land routes to California, Oregon, and New Mexico territories. Stephen Douglas, senator from Illinois, seeking to have a railroad built from Chicago to the Pacific, wanted to establish territorial organization on the plains, but Southerners opposed territorial status anywhere the Missouri Compromise of 1820 banned slavery. Douglas crafted a compromise in 1854, creating Nebraska and Kansas Territories, with each to decide whether to permit slavery. The Kansas-Nebraska Act provoked a great national debate over slavery, precipitated the emergence of the Republican Party, and contributed significantly to a major national political realignment. The organization of Kansas, in turn, initiated a miniature civil war.
Kansas became a state in 1861, Nebraska in 1867, and Colorado in 1876. Beginning in 1861, Congress promoted the rapid economic development of the West through land grants to railroads, the Homestead Act, and similar distributive programs. And Congress created Dakota and Colorado Territories in 1861, Montana Territory in 1864, and Wyoming Territory in 1868.
Late into the nineteenth century, much of the plains remained territories, due to sparse population and sometimes also to congressional jockeying for partisan advantage. Montana and the Dakotas became states only in 1889 and Wyoming in 1890. Oklahoma and New Mexico remained territories into the twentieth century. Residents of territories could not elect their governors or participate in presidential elections, and their delegates to Congress commanded little attention. Political patronage often was allocated in faraway Washington. Some historians have suggested that party organizations and loyalties were stunted by the low stakes in territorial politics.
In the plains states, partisanship developed along regional lines. Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado were initially Republican strongholds, often under the leadership of Union veterans who constantly reminded voters that Republicans promoted western economic development. Party politics in Texas followed from that state’s participation in the Confederacy, as westward-moving southern whites assisted the Democrats in redeeming the state from Republican rule in 1873 and keeping it securely Democratic until the 1960s.
Advocates of woman suffrage were active on the northern and central plains. In 1867 Kansas became the first state to vote on the issue, but its voters rejected suffrage. The first session of the Wyoming territorial legislature, in 1869, approved suffrage for women—the first state or territory to take such a step and one of the first political entities in the world to do so. Some attributed that decision to Wyoming males’ expectation that woman suffrage would attract more women to the plains but others have pointed to diligent lobbying by suffrage advocates. Wyoming achieved statehood in 1890 and became the first state to fully enfranchise women. Colorado, in 1893, became the first state whose male voters approved woman suffrage. Despite repeated agitation and several referenda, the other plains states continued to reject suffrage until the 1910s, even as women won statewide elective office in North Dakota and Oklahoma.
With or without suffrage, plains women helped to lead reform movements, especially Prohibition. In 1878 Kansans banned the importation, manufacture, and sale of alcohol, but the law was widely violated. Despite referenda in several other plains states, before 1907 laws banning liquor passed only in North and South Dakota, and South Dakotans soon reversed that decision.
On the northern plains, the political battle over alcohol reflected broader ethno-religious differences. Old-stock Americans and immigrants affiliated with the Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, or Presbyterian denominations, along with Norwegian and Swedish immigrants and their offspring, usually condemned as sinful any use of alcohol, and often censured gambling and dancing as well. Catholics and many German Protestants found no sin in a stein of beer, a dance, or a lottery. Thus, referenda on Prohibition and woman suffrage (closely connected in many voters’ minds) often turned on the ethno-cultural values of voters. Identification with the Democratic Party and Republican Party on the northern plains often had ethnic dimensions, for northern Democrats adamantly opposed Prohibition and courted German and Irish voters. Republicans usually tried to duck the issue but sometimes issued cautious endorsements.
While Prohibition formed a highly divisive political issue on the northern plains, Texas politics sometimes revolved around race. Texas experienced radical reconstruction beginning in 1867, and a coalition of black and white Republicans held control until 1873, when the Democrats won a gubernatorial election characterized by widespread fraud and intimidation of black voters. The Democrats then wrote a new state constitution, severely limiting the legislature but not disfranchising black voters.
In the plains states, as elsewhere, African Americans aligned themselves with the dominant Republicans. In Kansas and Nebraska, some received political patronage in return, and a few were elected to local or state office, including state auditor in Kansas. In Kansas and Nebraska, and later in Oklahoma Territory, black migrants from the South created all-black towns and exercised local political authority.
