For the better part of fifty years, Henry Clay (1777–1852) dominated the United States Congress, first as the most powerful Speaker of the House in the history of the office and then as a leading senator from Kentucky. Clay entered Congress at age twenty-nine and remained in national government for most of the remainder of his life. Eloquent and ambitious, Clay ran for president five times, on the ticket of three different political parties, but was never able to achieve his ultimate goal. Nicknamed the “Great Compromiser,” Clay’s canny, pragmatic deal making helped preserve the Union and advanced his own favorite cause, the construction of federally funded canals and roadways connecting the cities of the growing nation.
A lawyer by training, Clay was only thirty-four years old when his colleagues in Congress elected him Speaker of the House. Up until then, the position was regarded as an undesirable and largely ceremonial job. But the Kentuckian transformed the office into a powerhouse. Clay cajoled Congress into declaring war on Great Britain in 1812, supporting his “American System” of costly infrastructure projects, and agreeing to the Missouri Compromise, which averted a crisis over slavery.
In 1824, Clay made his first run for the presidency but finished in fourth place. He entered the Senate in 1831 as one of the founders of a new political party, the Whigs. Clay ran against Democrat Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) in 1832, again promising to build roads, railroads, and canals, but was soundly defeated by the popular Tennessean.
On the great issue of the day, slavery, Clay closely followed his Senate colleague and fellow Whig Daniel Webster (1782–1852). Like Webster, Clay opposed slavery personally but was willing to compromise with pro-slavery forces to preserve the Union. With the deaths of these two men in 1852, a new generation of uncompromising politicians took power in Washington, DC, and within a decade the North and South were at war.
1. In 1986, a poll of history professors ranked Clay as the greatest-ever United States senator, narrowly edging out second-place Hubert Humphrey (1911–1978) and third-place Daniel Webster, according to the New York Times.
2. Although Clay never became president, a peak in the Presidential Range in New Hampshire is named in his honor.
3. Nicknames for Clay included “Harry of the West,” “Prince Hal,” and the “Great Compromiser.”
The Union victory at the Battle of Gettysburg (1863) was the decisive turning point of the Civil War. The gruesome three-day battle, which resulted in 51,000 casualties, stopped an attempted Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania. After the battle, Confederate general Robert E. Lee (1807–1870) was forced to retreat to Virginia. His army, battered by superior Union firepower, would never again mount an invasion of the North.
Gettysburg, located in central Pennsylvania on the road to the state capital of Harrisburg, was a sleepy college town in 1863. The town held little strategic value, but it was where the Union cavalry pursuing Lee’s invaders happened to catch up with him on the morning of July 1, 1863.
The plan for the Confederate invasion, hatched that spring, was simple. Lee and the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis (1808–1889), hoped to resupply their famished army in the rich Pennsylvania farmland. Additionally, Lee and Davis hoped that a successful strike on the North would demoralize the enemy and strengthen the antiwar faction in the North before the 1864 presidential election.
The significance of Gettysburg to American history can hardly be overstated. For three days, both armies fought out of desperation. Union troops, more accustomed to fighting on Southern soil, were suddenly called on to defend their home turf. Southern leaders understood that the Pennsylvania campaign was a last-ditch effort and that if the invasion failed, the Confederacy would probably be doomed.
On the third day, with the Union winning the battle, Lee ordered one of the most famous actions of the war, a massive assault of 13,000 infantry soldiers against the Union lines known as “Pickett’s charge” after its leader, General George E. Pickett (1825–1875). The charge was a failure, and thousands of Confederate soldiers were killed or taken prisoner. Pickett’s charge would go down in Southern lore as the last, best effort of the Confederate army to overcome the Northerners.
1. The Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln’s famous speech defending the Union cause, was delivered five months after the battle at the dedication of a cemetery for 3,500 Union soldiers killed there.
2. The New York Times reporter who covered the battle, Sam Wilkeson, reported on the death of his own son, a Union soldier.
3. Hundreds of miles from Gettysburg, another Union general, Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885), took the city of Vicksburg, handing a double victory to the Union on Independence Day 1863.
On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) issued the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves in the Southern states. Unlike many of Lincoln’s famous speeches, the proclamation was inelegant, even verbose. It resembled a legal pleading, not a landmark document in the history of civil rights:
… on the 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.
Prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, the legal status of Southern slaves in Union camps during the Civil War (1861–1865) was the subject of considerable debate and confusion. Some Union generals set slaves free, defying orders from Washington, DC, while others considered slaves taken from Confederate landowners as “contraband,” meaning they legally remained slaves but could not be returned to their owners.
The proclamation, issued by Lincoln in his capacity as commander in chief, applied only to the Southern states in rebellion, a loophole that raised the ire of abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879). Slavery remained legal in the border states loyal to the Union until the Thirteenth Amendment was added to the US Constitution in 1865.
In the long term, the Emancipation Proclamation changed the complexion of the Civil War from a dispute over the integrity of the Union to a fight over the fundamental moral issue of slavery. The proclamation redefined the Northern cause: the North was no longer fighting only for the somewhat abstract goal of preserving the Union, but also to free an oppressed people.
1. One provision of the proclamation also allowed blacks to join the Union army, leading to the creation of all-black units like the Fifth-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment.
2. The last slaves to be liberated were in Delaware and Kentucky, two states that had remained loyal to the Union.
3. Lincoln waited until after the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam (September 17, 1862) to issue the proclamation, so that it would appear to have been announced from a position of strength.
Laissez-faire, an economic doctrine that calls for minimal government interference with the marketplace, was dominant in the United States during the nineteenth century and remains a strong intellectual tradition in American political thought. In general, supporters of laissez-faire believe that allowing the market to function unfettered by regulation will result in economic prosperity for all. However, critics of laissez-faire have argued successfully since the Gilded Age that some government regulation is needed to prevent corporate abuses.
French for leave alone, laissez-faire had its roots in the backlash against mercantilism that started in the late eighteenth century. Beginning in 1776, Adam Smith (1723–1790) and a growing number of his fellow economists rejected mercantilism and began to argue against government interference with trade. If the government stepped aside and left private industry to its own devices, they believed, the laws of supply and demand would ultimately create a more efficient economy for everyone.
Across Europe and the United States, the mid-nineteenth century represented the zenith of laissez-faire. Labor laws were generally nonexistent, and corporate tycoons wielded unchecked power over their employees. Railroads could set prices as high as they wanted. Several large companies, such as John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, began to develop monopolies that squeezed out their competition. In historical usage, the term laissez-faire is sometimes used to refer specifically to the lax economic policies of this period in American history.
The reaction against the excesses of laissez-faire began to gain force in the 1880s. One of the first regulatory bills, the Interstate Commerce Act, was passed in 1887 to limit the clout of railroad corporations. In the beginning of the twentieth century, President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) campaigned strongly against corporate power. Finally, the Great Depression of the 1930s was a major catalyst for the passage of stringent new government regulations on industry, banks, and utilities.
More recently, supporters of laissez-faire have made a minor comeback. Since the 1970s, Congress has wholly or partially deregulated several major industries, including airlines, banks, and railroads. In general, however, the modern regulatory state would be unrecognizable to the robber barons whose abuses and excesses led to its creation.
1. The term laissez-faire was coined by a group of eighteenth-century French economists known as physiocrats.
2. To the widespread confusion of both Europeans and Americans, the word liberal has very different definitions on the two continents. In Europe, a liberal generally supports free market economics and minimal government regulation; in the United States, people who identify themselves as liberals generally believe just the opposite.
3. The leading journal for laissez-faire supporters, the Economist, was founded in 1843 in Britain and is still published today.
Destroying thousands of homes and killing hundreds of people, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was one of the worst disasters in the nineteenth-century United States. The inferno, which raged for two days before it finally died out, obliterated much of downtown Chicago and forced the city to rebuild almost entirely from scratch.
The fire started on the city’s West Side at the home of Catherine (Mrs. Patrick) O’Leary, an Irish immigrant, on October 8, 1871. Thanks to high winds that night, the flames spread quickly to neighboring wooden structures, and by the next morning the whole city was ablaze. A newspaper reporter made up an infamous story that the fire had been started when Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a kerosene lamp. In reality, however, the exact cause of the blaze at the O’Leary home still remains unknown.
At the time of the fire, the city of Chicago was less than forty years old and had undergone fantastic growth since its founding. The 1870 census placed the city as the fifth largest in the nation, with 298,977 residents, up from only 4,470 in 1840. Many of the new arrivals were immigrants from Poland, Ireland, and Germany who were crammed into hastily built wooden houses.
