Often called America’s “forgotten” war, the 1846–48 conflict with Mexico was brief, bloody, and a great short-term success for the United States. After a string of impressive military victories under General Zachary Taylor in Texas and Mexico’s northeast between May 1846 and February 1847, General Winfield Scott’s troops completed an amphibious assault on the port of Vera Cruz in Mexico’s south and marched west to the capital, ultimately occupying Mexico City in September 1847. In early 1848, Mexico ratified the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, transferring 500,000 square miles, almost half of its territory, to the United States in exchange for 
15 million. The U.S. states of California, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah, as well as parts of Arizona, Colorado, and Wyoming are all products of the Mexican cession. The ratified treaty arrived in the United States on the Fourth of July in 1848 to ecstatic celebration. That the nation had “won an empire” in this war seemed providential to many Americans, proof of the country’s Manifest Destiny to expand across the continent.
The long-term implications of the war were less than positive, however. The question of the status of slavery in the newly acquired territories greatly exacerbated sectional tensions and eventually contributed to both the collapse of the Second Party System and southern secession. The war with Mexico was the first war fought by America for reasons other than self-defense; it set a precedent for military action in Latin America in the name of American interests, and permanently damaged relations with Mexico. This little-remembered war had far-reaching effects, ultimately transforming America’s foreign relations and internal politics almost as dramatically as it altered the nation physically.
Hostilities between the United States and Mexico officially erupted when President James K. Polk ordered General Taylor to move his army in Texas into a disputed area between the Nueces River and the Río Grande. After the Texas rebellion of 1836, both Mexico and the newly independent Republic of Texas claimed this area, although Texas’s claims were somewhat speculative (the republic also claimed Santa Fe, the capital city of Mexico’s province of New Mexico). In fact, Mexico refused to recognize the independence of Texas, considering it a rebel province. Although most Texans favored joining the United States, attempts to annex Texas in the late 1830s and early 1840s failed because both Democrats and Whigs recognized that annexation would inflame sectional tensions and likely result in a war with Mexico. President John Tyler, a Whig in name but Democrat in policy, fastened on the idea of annexing Texas in the hope that this stance would win him the presidency in 1844. It did not, but his proposal was met with an outpouring of popular and congressional support. Tyler invited Texas to join the union at the close of his presidential term in 1845.
Democrat James K. Polk entered office immediately after on an explicitly expansionist platform and pledged himself to gaining Mexico’s Alta California. During his first year as president, he unsuccessfully attempted to buy California and New Mexico for more than twice the amount the United States eventually paid in 1848. After Mexican cavalry crossed the Río Grande and attacked a U.S. patrol, Polk addressed Congress on May 11, 1846, and reported that “Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil.” Although many representatives had serious doubts about Polk’s claims and suspected that the president had provoked war by moving U.S. troops into an area rightfully claimed by Mexico, Congress overwhelmingly supported the declaration of war.
The Whig minority in Congress opposed territorial expansion generally and expansion into potential new slave territories in particular. But with memories of the disastrous collapse of the Federalist Party over the War of 1812 firmly in mind, the vast majority of congressional Whigs supported Polk’s call for volunteers and voted for funds to fight Mexico. Only 14 members of the House, all of whom represented heavily antislavery constituencies in the Northeast and upper Midwest, voted against the declaration of war.
The American public, schooled in the ideology of Manifest Destiny and firmly convinced of the racial and cultural inferiority of Mexicans, largely embraced this war. But a vigorous antiwar movement, centered in New England and led by abolitionists, offered sharp critiques of its morality. Antiwar activists argued that the war was unjust, that might did not make right, and that the conflict was evidence of a “slave power” manipulating the government in order to expand slavery. These positions would ultimately emerge as the consensus view by the late nineteenth century.
During the first year of the war, the antiwar movement had a limited impact. But as war dragged on, dissent became widespread. By late 1847, mainstream congressional Whigs, including some from southern and western districts, openly protested the war and called for its immediate end. Freshman representative Abraham Lincoln demanded to know the “exact spot” where American blood had supposedly been shed. Presidential hopeful Henry Clay gained national attention when he called for mass protests against the war. The antiwar movement has been discounted by some scholars as ineffective, but it played a clear role in pressuring President Polk to come to terms with Mexico at the close of the war.
Polk’s initial call for troops resulted in an outpouring of volunteer enthusiasm, but most soldiers found service in Mexico disillusioning. The Mexican-American War had the highest casualty rate of any American conflict, almost 17 percent of the 79,000 American soldiers who served in it died, mainly from disease. Although the regulars in the army did most of the hard fighting and both Taylor and Scott regularly condemned the volunteers for lack of discipline (they were responsible for most of the atrocities committed against Mexican civilians), it was the volunteers who won most of the acclaim back home. The working men who made up the bulk of both army regulars and volunteers may have believed that service in Mexico would result in an increase in their class status at home, but their harsh treatment by officers tended to reinforce their subservient position in industrializing America. Desertion rates were high, particularly among Catholic immigrants who felt divided loyalties fighting a Catholic country under an army openly hostile to their faith. Some of these men joined the San Patricio Battalion and fought for Mexico. Many more American soldiers embraced the “free soil” political movement upon returning home, convinced that democracy and economic opportunity could flourish only for working men in slavery-free territories.
At the outset of the war, most European observers predicted that Mexico, fighting at home with a large standing army, would easily defeat the invaders from the north. But General Stephen W. Kearny’s troops easily conquered New Mexico, Taylor’s troops prevailed in a number of bloody clashes in northeastern Mexico, Scott battered his way to the capital, and an initial revolt of Anglo settlers under the command of Captain John C. Frémont in California (known as the Bear Flag Revolt) culminated in the surrender of Mexican Californios to American forces in January 1847. Factors internal to Mexico greatly aided the U.S. cause. Chronic political instability, a series of popular uprisings against national and state governments, wars between Mexican settlers and independent Native Americans in the border region, and the inept military leadership of General Antonio L ópez de Santa Anna all hampered Mexico’s ability to repulse the invaders.
Polk had secured the northern half of Mexico by the end of February 1847, and dispatched diplomat Nicholas Trist to negotiate a treaty of peace soon after. But the incensed Mexican government refused to come to terms, even after the fall of Mexico City. American forces in the capital were subject to brutal attacks by guerrilla partisans, and General Scott came to believe that the long-term occupation of central Mexico by the United States was untenable. But extreme Democratic expansionists increasingly called for the annexation of all of Mexico as spoils of war, and Polk recalled Trist in the fall of 1847 in hopes of gaining a larger settlement from Mexico than he had originally authorized. With the support of General Scott, and in sympathy with Mexico’s plight, Trist disobeyed the president and negotiated a treaty on his own. Polk agreed to the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, both because of growing antiwar sentiment at home and because the annexation of the densely populated southern part of Mexico was opposed on racial grounds by many in both the North and South.
There was initial support for the war among northern Democrats who believed expansion was healthy for democracy, desired California’s ports in order to commercially expand into Asia, and saw the annexation of Texas and California as the best means of preventing British encroachment in North America. Yet many came to view Polk’s war with Mexico with suspicion, born of the belief that the war was being waged in the interest of southern slaveholders. When Pennsylvania Democratic congressman David Wilmot offered a rider to a war appropriations bill in August of 1846 on the floor of the House that banned slavery from any territory won from Mexico, he revealed the increasing sectional rift and growing power of free soil ideology in the North.