Only in New Mexico, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, did Mexican Americans exercise significant political power. There, the long-established Hispano communities (most not on the plains), along with the slow pace of in-migration by other groups, meant that Mexican culture dominated many areas. Voters elected Mexican Americans as local officials, territorial legislators, and territorial delegates. Mexican Americans also secured federal patronage posts, including territorial secretary and governor.
In the 1880s, Congress moved toward a new Indian policy with important implications for the plains. The Great Sioux Reservation, in Dakota Territory, was reduced in size in 1877 and broken into smaller units in 1889. Officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, committed to a policy of assimilation, sought to eliminate traditional practices, including structures of authority and governance. The Dawes Act of 1887 directed that reservations be divided among Indian families and the land be owned in severalty (i.e., individually). Remaining land was to be taken out of the reservation system.
On the southern plains, much of what is now Oklahoma became home to the “Five Civilized Tribes”—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole—in the 1830s, when they were moved from their previous homes in the Southeast and were promised permanent reservations in the new territory. During the Civil War, some or all of these tribes in the new territory sided with the Confederacy and, as punishment, were deprived of their western lands. Those lands, in turn, became reservations for tribes from the southern plains. In 1890 Congress created Oklahoma Territory in the western part of what is now Oklahoma, leaving the eastern region as Indian Territory.
By the 1880s, political agitators on the plains were condemning both Republicans and Democrats for failing to counteract declining prices for farm products and to regulate railroad rates. Most such agitators were on the margins of politics, but not in Texas. John Reagan, a member of Congress from that state, consistently advocated regulation and contributed significantly to passage of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1886. James Hogg, Texas’s attorney general and governor in the late 1880s and early 1890s, also built a following by attacking the railroads.
In 1890, in the central and northern plains states, new political parties emerged, claiming to speak for hard-pressed farmers and laborers. First organized as state parties, they came together as the People’s Party, or Populists, in 1892. The new party called for federal action to restrict the great corporations that had developed since the Civil War. Those corporations, Populists argued, limited the economic opportunities and political rights of ordinary citizens. On the plains, Populists drew their greatest support from farmers on marginally productive land, often with large mortgages at high interest rates, for whom the prevailing deflation proved especially ruinous.
The Populists called for government ownership of the railroads; sweeping changes in federal monetary and banking policies, especially currency expansion to counteract deflation; structural reforms to make government more responsive to voters, including the secret ballot and the initiative and referendum; the eight-hour workday; a graduated income tax; and other reforms. Populists won election as local officials, state legislators, governors, and members of Congress. In most places in the central and northern plains states, the Democrats were reduced to a tiny third party and often threw their support behind Populist candidates. Such fusions brought gubernatorial victories in 1892 in Colorado, Kansas, and North Dakota, and in Nebraska in 1894.
In 1896 William Jennings Bryan, a Democrat from Nebraska, won the Democratic presidential nomination on a platform that stressed currency inflation through silver coinage and called for an income tax and other reforms. Most western Populists gave Bryan enthusiastic support, and he secured their party’s nomination. Leading western Republicans broke with their party, formed the Silver Party (or Silver Republicans), and also nominated Bryan.
Bryan lost the presidency but did well throughout much of the West. The Populist Party and the Silver Republican Party survived only a few more years. For many former Populist voters, however, party loyalties seem to have significantly weakened. Republicans and Democrats were closely competitive in Nebraska, Colorado, and Montana over the next 20 years. Kansas and the Dakotas, however, usually voted Republican.
Racial issues became prominent in Texas politics in the 1890s, when the state’s Populists made a strong appeal to black voters and, fusing with the Republicans, registered a strong vote for their gubernatorial candidate in 1896. Texas adopted a poll tax in 1902 but never followed other former Confederate states in creating a more elaborate set of legal or constitutional restrictions on black participation in politics. Texas Democrats accomplished much the same thing extralegally, however, by barring African Americans from Democratic primaries (and eventually writing that provision into law) and by coercing blacks who insisted on exercising the franchise.
Every plains state experienced progressive reform during the two decades before World War I, and those reforms significantly changed most state governments. George W. Norris, a Nebraska Republican, became an important national leader of progressivism, leading the “revolt against Cannonism”—a reduction in the powers of the Speaker of the House, then Joseph Cannon—in 1910 and continuing as a leading progressive in the U.S. Senate until 1943. Other plains progressives also drew national attention.