Democrats faced other struggles during “their” war. Polk had pledged to serve only one term in office, and there was no clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination in 1848. The two heroes of the engagement, Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, were Whigs. Despite Polk’s attempts to brevet Democratic generals, including Franklin Pierce, the president’s fears were realized when the Whigs won the presidency in 1848 with Taylor at the head of the ticket. This was the second and last time the Whigs would win the presidency before the party collapsed over the issue of slavery in the 1850s. Winfield Scott, the Whig Party’s final presidential candidate, was defeated by Pierce in 1852.
In the eyes of many U.S. citizens, virtually every battle in the Mexican-American War made manifest the heroism and superior fighting abilities of the North American. In the battle of Buena Vista, less than 5,000 U.S. soldiers defeated a Mexican army of 15,000. At Cerro Gordo, U.S. forces flanked and drove a much larger Mexican army out of a defensive position, clearing the way to march on the capital, where they successfully stormed Chapúltepec Castle, which guarded Mexico City.
The first war covered by newspaper correspondents was closely followed at home, and these victories became cultural events, celebrated not only in the press, but also in fiction, music, and art. This war marked the first encounter of most white Americans with Mexicans and disrupted the reigning division between black and white that structured American racism. Dime-novel accounts of the war celebrated romance between U.S. soldiers and light-skinned Mexican women, while casting dark-skinned Mexican men as villains. The years following the war saw an explosion of filibustering expeditions by American men into Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America. American filibusters were motivated to invade foreign countries without governmental sanction by a belief that the continued territorial expansion of America was God’s will, by greed for land, and by visions of international romance. For these mercenaries, the key lessons taught by the Mexican-American War were that violence was an acceptable means to gain new territory, and that victory was inevitable over the racial inferiors of Latin America.
The status of slavery in the Mexican cession led to repeated sectional crises. Despite its support among northern representatives of both parties, the Wilmot Proviso never became law because of southern strength in the Senate. The question of whether to allow slavery in the new territories took on concrete importance when California applied for statehood in 1849. When President Zachary Taylor proposed outlawing slavery from all the new territories, including California, furious Southerners threatened to secede from the Union. Only Henry Clay’s Compromise of 1850 calmed the storm by offering Southerners a strict fugitive slave law and the possibility of a new slave state in the unorganized New Mexico territory through the doctrine of “popular sovereignty.”
But this compromise was only temporary. The Second Party System was yet another casualty of the war. The platforms of both major parties, which studiously avoided discussing slavery, began to seem increasingly irrelevant to voters in both the North and South, opening up room for the new Republican Party to make a strong showing in the North in 1856 with presidential candidate John C. Frémont, hero of the Bear Flag Revolt.
Both supporters and opponents agreed that the Mexican-American War marked a turning point in the nation’s history. In 1848 Captain James Henry Carleton wrote that “the Battle of Buena Vista will probably be regarded as the greatest ever fought on this continent.” The Civil War quickly proved him wrong, however, and completely overshadowed the war in Mexico. While in Mexico La Invasíon Norteamericana exerted a powerful force in the political realignment of the late nineteenth century, the creation of a centralized state, and the forging of a common Mexican identity, the half-life of this war north of the border was remarkably short. Representations of even the most dramatic victories of the conflict disappeared after 1860, and veterans of the 1848 conflict struggled to gain public recognition and financial support from a society that had no heart for revisiting the Halls of the Montezumas.
In 1885 former president Ulysses S. Grant, who like most Civil War generals had gained key military experience in the Mexican conflict, described the war with Mexico as “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” He declared the Civil War “our punishment” for that “transgression.” At the time this view was a mainstream one. While Grant had been a member of the pro-war Democratic Party in the 1840s and 1850s, he was a Union general and Republican president and accepted the antiwar Whig Party as his party’s forebear. Although the Democrats promoted and won the war with Mexico, it was a pyrrhic victory for the party. Ultimately the views of Whigs, who maintained that the war was unjust, immoral, and part of a land grab on the part of slaveholders, held sway. The 1847 resolution by the Massachusetts House of Representatives that “an offensive and unnecessary war is one of the highest crimes which man can commit against society; but when is super-added a war for the extension of slavery, its criminality stands out in the boldest possible relief” had become the dominant belief among Republicans after the Civil War.
But white Americans of all parties and all sections of the country in the later nineteenth century tried to forget the Mexican conflict and to reimagine the bloody 1840s as a peaceful period, when sectional harmony and common purpose advanced Manifest Destiny. By the fiftieth anniversary of the war in 1898, politicians and historians seemed comfortable writing a history of America’s military past in which the war with Mexico and its veterans were absent. Congress debated whether to fight a war for empire in 1898 without acknowledging that it was the fiftieth anniversary of the successful conclusion of the first war for empire. The 1848 war posed some difficulties for those who endorsed a history in which Americans always behaved from selfless motives. In 1898 both supporters and opponents of imperialism maintained that the United States had always firmly and consistently disavowed empire.
Since many scholars now explain the war fought by the United States in 1898 as part of a regional struggle for dominance, a process that started with the Monroe Doctrine, this amnesia was significant. Some historians have suggested that the war with Mexico was unnecessary: Polk could have gained Mexico’s northern territories through steady diplomatic negotiations and without either the loss of life or principle that the war entailed. In either case, many would now consider Ralph Waldo Emerson prophetic for predicting in 1846 that “the United States will conquer Mexico,” but that “Mexico will poison us.”
See also sectional conflict and secession, 1845–65.
FURTHER READING. Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War, 2008; Paul Foos, A Short Offhand Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict during the Mexican-American War, 2002; Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire, 2005; Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 1990; Thomas Hietala, Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire, 2003; Irving W. Levinson, Wars within War: Mexican Guerrillas, Domestic Elites, and the United States of America, 2005; David Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War, 1973; Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850, 2005; Cecil Robinson, The View from Chapultepec: Mexican Writers on the Mexican-American War, 1989; John H. Schroeder, Mr. Polk’s War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1846–1848, 1973; Richard Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War, 2001.
AMY S. GREENBERG
Just three Middle Atlantic states, among the most populous in the nation between 1820 and 1940 and industrial leaders for much of American history, have wielded huge potential influence in American politics, particularly in the election of presidents and the make-up of Congress. Yet they have realized this potential only intermittently, as great wealth and diverse populations have made them notorious for political corruption and the politics of compromise.
Leading banks, industries, and railroads were the glue that held these diverse states together. From the Civil War until the mid-twentieth century, Pennsylvania was dominated politically by the Pennsylvania Railroad, Standard Oil, the great steel and coal companies, the Mellon Bank interests (including the Aluminum Corporation of America), and the Pennsylvania Association of Manufacturers. In New York during the same period, the New York Central and Erie Railroads, along with Wall Street bankers, notably J. P. Morgan, wielded the most influence. In New Jersey, the Camden and Amboy Railroad before the Civil War and the Pennsylvania Railroad afterward came to dominate the state. In each state, the enormous discrepancy between private and public wealth ensured that state legislators were almost invariably willing to do the bidding of the capitalists.