“Direct democracy”—efforts to increase the role of voters in the political process—flourished on the plains. In 1898 South Dakota Populists adopted the nation’s first initiative and referendum process. Most plains states also adopted the initiative and referendum, though not through Populists’ efforts. Other widely adopted direct-democracy reforms included the direct primary and recall. States adopted other structural reforms, including nonpartisan offices, limits on political parties, the merit system for appointing state employees, and rationalization of the structure of state government.
Plains progressives added new functions to state government as they promoted regulation of railroads and public utilities, abolition of child labor, employer liability and workers’ compensation, and protections for consumers. Four states set up insurance funds for deposits in state-chartered banks. Under Republican governor Peter Norbeck (1917–21), South Dakota launched several state-owned enterprises, including a coal mine, cement plant, hail insurance fund, and hydroelectric plants. When Oklahoma became a state in 1907, its constitution included many progressive innovations, including restrictions on corporations, a graduated income tax, and the initiative and referendum. Oklahoma Democrats also enacted racial segregation and a literacy test aimed at disfranchising African American voters.
Renewed efforts by woman suffrage and temperance advocates finally brought victories. Kansas adopted woman suffrage in 1912 and Montana followed in 1914. In 1916 Montana elected the first woman to serve in the House of Representatives, Jeannette Rankin, a progressive Republican. South Dakotans and Oklahomans adopted woman suffrage in 1918. Oklahomans voted their state dry in 1907, and, by 1918, all the plains states but Texas had done the same.
Plains progressivism differed in important ways from progressivism in eastern states. Like other western progressives those on the plains were more likely to favor direct democracy, woman suffrage, and Prohibition than their eastern counterparts. Some, like Norbeck, promoted state-owned enterprise, especially those devoted to economic development. Other plains progressives were more isolationist regarding foreign policy.
In some plains states, groups to the left of the progressives attracted a following. In Oklahoma, the Socialist Party, espousing government ownership of key industries, won 21 percent of the vote for governor in 1914. Socialists developed strength elsewhere in the plains states, electing local officials in several places, but failed to win any office higher than state legislator. In North Dakota, Arthur C. Townley, a former socialist organizer, created the Nonpartisan League (NPL), which worked within the Republican Party to win the governorship in 1916 and the state legislature in 1919. They enacted much of its program, including a state-owned bank and terminal grain elevator.
Rankin and Norris were among those in Congress who voted against the declaration of war in 1917. But throughout the plains, World War I stimulated intense patriotism, encouraged by the federal government, state Councils of Defense, and extra-governmental bodies. Suspicion, hostility, and sometimes vigilante action greeted those of German birth or descent, pacifists (including Mennonites, who were also of German ancestry), and radicals, especially the NPL, Socialists, and the Industrial Workers of the World.
The summer of 1919 brought racial conflict in several parts of the nation, as white mobs lynched African Americans or attacked black sections of cities. Three riots took place in Texas. In Longview a mob killed several people and burned buildings in the black section of town before National Guard troops arrived. In Omaha, Nebraska, some 4,000 whites intent on lynching a black man accused of raping a white woman attacked police and deputy sheriffs guarding the courthouse, set it on fire, nearly lynched the mayor, beat any black people they found on the streets, and finally lynched the accused man. Ultimately U.S. troops put down the riot. In 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, was the scene of the worst race riot in U.S. history. As in Omaha, the riot began with an effort to lynch a black man accused of assaulting a white woman. In Tulsa, however, a group of armed African Americans attempted to assist the sheriff, who was determined to prevent a lynching. A gun battle between blacks and whites left several dead. A white mob then attacked the black commercial and residential section of town, called Greenwood. African Americans fought back. Before the National Guard could arrive, an estimated 300 African Americans and 13 whites were killed. Greenwood was destroyed by fire—more than a thousand buildings worth nearly 
2 million.
The war had created a huge demand for wheat and meat. At the end of the war, agricultural prices fell, initiating an agricultural depression that persisted when the rest of the economy began to roar with the prosperity of the 1920s. The economic distress of farmers contributed to the development of a congressional “farm bloc” in 1921. Members of Congress from both parties, including many from the plains states, joined to support regulation of stockyards and grain exchanges, exempting farm cooperatives from antitrust laws, and easing credit for farmers. Despite such efforts, the farm economy continued to slump.
In 1922 agricultural distress and reversals for organized labor, especially railroad workers, sparked political protests among farmers and workers. Organized through the Conference on Progressive Political Action (CPPA), protesting voters put Democrats into the governorship in several states and elected Burton K. Wheeler, a progressive Democrat from Montana, to the Senate. In 1924 the independent presidential candidacy of Robert La Follette drew significant support from plains farmers and organized labor. He failed to win any plains state but carried many counties across the northern and central plains.
In 1924 two plains states elected the nation’s first female governors. In Wyoming the death of the incumbent shortly before the election led to the nomination and election of his widow, Nellie Tayloe Ross. Miriam A. “Ma” Ferguson won the governorship in Texas but was widely seen as a surrogate for her husband, James E. Ferguson, who was ineligible because he had been impeached from the office in 1917.
Ma Ferguson won the Texas Democratic primary over the opposition of the Ku Klux Klan. Anti-black, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant, the Klan presented itself as the defender of old-fashioned Protestant morality and became a significant force in plains politics. Klan-endorsed candidates won local and state offices across Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas in the early and mid-1920s. The Klan tried to influence elections elsewhere but its authority swiftly declined by the end of the decade.
The Depression that began in 1929 was a serious blow to farmers, who had not shared in the prosperity of the 1920s. Shortly after, drought turned large areas of the southern plains into the dust bowl. Political repercussions appeared in some plains states as early as 1930, when voters elected governors and senators who promised to solve their economic problems. In 1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first Democrat to sweep every plains state. He also carried Democrats into Congress, statehouses, and state legislatures. In North Dakota, a revived NPL won control of the state government.
Roosevelt’s New Deal addressed farmers’ problems with the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which included provisions for paying farmers and stock growers to reduce production. Relief rolls, both state and federal, grew to include a quarter or a third of the population in some plains states, and sometimes two-thirds or more of those in dust bowl counties. Other New Deal programs ranged from construction of schools and bridges to rural electrification, from tree planting and flood control to Social Security. One New Deal project, the Fort Peck Dam in Montana, was the largest earthen dam in the world when it was completed in 1939.
By the mid-1930s, several plains states had experienced efforts by Democratic governors and legislatures to create “Little New Deals,” but most were modest and unimaginative. Nearly everywhere, governors and legislatures drastically cut state spending to provide property tax relief. Seeking alternatives to property taxes, several states enacted sales taxes or income taxes.
In a few instances in the 1930s, states went beyond budget cutting, tax reform, and participation in New Deal programs. In 1936 Colorado voters approved a pension program for those over 60; the program proved so costly it absorbed most of the new sales tax. In Nebraska, Senator Norris convinced voters in 1934 to amend the state constitution to create a unicameral, nonpartisan legislature. Norris also inspired the development of Nebraska’s public power districts, most of which used federal funds to construct electrical generating and distribution systems. By 1945 the state’s entire electrical power system was publicly owned.
The New Deal brought important changes to the governance of Indian reservations. Roosevelt appointed John Collier commissioner of Indian affairs. A long-time critic of previous federal Indian policies, Collier closed many boarding schools and ended efforts to suppress traditional religious practices. His “Indian New Deal” included as its centerpiece the Indian Reorganization Act (1934), which promised to end allotments, restore tribal ownership of unalloted lands, and encourage tribal self-government. Not all were persuaded of the value of the new approach, and some tribes rejected the reforms.
In 1936 Republicans nominated Alfred Landon of Kansas for president, but he was defeated in a Roosevelt landslide that continued Democratic dominance in most plains states. Soon after, however, leading Democrats, notably Burton Wheeler, became increasingly critical of Roosevelt. In 1938 and after, plains voters expressed their disaffection from the New Deal, as most of the northern plains states returned to the Republicans and the southern plains states turned to conservative Democrats.