New York was founded as New Netherland in 1624 by the Dutch East India Company for two purposes: sending furs, especially for beaver hats, to Holland, and supplying the newly acquired Dutch colony of Brazil with provisions such as fish and grain. Peter Minuit, the first governor, instituted the patroon system in 1629, which the English continued under the name of proprietary estates, in which wealthy men who brought at least 50 settlers to the colony received large tracts of land that they leased to tenants.
New Netherland was governed autocratically by a series of governors, none of whom could maintain order effectively among the diverse population of Dutch, English (on eastern Long Island), and, after 1654, Swedes in the Delaware Valley, whom Governor Pieter Stuyvesant conquered. Stuyvesant was so unpopular that when an English fleet arrived in 1664, the population refused to fight. The renamed New York was then ruled as a proprietary colony by the Duke of York, the future King James II. Conflict between the influential English and Anglican minority and the Dutch characterized New York politics until the mid-1730s, when the proprietary Livingston family of upstate New York and the French Huguenot merchant Delanceys of New York City became leading rivals until the American Revolution.
New York anticipated the party politics that did not develop elsewhere until the 1790s or later. Each faction ran complete slates of candidates, distributed literature, held rallies, and articulated specific policies.
As with Pennsylvania and New Jersey, New York’s assembly never supported the American Revolution, and leadership before 1775 fell to New York City merchants and sea captains, who, in 1766, led the fight against British soldiers at what became known as the Battle of Golden Hill. But New York’s revolution did not lead to a major class conflict because members of the elite, such as the intermarried Jay and Livingston families, took a strong stand for resistance and independence. In 1777 John Jay (governor, 1795–1801) drafted most of a constitution that gave equal political rights to all citizens regardless of religion. But until 1795, the anti-Federalist supporters of states’ rights dominated New York, with George Clinton holding the governorship for 18 years. Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, along with James Madison, wrote the Federalist Papers to convince New Yorkers to support the U.S. Constitution, but only the threat to remove heavily Federalist New York City from the state and join the union convinced the upstate opposition to support ratification. New York was the eleventh state to ratify.
New York continued to lead the nation in political mobilization in the nineteenth century. Aaron Burr (senator, 1791–97) earned his spot as vice president on Thomas Jefferson’s 1800 ticket when he was a principal organizer of the nation’s first urban political machine, known as Tammany Hall after the meeting place of New York Democrats. On the state level, Martin Van Buren (senator, 1821–28; president, 1837–41) did likewise, earning a similar position from Andrew Jackson in 1833. Van Buren wrote the first theoretical defense of the two-party system as well, arguing that a legitimate opposition encouraged voter participation, especially in an era when nearly every government job was a political appointment.
During the Civil War, New York State, especially the New York City area, was the most pro-southern in the North. The city was the center of the cotton export trade, and by 1860, its population was three-fourths immigrant or first-generation (mostly Irish) American—poor workers who had little sympathy with southern slaves and competed for jobs with local African Americans. Mayor Fernando Wood hoped the city would secede and form the state of Islandia to join the South. In 1863 the city descended into chaos for seven days after the draft was instituted on July 4, and between 100 and 1,000 people died in the ensuing riots. Only the arrival of Union troops from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, ended the disturbances; had Lee won that pivotal battle, Union control over its largest city might have ended.
With the most patronage positions up for grabs, the New York Republican and Democratic parties led the nation in corruption. William M. “Boss” Tweed, a Democrat who dominated the city in the 1860s, had a Republican counterpart in Senator Roscoe Conkling (1867–81), who persuaded his party to nominate the former head of the New York customhouse, Chester Arthur, for vice president in 1880. Republican president Rutherford Hayes had dismissed Arthur for his willingness to overlook corruption where more of the nation’s imports landed than anywhere else. Earlier, New Yorkers of both parties had joined together and nominated Republican editor of the New York Tribune Horace Greeley to run for president in 1872 against the scandal-ridden administration of Ulysses S. Grant. The Democratic Party endorsed him as well. New York Governor Grover Cleveland was the only Democratic president between the Civil War and Woodrow Wilson, who would become president in 1913: in 1884 Cleveland defeated the notoriously corrupt James G. Blaine, a Maine senator, despite having admitted to fathering and supporting an illegitimate child. When a New York Republican minister denounced the Democrats as the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” his speech backfired, giving Cleveland a minuscule margin in his home state.
With Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt and Alfred E. Smith (governor, 1923–29), New York became a national leader in progressive reform in both political parties. Laws that protected women and children at work, supported labor unions, provided old-age and disability insurance, and furthered public education were a model for the New Deal; Governor Herbert Lehman (1933–44) was a firm friend of Franklin Roosevelt and his policies. New York public housing and road construction led the nation: by the 1930s, New York City had five times the highway mileage of any other city, as well as the largest city and regional railroad system.
Following World War II, New York continued to lead the nation in expenditures, including a huge highway system, state university, and capitol complex in Albany built under Governor Nelson Rockefeller (1959–73), which greatly expanded the state’s debt. In the 1960s, New York and many of the state’s older cities were plagued by poverty, riots, and a flight to the suburbs. New York City went bankrupt in 1975 and had to be bailed out by the state government. Under Mayor Ed Koch (1978–89), the city regained much of its prosperity by promoting international tourism and investment, but at the expense of the poor and the middle class, who found it increasingly hard to pay the astronomical city rents. The suburbs continued to grow while urban and rural areas of upstate New York declined in population.
In the twentieth century, New York was the only state to have important liberal and conservative parties that ran candidates of their own as well as endorsing those of the major parties. Liberal Republican John Lindsay won election as mayor of New York City (1966–73) when conservative Republicans ran candidates—including columnist William F. Buckley Jr.—who took votes away from the Democratic machine’s choice. Lindsay ran on the Republican-Liberal ticket to win his first term and Democratic-Liberal for his second. When Buckley’s brother James (senator, 1981–87) defeated longtime liberal Republican senator Jacob Javits (1957–81) in the 1980 primary, Javits refused to give up his Liberal Party line, taking enough votes away from Democrat Elizabeth Holtzman to cost her the election.
New York also attracted celebrity candidates from other states: the Buckleys from Connecticut, Senator Robert F. Kennedy from Massachusetts, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton from Arkansas. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, New York voters were independent and unpredictable: they elected two Republican mayors, Rudolph Giuliani (1994–2001) and Michael Bloomberg (2001–), in heavily Democratic New York City and a conservative Republican governor, George Pataki (1995–2006), to succeed the liberal Democrat Mario Cuomo (1983–94). Until the Democrats’ victory in the election of 2008, the state senate had been in Republican hands, the assembly in Democratic, since the 1960s. Candidates for judges were almost invariably endorsed by the Democratic, Republican, Conservative, and Liberal parties.
Pennsylvania began in 1682, when William Penn became the proprietor of the colony. Penn recruited English Quakers as well as German pacifists to receive freeholds in a colony that would grant religious toleration to all peaceful inhabitants (although only Christians could vote and hold office before the constitution of 1790). Penn recruited whole communities, which settled together, thereby preventing serious internal conflict until the Scots-Irish settled the western frontier in the 1750s. He bought the western land fairly from the Indians, although the “treaty” made famous in Benjamin West’s 1771 painting was actually 12 treaties with small groups in the Philadelphia area.