The mid- and late 1930s saw isolationism at high tide on the northern plains. Senator Gerald Nye (Republican) of North Dakota led investigations into the munitions industry and sponsored neutrality legislation. After the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor isolationism receded, but Senator William Langer of North Dakota (Republican and NPL), was one of the two senators who voted against joining the United Nations, and both North Dakota senators opposed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Prosperity returned to the plains during World War II. Then and after the war, liberals continued on the defensive in most places, as conservative Republicans held most governorships in northern and central plains states and equally conservative Democrats held those in Oklahoma and Texas. Except for Montana and sometimes North Dakota, the northern and central plains states usually sent conservative Republicans to represent them in Washington. Between the late 1950s and the 1980s, however, all the plains states moved toward more competitive two-party systems.
In the late 1950s the nation entered a recession. Economically distressed farmers and urban dwellers elected liberal Democrats in most northern and central plains states. By 1959 George McGovern of South Dakota, Quentin Burdick of North Dakota (elected following a fusion of the Democratic Party with the NPL in 1956), Gale McGee of Wyoming, and Mike Mansfield and Lee Metcalf of Montana made the northern plains appear to be a center of congressional liberalism. Since then, Montana and North Dakota have usually elected Democratic senators. South Dakota, Nebraska, and Colorado have been competitive in senate races, and Wyoming and Kansas have usually elected Republicans. All the northern plains states have been competitive for governor except South Dakota, which has usually elected Republicans. Underneath those highly visible offices, however, significant majorities of the voters of most northern and central plains states identified as Republicans, especially in the counties that are part of the Great Plains.
As Democrats won elections in northern and central plains states, Republicans made gains in the southern ones. In 1961 Texans sent a Republican, John Tower, to the U.S. Senate for the first time since Reconstruction, and Republicans have won both Texas Senate seats since 1990. In 1962 Henry Bellmon became the first Republican ever to win the Oklahoma governorship, and since then that office has often alternated between the parties. Republicans and Democrats also alternated winning senatorial contests in Oklahoma in the 1970s and 1980s; both Oklahoma Senate seats have gone Republican since 1992. Not until 1978 did a Republican, Bill Clements, win the Texas governorship. That office then alternated between the parties until 1994, when Republicans began a winning streak. New Mexico has been competitive for governor since the 1950s, and the two parties have won almost equal numbers of Senate contests.
The plains states usually voted Republican for president between 1952 and 2004. There have been only a few exceptions: New Mexico in 1960, 1992, 1996, and 2000; Texas in 1960, 1968, and 1976; and Colorado and Montana in 1992. In 2008, Colorado and New Mexico voted Democratic, and Montana and North Dakota were considered “battleground” states. Nebraska law provides that a candidate who carries a congressional district receives one electoral vote, and the candidate who carries the state wins two votes in addition to those earned in the congressional districts. In 2008, for the first time, this law resulted in Nebraska splitting its electoral votes when Barack Obama carried the second congressional district (Omaha and its suburbs to the south).
Republican gains in southern plains states, like Republican gains in the South more generally, came in part in response to Democratic support for civil rights. The civil rights movement had its most direct impact in the southern plains, even though Brown v. Board of Education (1954) concerned Topeka, Kansas. Earlier, the Supreme Court had struck down the Texas white primary law (1944) and had ordered Oklahoma and Texas to integrate their state graduate and professional schools (1950). There were, however, relatively few African Americans in most plains counties, so the direct political impact of the civil rights movement was more pronounced in the eastern, non-plains portions of those states. One important exception was Colorado, where Denver residents fought a brutal and occasionally violent battle over school integration between 1969 and 1974. Earlier, Latino veterans returning from World War II had organized the American GI Forum and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. These groups took the lead in fighting discrimination against Latinos and made important gains.
The 1970s saw increased politicization of ethnic groups on the plains. In South Dakota, the American Indian Movement, first organized in Minneapolis in 1968, demanded equal treatment and autonomy and challenged existing tribal leadership. A confrontation at Wounded Knee in 1973 resulted in two deaths. In New Mexico a violent, but not deadly, confrontation in 1967 brought the end to the Alianza, a group seeking the return of land grants. In the early 1970s in Texas, Mexican Americans formed the Raza Unida party and won a number of local offices.