Penn’s colonists did not appreciate his largesse. They opposed his design for an appointed council and did not want to pay rents or taxes without an assembly’s consent; Penn lost so much money on Pennsylvania that when he tried to sell it in the 1690s to pay off his debts, there were no buyers. After 19 constitutions or instruments of government either proposed or attempted, in 1701 Penn and the colonists finally settled on a system unique among the 13 colonies in having a one-house legislature, the assembly. With representation set by county, the three original counties that favored the Quaker Party dominated the legislature; their opponents, the Proprietary Party, supported the Penn family interests and mostly consisted of Presbyterians and Anglicans.
When warfare broke out in 1754 over whether the French or British should rule what is now western Pennsylvania, the Indians from whom Pennsylvania had purchased land attacked all along the frontier, driving settlement back beyond the Susquehanna River and turning Lancaster, York, and Reading into refugee centers. The assembly insisted the proprietors pay taxes for frontier defense; eight pacifist Quakers resigned in 1756 rather than approve funds for war, but the party kept control. It sent Benjamin Franklin to London to lobby for Pennsylvania’s becoming a royal province; during the 1760s and 1770s, when most colonies were resisting British taxes and commercial regulation, leaders of both Pennsylvania factions were trying to impress the home government with their loyalty.
As a result, Philadelphia artisans and politicized Pennsylvania German farmers, led by notable Philadelphians including Franklin, Thomas Paine (author of Common Sense), painter Charles Willson Peale, astronomer David Rittenhouse, and Dr. Benjamin Rush, took control of the revolution, ousted the assembly, and drew up a new constitution in 1776. Abolishing the office of governor for a mere “president,” who simply presided over the assembly, the document was both the most and least democratic of all the state constitutions: most democratic in that tax-paying men could vote and the assembly was reapportioned to favor the previously underrepresented backcountry, but least democratic in that only those who swore an oath to the government on the Bible could participate in the new order. Pennsylvania also adopted the nation’s first system of rotation in office (no one could serve in the assembly more than four out of seven years), authorized the Council of Censors to judge whether laws violated the constitution, and required two consecutive assemblies to pass nonemergency legislation, to give people a chance to look over the new laws. But the new government proved both tyrannical in suppressing opponents and enforcing price fixing and ineffective in collecting taxes and keeping order. Businessmen headed by U.S. superintendent of finance Robert Morris formed the Republican (later Federalist) Party to oppose the Constitutionalists (later anti-Federalists). Bringing fiscal stability to the state with the first bank on the North American continent in 1781, they also supported commercial and industrial development. After they took over the state in 1786, they brought it into line for the U.S. Constitution, and replaced Pennsylvania’s own constitution in 1790, restoring a strong senate and governor.
Aside from the struggle over the nature of its government, Pennsylvania endured more unrest than any other state between 1750 and 1800. It had fought with three of its neighbors—Maryland in the south, Virginia in the west, and Connecticut in the north—over its boundaries, and only settled them in 1763, 1781, and 1786, respectively. Two of the three “rebellions” in the early republic (more accurately, cases of tax resistance)—the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 and Fries’s Rebellion in 1799—occurred in Pennsylvania when the federal government appointed unpopular individuals to collect new taxes.
Between 1800 and the Civil War, Pennsylvanians of every political persuasion dedicated themselves to economic growth. They strongly favored government support for internal improvements, differing primarily over whether this should occur through legislative grants, borrowing, or assistance to banks. Pennsylvania staked its industrial growth on high tariffs, but by the 1850s, after most of the schemes for canals and railroads failed, the state was controlled by the pro–southern Democratic machine headed by James Buchanan.
Buchanan’s disastrous presidency and the invasion of Pennsylvania twice by Confederate forces (at Gettysburg in 1863 and Chambersburg in 1864) led to a Republican ascendancy that even the Great Depression barely interrupted, and which ultimately survived until the 1950s. The state legislature became notorious as the servant of business interests: Pennsylvania was the only state in the union that allowed corporations to recruit government police forces (the infamous “coal and iron police”) and allowed the Pennsylvania Railroad to create corporations, such as John D. Rockefeller’s South Improvement Company, which drilled and processed most of western Pennsylvania’s oil. Tom Scott, President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, helped negotiate the deal that in 1876 made Republican Rutherford B. Hayes president in a disputed election with Samuel Tilden; the next year, Hayes ordered federal troops to break the national railroad strike. Even Pennsylvania Democratic reformers such as lawyer J. Mitchell Palmer could not defeat boss Boies Penrose in the first direct election of a senator held in the state in 1914; six years later, Penrose solved an impasse at the Republican National Convention and secured the presidential nomination for Warren Harding, with his chief supporter Andrew Mellon of Pittsburgh becoming secretary of the treasury. Nor could William Wilson, secretary of the United Mine Workers—in whose northeastern Pennsylvania strike of 1903 the federal government intervened on the workers’ behalf for the first time—defeat William Vare, the boss of Philadelphia, in the dishonest senate election of 1926. Vare had previously arranged for his wife to be the first woman in the Pennsylvania state legislature as a sop to women’s rights. Ultraconservative Pennsylvania supported neither woman suffrage nor Prohibition.
Only in 1922 and again in 1930 was a reformer, Gifford Pinchot, elected governor. Pinchot had won the support of the Mellons and the Pennsylvania Association of Manufacturers, which, represented by its president Joseph Grundy, ran the state most of the time between Penrose’s death in 1921 and his own (at the age of 99) in 1961. The first chief of the National Forest Service, Pinchot pushed for conservation of the formerly magnificent woods that had allowed Pennsylvania to lead the nation in lumber production during the 1860s and 1870s. He also favored employment projects, especially roads and public construction, during the New Deal, as did his successor Democrat George Earle (1935–39): both men supported unions and the right of workers to strike. But the Republican legislature refused even to set up a system for distributing much of the New Deal monies to which the state was entitled, just as, in the 1920s, it had refused to enforce Prohibition, leading Pinchot to rely on funds from the Women’s Christian Temperance League. The Pennsylvania Turnpike, the nation’s first limited access high-speed highway, was built only when President Roosevelt approved 20 million in federal funds to do so.
After World War II, Pennsylvania became a two-party state. Popular governors included Democrats George Leader (1955–59), David Lawrence (1959–63), and Ed Rendell (2003–) as well as Republicans William Scranton (1963–67) and Tom Ridge (1995–2001). Once a leader in American industry, Pennsylvania now confronted deindustrialization: numerous small cities as well as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia lost one-third to one-half of their population between 1960 and 2008.
New Jersey began as two colonies: East Jersey, with its capital at Perth Amboy, opposite New York City, and West Jersey, with its capital at Burlington opposite Philadelphia, in 1676. Although the colony united in 1702, its economy and politics reflected this geographic divide. West Jersey was heavily Quaker, settled with freehold farms, and used Philadelphia as its major port; East Jersey was settled largely by Scots, had large proprietary estates, and fell within New York’s orbit. At first New Jersey was considered too insignificant to have its own royal governor, and shared one with New York until 1738. During the 1750s, Scottish proprietors attempted to collect their rents and control the settlement on their estates, which led to land riots. Only the American Revolution and the ousting of the largely loyalist owners settled the problem. New Jersey accepted the U.S. Constitution with alacrity, fearing that otherwise it would be swallowed by its stronger neighbors. But the divisions continued: the state had to pass a law in 1790 preventing people from bringing their guns to polling places.
New Jersey set up one of the weakest state governments in the nation: the executive had no appointive powers, it was the next to last state to have free public education, and, as late as 1960, had neither a sales nor an income tax. In the nineteenth century, it was overwhelmingly Democratic until the Republicans supplanted the Democrats after William McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryan in the presidential election of 1896. Conservative New Jersey gave African American men the vote only when compelled to, along with the South, by the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1870. Republican rule was briefly interrupted when a division between Republican reformers and conservatives permitted the election of Woodrow Wilson, a Democratic governor (1911–13) who supported such innovations as the direct primary, laws protecting workers, and regulation of public utilities. Wilson had won election as the choice of Boss James Smith of Newark, and infuriated Democratic regulars when he decided to become a reformer.
In later years, New Jersey, like New York, behaved unpredictably in state elections, although consistently in presidential races, voting Democratic in every national contest between 1992 and 2008. Republican moderates won election as governor, including Tom Kean (1982–90) and Christine Todd Whitman (1994–2001). Democratic governor James Florio (1990–94) generated a backlash against his party when he raised taxes significantly to improve public services. As in Pennsylvania, state taxes were low (New Jersey had some of the lowest gasoline prices in the nation), which put the burden of solving urban problems on cities. Many New Jersey residents lived in suburban areas and were more closely linked, economically and psychologically, with the communities in Pennsylvania and New York, especially Philadelphia and New York City, where they worked.
New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and frequently New York, have been bastions of corruption and compromise through much of their history, from their refusal to endorse independence in 1776 to the vast influence corporations and railroads exercised over state legislatures. As the nation moved to a service economy, representatives of urban ethnic groups, middle-class suburbs, business interests, farmers, and post-industrial cities all had to cooperate to solve the problems of a region that had lost national importance to the South and the West. Nevertheless, all three states proved capable of electing energetic officials whose civic commitment extended beyond enriching corporations and satisfying the wishes of political machines. Mayors Giuliani (1994–2001) and Bloomberg (2002–) of New York City and Governor Jon Corzine (2006–) of New Jersey won national attention for their efforts to control fiscal expenditures, promote economic growth, and improve some of the nation’s most polluted environments. At the same time, perpetual squabbling in the state legislatures continued to stymie meaningful advances in educational reform and improved health care.
See also local government; state government.
FURTHER READING. Paul D. Beers, Pennsylvania Politics: Today and Yesterday, 1980; Thomas Fleming, New Jersey: A History, 1984; Richard Hofstadter, The Rise of a Party System: The Growth of the Idea of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840, 1969; Milton M. Klein, ed., The Empire State: A History, 2005; Philip Klein and Ari Hoogenboom, A History of Pennsylvania, 1980; Richard Lehne and Lana Rosenthal, eds., Politics in New Jersey, 1979; Randall Miller and William Pencak, eds., Pennsylvania: A History of the Commonwealth, 2002; John F. Reynolds, Testing Democracy: Electoral Behavior and Political Reform in New Jersey, 1880–1920, 1988; William Riordan, ed., Plunkett of Tammany Hall, 1963; Barbara G. Salmore and Stephen A. Salmore, New Jersey Politics and Government: The Suburbs Come of Age, 3rd ed., 2008; Edward V. Schneier and Brian Murtaugh, New York Politics: A Tale of Two States, 2001; Jack M. Treadway, Elections in Pennsylvania: A Century of Partisan Conflict, 2005.
WILLIAM PENCAK
In his recent polemic What’s the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank examined that state to discover “how conservatives won the heart of America.” For many Americans, Frank’s assessment that the Midwest is fundamentally conservative, unprogressive, and even backward politically is self-evident. An earlier generation, however, saw the Midwest as a laboratory for democratic ideas and causes. John Barnhart, author of a 1953 history on the settlement of the Ohio River Valley, applied historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s emphasis on the frontier’s importance for democracy to that region. Barnhart’s thesis was that in Ohio’s territorial period, democracy triumphed over the elitism of the Federalist Party. Although it is no longer fashionable among historians to see a causal connection between the settlement of the frontier and the advance of democracy, many of the issues and problems of U.S. politics have been worked out in the Midwest. Even William Allen White, the newspaper editor who first asked the question “What’s the matter with Kansas?” in an 1896 editorial, was ridiculing a movement—populism—that many contemporary historians view as a radical solution to the economic ills of the late nineteenth century. And Frank’s maligned conservatives were, in the 1980s, part of a revolution to remake American society and politics. Far from being backward, the Midwest has been at the forefront of political debate in the nation.
The first political systems of the Midwest were the consensus-based tribal politics of the Native Americans. The collective decision making and noncoercive nature of the Native American political tradition ran contrary to the European colonizers’ hierarchical systems. As European alliances became important to the tribes, tribal politics began to revolve much more around diplomacy and trade relations. Historian Richard White has posited a “middle ground” in which Native Americans and Euro-Americans accommodated and adapted to each other. That relationship eroded, however, when Euro-Americans achieved dominance in the early nineteenth century. Rather than accommodate Native Americans, Americans sought to expel them.
The removal period of the early 1800s saw some tribes displaced from certain areas of the Midwest, often to more western parts of the region. In states that had undergone removal, the families and bands that remained often lost their tribal status. Some, such as the Miami, engaged in a long political struggle to regain that status. Even among current Native Americans with tribal status, resentment at government encroachments on tribal sovereignty conflicts with fears that government moves toward “self-determination” will mean the end of the federal aid the tribes receive.
For Euro-Americans in the Midwest, the American Revolution brought new forms of government. The national government, under the Articles of Confederation, possessed a vast colonial territory: the region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. Congress resolved the issue of governance through the Northwest Ordinance, which established the Northwest Territory and provided for stages of government as the territory grew in population. In the earliest stages, government was autocratic under a federally appointed governor and judges. As population increased, the territory acquired an elected legislature, but the governor retained absolute veto power. When the population reached a certain level, voters could elect a constitutional convention and apply for statehood. If admitted, the new state entered on an equal footing with its predecessors. The ordinance acknowledged both the democratic underpinnings of the American system and a good deal of distrust in the pioneers’ capabilities to govern properly. It also, however, laid the groundwork for territorial government not only in the Midwest but in all regions of future U.S. expansion. As well, the trend from the earliest settlement of Ohio was for autocratic features to erode in favor of democracy. The population benchmarks required for the government to move to the next stage were often waived, governors of future territories lost their absolute veto, and the presumption became that settlers were fit for statehood as soon as they desired it. In fact, the national government, or political parties that sought to gain electoral votes, would often push for statehood before many settlers felt ready to bear the financial burden of extra taxation that statehood entailed.