During the last quarter of the twentieth century, politics in several plains states achieved a greater measure of racial and gender diversity. New Mexicans, to be certain, have elected Mexican Americans throughout their history. In 1978 Nancy Landon Kassebaum of Kansas won the first of three terms in the U.S. Senate. That same year, Coloradians elected the nation’s first black lieutenant governor since Reconstruction, and, in 1992, they sent Ben Nighthorse Campbell, an American Indian, to the U.S. Senate. Patricia Schroeder, member of Congress from Colorado, established a national reputation. In Nebraska in 1986, two women faced each other as the major party candidates for governor.
Throughout most of the Great Plains counties, net out-migration began after World War II and has persisted in most rural places. States consequently became more urban, though most cities were located on the fringe of the Great Plains. Local and state governments faced a variety of problems resulting from a diminishing population base, but education often drew the greatest attention. Declining population and increasing accreditation standards caught rural schools in their pincers. Although school consolidation often proved politically divisive, most plains states witnessed sharp reductions in the number of school districts—by 72 percent in Wyoming between 1952 and 1984 and by 67 percent in Nebraska between 1949 and 1965. In 2008, Arthur County, Nebraska, with an estimated population of 372, had fewer than 70 students in all grades in the entire county. In such places population decline has sometimes made it difficult to fill county and local offices.
Since the 1980s, preachers in evangelical Christian megachurches in such places as Wichita, Tulsa, and Colorado Springs have allied themselves closely with the Republicans and have pushed the party in those states toward the Christian Right by focusing on issues like abortion and gay rights. By the early twenty-first century, however, the evangelical tide within the region’s Republican Party seemed to be receding. In Kansas between 1999 and 2007, the state board of education reversed itself repeatedly on the teaching of evolution in the public schools, as first one side then the other won majorities in elections for board members. In South Dakota in 2006, a referendum on a state law banning abortions voided the law by a margin of 52 to 48 percent, and a similar statewide vote in 2008 failed by a slightly larger margin.
The political history of the Great Plains has much in common with its surrounding regions. Many, even most, of its distinctive features are shared with other western or middle-western states. One feature, federal policies aimed at promoting economic development, has been common throughout much of the West. Populism, early approval of woman suffrage, and the western variety of progressivism were, perhaps, the most distinctive aspects of plains political development, but they were not unique to plains states. Populism and progressivism left most plains states with a legacy of direct democracy and a few plains states with state-owned enterprises. Populism and western progressivism, born of agricultural adversity and, in the 1920s at least, nurtured by a political alliance of farmers and labor, grew out of a social and economic situation now largely vanished. The substantial decline in the proportion of farmers and stock growers on the plains has reduced the potential base for such politics, and the emergence of an agribusiness attitude among many of the survivors seems to have given them a different political outlook.
The emergence of two-party competition throughout most of the plains states since the late 1950s suggests that plains political subcultures are being homogenized into larger national patterns. Similarly, the half-century pattern of support for most Republican presidential candidates throughout much of the plains suggests a blending into larger patterns of western politics. Finally, the decline in party loyalty in the East and South suggests that even that aspect of western politics is no longer unique.
See also Pacific Coast; populism; progressivism and the Progressive Era, 1890s–1920; race and politics; Rocky Mountain region; taxation; woman suffrage.
FURTHER READING. Norman D. Brown, Hood, Bonnet, and Little Brown Jug: Texas Politics, 1921–1928, 1984; Robert W. Cherny, Populism, Progressivism, and the Transformation of Nebraska Politics, 1885–1915, 1981; Gene Clanton, Kansas Populism: Ideas and Men, 1969; Chandler Davidson, Race and Class in Texas Politics, 1990; Juan Gómez-Quiñones, Chicano Politics, Reality and Promise, 1940–1990, 1990; Lewis L. Gould, Progressives and Prohibitionists: Texas Democrats in the Wilson Era, 1973; Paul Kleppner, “Politics without Parties: The Western States, 1900–1984,” in The Twentieth-Century West, Historical Interpretations, edited by Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain, 317–21, 1989; Richard Lowitt, The New Deal and the West, 1984; Robert L. Morlan, Political Prairie Fire: The Nonpartisan League, 1915–1922, 1955; Theodore Saloutos and John D. Hicks, Agricultural Discontent in the Middle West, 1900–1939, 1951; James E. Wright, The Politics of Populism: Dissent in Colorado, 1974.
ROBERT W. CHERNY