The Midwest achieved statehood during the nineteenth century, a period when expanding democracy was the norm. James H. Madison, an expert in Midwestern history, includes the following states in the region: Ohio (which achieved statehood in 1803), Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), Missouri (1821), Michigan (1837), Iowa (1846), Wisconsin (1848), Minnesota (1858), Kansas (1861), Nebraska (1867), South Dakota (1889), and North Dakota (1889). State constitutions provided for strong legislatures and weak governors. Ohio’s 1803 constitution did not even give the governor a veto. Some early state constitutions gave the legislature extensive control over appointments or required frequent elections of both the legislative and executive branches. Frequent elections gave the people more control over their representatives. Nineteenth-century notions of democracy, however, were limited only to white men. When Indiana revised its constitution in 1851, it specifically limited suffrage to white males. Many Midwestern states had black exclusion laws that forbade blacks to settle in them or required the posting of a bond. Although these laws were often flouted, they demonstrated the pervasive hostility to African Americans and became the basis for harassing blacks who incurred community wrath—often for abolitionist activity.
Attitudes toward African Americans depended in part on sectional differences. New England migrants who settled Ohio’s Western Reserve formed abolition societies and voted Whig or Republican, while the Kentuckians in the lower North favored the Democrats. In general, regional differences in housing styles, foodways, and political culture would be subordinated to a general sense of American westernness. Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln demonstrated the subordination of region of origin to party politics when they clashed in the 1858 Illinois senatorial race. The Democrat, Douglas, a Vermont native, rejected the East’s confining morality and deference to hierarchy. The Republican, Lincoln, a Kentucky native, rejected the South’s economic backwardness and embraced the very movements Douglas abhorred—temperance and antislavery. Both men, of course, considered themselves Westerners and believed their positions represented the best interests of the Midwest. The place where this emphasis on westernness failed, perhaps, was the Kansas Territory. Since Kansas was at the center of a sectional storm over slavery, settlers from New England, the Midwest, and Missouri were unable to forget their regions of origin and forge a common western identity. Rather, they adhered to free soil or proslavery political positions, keenly aware of region.
The Midwest was at the forefront of disputes over democracy during the Civil War. The Peace Democrats, or Copperheads, took their nickname from a poisonous snake indigenous to the Midwest. The Copperheads advocated constitutional liberty, which they believed the administration of President Abraham Lincoln threatened. They opposed military arrests and trials of civilians, the suspension of habeas corpus, and the suppression of free speech and the press. Deeply racist, they also opposed emancipation, as well as civil and political rights for African Americans. Many Midwesterners believed that Copperhead objections to Republican wartime policy constituted active support of the Confederacy. In 1863 the military’s arrest of the leading Peace Democrat, former congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, became a cause célèbre. Because Vallandigham had spoken against the war, he was arrested and tried by a military tribunal. President Lincoln commuted his sentence to exile to the Confederacy. While never a threat to the war effort, the Copperheads represented deep discontent in the white Midwest with many of the Lincoln administration’s policies, particularly on civil liberties and race.
Although the Midwest had long been hostile to blacks, African American migration to the Midwestern states increased after the Civil War. The suppression of African American political rights at the end of Reconstruction prompted a migration of so-called Exo-dusters (so named because of their exodus from the increasingly repressive southern states). Segregation of schools, workplaces, housing, and social venues existed formally and informally in the Midwest, but voting was nonetheless allowed. By the early 1900s, industrialization stimulated black migration. Factory owners sometimes recruited black workers as strikebreakers, but, in general, the availability of jobs just as surely brought African Americans from the South. Race riots occasionally marred the Midwest’s reputation as a refuge from the Jim Crow South. In 1908 a race riot erupted in Springfield, Illinois—Abraham Lincoln’s hometown—when whites attacked blacks in reaction to their growing presence. During World War II, a terrible race riot occurred in Detroit, where black and white workers clashed. By contrast, race riots during the 1960s were more often associated with black frustration at poor housing and menial jobs, as was the case with a Detroit riot in 1967.
Civil rights leaders worked to improve conditions in the Midwest as well as in the South. The lead case in the U.S. Supreme Court’s groundbreaking school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, was that of an African American family, the Browns, against the school board of Topeka, Kansas. In the all-white Chicago suburb of Cicero, Martin Luther King Jr. drew attention to segregation in the North by means of a peaceful march. By 2008 the rise of Illinois senator Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency indicated the progress that Midwestern African Americans had achieved.
After the Civil War, the Midwest became a political battleground. Several Midwestern states possessed both divided electorates and considerable electoral votes. Moreover, government’s growing involvement in regulating the economy was of special interest to residents of the region. As a heavily agricultural area, but also one of growing industry, the Midwest faced the social and economic changes of the age. The temperance, Greenback (labor), and grange or populist movements all drew great attention in the Midwest.
Quantitative analyses of Midwestern politics in the late nineteenth century argue that voters split along ethnic and religious—rather than along class—lines. In this formulation, pietists (evangelical Protestants) backed the Republican Party, and ritualists (Catholics) backed the Democrats. The 1896 presidential election between William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan, both Midwesterners, shifted the dynamic. Pietists embraced the Presbyterian Bryan, but ritualists were repelled from the Democratic Party. The result was a new ascendancy for the Republican Party in the Midwest as the “party of prosperity.”
However, pietism was not dead, and soon saw results in the Prohibition movement. Both major anti-alcohol organizations, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League, originated in the Midwest. The Eighteenth Amendment to prohibit alcohol was ratified by most Midwestern state legislatures, and the enforcement legislation, the Volstead Act, took the name of Minnesota congressman Andrew Volstead.
The Midwest also became a center of resistance to Prohibition. Al Capone, a Chicago gangster, gained notoriety as a supplier of bootleg liquor. Because the legalization of alcohol not only promised to undermine this flourishing criminal subculture but also to stimulate a flagging economy, the Midwest decisively supported repealing Prohibition in the early years of the Great Depression.
Ethnicity was an important element of the struggle over Prohibition. Among the bootleggers’ customers were ethnic, urban voters who supported the repeal of Prohibition, while native-born, rural Protestant Midwesterners opposed it, embracing the crusade against alcohol. These ethnic voters resulted from the waves of migration into the Midwest from the early nineteenth century on. Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians came first, followed by the late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century migration of southern and eastern Europeans. Democrats welcomed the immigrants, but the Whig Party, and later the Republican Party—although attractive to some immigrant groups such as the Germans—were more hesitant to embrace the new constituencies.
Issues such as slavery, alcohol, and economics helped determine the partisan split of immigrant groups. German voters were more receptive to the middle-class aspirations of Republicans than were the Irish. Although German voters might have disliked Republican temperance proclivities, they were more likely to appreciate Republican moral qualms about slavery and invocations of the superiority of a free-labor society. In the post–Civil War period, Democrats continued to appeal to immigrants for their defense of cultural traditions, such as drinking alcohol, and their closer identification with the working class, to which many immigrants belonged.
More recently, many political alliances have been reshaped by Hispanic migration, especially from Mexico, and by migration from Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Mideast. Federal immigration legislation in 1965, which removed quotas that favored western and northern Europeans, coincided with shifting patterns of migration by bringing more persons from developing nations. As immigrants became more involved in civic life, their presence often provoked a nativist backlash. Political movements to deny immigrants the right to hold office, to enforce the legal prohibition of alcohol, or to deny amnesty for illegal immigrants have all grown from nativist sentiment.
The increasing presence of women on the Midwestern public stage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dovetailed with the growing movement for their own rights. Although the women’s rights movement originated in the northeast, Midwestern women took part in meetings before the Civil War. It was at an Akron, Ohio, women’s rights gathering that Sojourner Truth delivered her famous “Aren’t I a Woman?” speech, reminding the audience that nineteenth-century gender roles made no allowance for the situation of black women. Clarina Nichols took a notable role at the convention that wrote Kansas’s constitution.
Nonetheless, women’s activism was still seen as an extension of their role in the home. During the Civil War, women supported the war effort through aid societies, sanitary fairs, and nursing. Although Mary Livermore, a Chicagoan and organizer of sanitary commission fairs, became a suffrage advocate, the movement was not as strong in the Midwest. In the post–Civil War period, many women turned their activism toward temperance. Midwestern women joined the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and participated in its crusades against the saloon. Kansan Carrie Nation and her hatchet became national symbols of the WCTU’s campaign against alcohol.
Their battle against the liquor interests persuaded many women of the need for the vote. Midwestern states began to permit women to vote, often in local elections, before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. The leader of the campaign for the woman suffrage amendment was an Iowan, Carrie Chapman Catt. A generation later, the feminist movement would also have Midwestern roots. Betty Friedan from Peoria, Illinois, was living the life of a suburban housewife and mother when she wrote her protest against women’s isolation in the home, The Feminine Mystique, in 1963. All the Midwestern states except Illinois ratified the equal rights amendment, although Nebraska and South Dakota later rescinded their ratifications. After the expansion of women’s rights to include reproductive rights, the National Abortion Rights Action League was founded in Chicago to protect against attacks—both political and physical—on abortion rights.
Women had, of course, never been entirely isolated in the domestic sphere. Economic necessity as well as the desire for a career often drove women to work outside the home. During the nineteenth century, certain occupations such as teaching and nursing had become feminized. But women also worked in the emerging factories.
The new industrial order, in fact, stimulated some of the most important political developments in Midwestern history. Early factory labor was dangerous, subject to the boom and bust periods of the business cycle, and largely unregulated. Manufacturers’ reliance on holding companies and trusts allowed them to build near monopolies in certain industries. Amid a political culture of lax ethics, politicians took money and gifts from industrialists, thereby compromising their ability to speak for the people. Some of the most famous protests against the new industrial order arose out of the Midwest. In 1894 Jacob Coxey, an Ohio manufacturer, led an army of the unemployed in a march on Washington, D.C. Although they drew attention to the hardships created by the Panic of 1893, they gained little from the government except arrest for walking on the grass.
Industrialization stimulated the political movement of progressivism. Progressives sought to ameliorate its worst effects through social reform and government regulation. Jane Addams pioneered the settlement house movement when she and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House in an immigrant neighborhood in Chicago in 1889. Settlement houses provided social services for their neighbors, such as day care and vocational training, but they also played an active role in civic life. Settlement house workers helped immigrants prepare for naturalization and campaigned for regulation and services from city government. Midwestern mayors such as Hazen Pingree of Detroit, Samuel Jones of Toledo, and Tom Johnson of Cleveland led early reforms against the boss-dominated politics of their cities. Samuel M. “Golden Rule” Jones, a Christian Socialist, advocated public ownership of utilities. Robert M. “Fighting Bob” La Follette of Wisconsin, the great leader of Midwestern progressivism, began his career by winning election against his state’s Republican machine. By 1900 the machine was broken, and La Follette and his followers were implementing the “Wisconsin idea” of expanded democracy, whose major reforms included direct primaries, initiative and referendum, campaign finance, civil service, and antilobbying laws; government regulation of transportation, public utilities, industry, and banking; state income and inheritance taxes; child labor, industrial safety, pure food and workmen’s compensation laws. Although La Follette lost influence in the national party, the Wisconsin reforms became a model for national progressivism.
While Progressives accepted the capitalist economic order, some Midwesterners rebelled against it. The Midwest was the site of labor unrest that galvanized the nation. Chicago, a major railroad hub, was caught up in the national railroad strike of 1877. In 1886 strikes in Chicago for the eight-hour day panicked middle-class residents, who feared the violent rhetoric of many in the labor movement. When police fired into a crowd of strikers at the McCormick Harvester plant, labor leaders organized a protest meeting at the Haymarket. A bomb was thrown among the police who came to the meeting, and the police opened fire. Eight anarchists were convicted of conspiracy for murder, although little evidence connected them to the bomb.
During the depression of 1893–94, workers in Pullman, Illinois—who built railroad cars—went on strike over wage cuts. The strike became national when the American Railway Union agreed to support the Pullman workers. Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the American Railway Union, converted to socialism while in jail during the Pullman strike. Debs emerged from prison determined to change the economic system. A Hoosier, Debs pioneered an indigenous, American version of socialism, but socialism still was too radical and—despite Debs—too foreign for most Midwesterners.
Industrial workers were not the only people turning to organization to resolve their economic difficulties. Farmers also adopted cooperative arrangements, such as those offered by the Patrons of Husbandry (also known as the Grange) or the Farmers’ Alliance. The Granger laws, aimed at regulating the railroads on which farmers relied, were passed in many states. The Farmers’ Alliance, which began in Texas, took hold in the Midwest with a program of cooperative marketing and proposals for a government-run subtreasury that was intended to expand the money supply. Unable to achieve these reforms through the two-party system, the Alliance turned to political action with the creation of the Populist Party in 1892. It was the strength of the Populists in Kansas that provoked White to pose the question “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” for the first time. However, the Populists’ venture as a third party was short-lived: when they decided to fuse with the Democrats in 1896, they lost both the election and their identity as an influential party.
But Midwestern radicalism did not expire with the demise of the Populists. Before World War I, North Dakota farmers responded to the monopoly practices of grain elevators and railroads by forming the Non-Partisan League. Radicalism spread to other parts of the Midwest, where the Farmer-Labor party allied farmers with miners and industrial workers. During the war, the party lost power because adherents were accused of being pro-German.
A reactionary movement saw surprising growth in parts of the Midwest with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; this second Klan movement was as much anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic as it was antiblack. Klansmen, ostensibly representing moral rectitude and Americanism, enforced the vice laws, such as Prohibition, that immigrants often flouted. The Klan reached its apex of political power in Indiana, where the governor had ties to the group. Ironically, the Indiana Klan collapsed under the weight of a sex scandal when its leader kidnapped and raped a young woman who then committed suicide.
The Klan was one manifestation of another side of Midwestern politics. In contrast to the discontent and push for reform demonstrated by farmers and laborers, there were powerful impulses of conformity. The pioneering sociological study by Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown, found the Klan to be an offshoot of that impulse. Muncie, Indiana—the site of Middletown—possessed a business class that promoted civic boosterism, local and national patriotism, and encouraged voting a straight ticket. In this environment, citizens knew less and less about their candidates and their local government. Peer pressure kept those who might dissent from the local ethic quiet. In Middletown, the emphasis was on “getting a living,” not on political activism.
While the Midwest saw much protest against the emerging industrial-capitalist order, it also saw the rise of powerful conservatives who were part of that order. William McKinley, the Ohio Republican who concentrated on tariff reform, was bankrolled by Mark Hanna, the epitome for many in the Progressive Era of the money bag–carrying plutocrat. Herbert Hoover, a self-made man, championed a philosophy of “rugged individualism.” Conservative or so-called Bourbon Democrats, such as J. Sterling Morton of Nebraska, were more comfortable with industrialization than their Populist-oriented counterparts. In some parts of the Midwest, a more symbiotic than antagonistic relationship existed between farm and factory. Midwestern industrial centers such as Chicago and Omaha, Nebraska, provided markets for farmers’ output.
The Midwestern protest tradition reasserted itself during the Great Depression. The Farm Holiday Association dramatized the plight of farmers through farm strikes and by pouring milk onto roads in an attempt to raise its price. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal brought Midwestern farmers the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers not to plant and formed the basis of much modern farm policy. The American Farm Bureau emerged as spokesman for the farm interest. Although its roots were in the cooperative movements of the nineteenth century, it came to represent the farmer as small businessman. The Farm Bureau became a powerful lobbying force, closely allied to the Farm Bloc—congressmen and senators from farm states who have a major say in agricultural policy. The New Deal thus turned agrarian activism in a more conservative direction.
The Great Depression also renewed labor activism, which had been crushed by government suppression during and after World War I, and had remained dormant during the affluence of the 1920s. Flint, Michigan, home to a General Motors factory, became the site of a major sit-down strike that inspired similar labor actions across the country. Through such strikes, and New Deal legislation, labor won the right to organize.
World War II brought prosperity that continued into the postwar period, and that prosperity brought increased conservatism. As white workers could afford a middle-class income, they became increasingly concerned with rising taxes that redistributed income to the poor and to African Americans. By the 1980s, they became known as Reagan Democrats, traditionally working-class Democratic voters who voted for Republican Ronald Reagan because they liked his antitax stance and anticommunism. Ironically, the emergence of Reagan Democrats coincided with the decline of industry and working-class affluence. Filmmaker Michael Moore caught the emergence of the Rust Belt in Roger & Me, a profile of Flint’s decline as General Motors closed its plants there. Industry’s decline crippled labor’s political power.
During the post–World War II period, the Midwest was home to both a vibrant liberalism and a rising conservatism. Iowan Henry A. Wallace, who had a long career as secretary of agriculture under President Franklin D. Roosevelt and then as his vice president, would run for president himself in 1948 as the candidate of the left-wing Progressive Party. Conservatism would see its triumph with the election of Illinois-born Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Some of the best-known national spokesmen for postwar liberalism were from the Midwest. Throughout his long career as mayor of Minneapolis, senator from Minnesota, vice president, and presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey worked for the ideals of the New Deal and the Great Society, a social safety net, and civil rights. Humphrey, along with the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate, South Dakota senator George McGovern, embodied the big-government liberalism that conservatives attacked. In addition, McGovern was identified with a youth movement that wanted to legalize marijuana and end the Vietnam War.
The student movement had its birth in the Midwest with the Port Huron Statement, which was issued by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962. With roots in the Old Left, SDS initially focused on civil rights but quickly moved to antiwar protest. Student rallies against the Vietnam War at campuses throughout the country became a hallmark of the era. On May 4, 1970, a protest at Kent State University in Ohio turned deadly when National Guardsmen fired on protesters and bystanders, killing four and wounding several others.
At the same time, the Midwest was home to much dissatisfaction with the direction of liberalism. The cold war’s animus toward radicals undermined progressivism in the Midwest. Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, known as “Mr. Republican,” viewed government as the source of oppression not social welfare. He not only opposed the New Deal but also voted against U.S. entry into the North American Treaty Organization. Taft’s fellow senator, Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, gave his name to the era’s anti-Communist preoccupations, making exaggerated charges of Communist infiltration into the federal government and the Hollywood entertainment industry. One manifestation of the New Right was the John Birch Society, founded in Indianapolis in 1958, which advanced theories of left-wing subversion and claimed, for a time, that President Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist.
Although the “Birchers” might be dismissed as cranks, the conservative ideals of small government and anticommunism went mainstream with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Although Reagan built his political career in California, he always acknowledged his Midwestern upbringing as key to his individualistic values. As president, he presided over major tax cuts, a military buildup, and cuts in social welfare programs. Many Midwestern politicians carried out Reagan’s philosophy at the state level. Governor Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, for example, became nationally known for innovative conservative stands on welfare reform, for support of school choice and voucher programs, and for using the line-item veto—a power Reagan continually lamented the president lacked—to cut state spending.
As the history of the Midwest in the period after World War II reveals, it is a misconception to see the region as monolithically liberal or conservative. Just as the famous 1896 presidential election pit William McKinley of Ohio against William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska, who were styled as standard-bearers of money power versus the people, respectively, late-twentieth-century elections have featured Midwest-erners of very different viewpoints. The witty Ad-lai Stevenson, governor of Illinois and defender of liberal “eggheads,” was twice defeated for the presidency by Dwight D. Eisenhower of Kansas. In 1984 Ronald Reagan defeated a protégé of Hubert Humphrey, Minnesota’s Walter Mondale, who crippled his chances by pledging to raise taxes.
In addition, Midwestern politics is still capable of producing its share of candidates who are not easily categorized. Former independent Minnesota governor—and former professional wrestler—Jesse Ventura supported tax rebates when the state was running a surplus, but vetoed a bill to promote recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools—a key test of patriotism for many conservatives in the 1990s.
Once a stronghold of Republican “red states,” electoral maps of the Midwest offer only a superficial understanding of political divisions. Since World War II, Indiana usually voted Republican for president, but Minnesota was a Democratic stronghold. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the region became increasingly competitive. Minnesota, Michigan, and Ohio were battlegrounds during the 2000 and 2004 elections. In the Midwest, Democratic U.S. Senate candidates were successful almost two-thirds of the time in the last third of the twentieth century, while House of Representative seats split fairly evenly between the two parties. In the 2008 presidential primary race, two of the leading Democratic candidates, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, had ties to Illinois, while Republican candidate Mitt Romney originally hailed from Michigan. In addition, the Midwest still plays a crucial role in selecting candidates via the primary and caucus system. Iowa, by virtue of its first-in-the-nation place in the presidential selection process, has a disproportionate say in picking the major party nominees.
Indiana, which had not given its electoral vote to a Democrat since 1964, went for Obama in 2008. This deviation from its staunchly Republican record may be temporary. It remains to be seen whether Obama will emphasize pragmatism or progressivism, but the election of the first Midwestern president in a generation reaffirms the centrality of the region in the nation’s politics.
See also Great Plains; Rocky Mountain region.
FURTHER READING. John D. Barnhart, Valley of Democracy: The Frontier versus the Plantation in the Ohio Valley, 1775–1818, 1953; William C. Berman, America’s Right Turn: From Nixon to Clinton, 1998; Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1967; Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, 2004; Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment; A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America, 1978; R. Douglas Hurt, American Agriculture: A Brief History, 1994; Paul Kleppner, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850–1900, 1970; Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture, 1929; James H. Madison, ed., Heartland: Comparative Histories of the Midwestern States, 1988; Stephen Middleton, Race and the Legal Process in Early Ohio, 2005; Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance, 1987; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, 1991.
NICOLE ETCHESON