Although the fire devastated downtown Chicago, the death toll of about 300 was considered surprisingly light. The fire left acres of space in prime downtown locations vacant, which in turn attracted many of the nation’s leading architects, including Daniel Burnham (1846–1912) and Louis Sullivan (1856–1924). Several of the world’s first skyscrapers were built in Chicago on parcels of land left empty by the famous blaze.
1. The O’Leary house survived the fire with relatively light damage; it was later demolished.
2. The Chicago Fire of 1871 was the inspiration for national Fire Prevention Week, which is marked every year in early October.
3. An estimated 70,000 buildings were destroyed in the blaze, along with 73 miles of streets, which at that time were made of wooden planks.
Poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) was born in St. Louis and educated at Harvard. He moved to England in his twenties and eventually became a British subject. Although most of his best-known poetry was published while he lived abroad, Eliot’s ties to his home country remained deep, and he is considered one of the leading modernists of twentieth-century American verse.
Thomas Stearns Eliot published his first poems as a college student and wrote one of his most famous, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” while still in his twenties. Published in 1917, the poem established his reputation in literary circles and introduced the public to Eliot’s highly abstract, dense writing style. Eliot’s poems are not easy to read. He sprinkled obscure allusions and foreign phrases throughout his verse; “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” for instance, begins with six lines of untranslated Italian.
Still, the poem was hailed for its striking imagery and stream-of-consciousness narration. The narrator of the poem is a balding, middle-aged man named Prufrock, a timid, sexually frustrated nebbish who, in one famous passage, asks himself if he dares “to eat a peach.”
The Waste Land, a long poem considered Eliot’s masterpiece by many critics, was published in 1922. Although difficult to summarize, The Waste Land expressed the deep spiritual malaise of the post–World War I generation in the United States and Europe. Eliot himself referred to the early 1920s as a particularly rough period in his own life, due to an unhappy marriage. A demanding poem, The Waste Land was not intended for the faint of heart or feeble of vocabulary; in addition to English, parts of the poem are in Latin, Greek, German, French, Italian, and Sanskrit. The themes and imagery in the poem are borrowed heavily from a book called The Golden Bough (1890, expanded 1907–1915) by the Scottish anthropologist James George Frazer (1854–1941), which many of Eliot’s readers would also have read, making the poem slightly more accessible to them.
Later in life, Eliot found religion and converted to Anglicanism. His later poems, including “Ash Wednesday” (1930) and Four Quartets (1936–1942) are heavy with Christian symbolism. In recognition of his highly influential poetry, Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.
1. The hit musical Cats, by Andrew Lloyd Webber, was based on Eliot’s 1939 book Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.
2. Eliot and his friend and fellow anti-Semite Ezra Pound (1885–1972) both feature in the Bob Dylan song “Desolation Row,” in which they are said to be “fighting in the captain’s tower.”
3. A heavy smoker, Eliot died of emphysema.
A prodigy whose early death robbed the nation of one of its greatest musical talents, George Gershwin (1898–1937) became the most famous composer of the 1920s and 1930s with his wild, inventive melodies in classics like Rhapsody in Blue and the opera Porgy and Bess. Along with his older brother, lyricist Ira Gershwin (1896–1983), he wrote dozens of American standards, including the songs “Summertime,” “Someone to Watch Over Me,” “Embraceable You,” and “I Got Rhythm.”
Born in Brooklyn to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Gershwin took piano lessons as a boy and sold his first song, “When You Want ’Em, You Can’t Get ’Em,” on Tin Pan Alley—the nickname for an area in New York City where many music publishers had their offices—in 1916. His first hit, published in 1919, was the song “Swanee,” inspired by Stephen Foster’s classic “Swanee River.”
While composing popular tunes for Tin Pan Alley, Gershwin also began writing classical music in an effort to establish himself as a serious musician. His best-known classical composition, Rhapsody in Blue, debuted in 1924. One of the most famous pieces of instrumental music by an American, the rhapsody represented an exuberant “kaleidoscope of America,” mixing jazz, blues, and classical styles into a unique seventeen-minute composition.
In 1931, the Gershwin brothers won a Pulitzer Prize for Of Thee I Sing the first musical comedy to win the prestigious award. They wrote their most ambitious Broadway work, Porgy and Bess, in 1935. The racial aspects of the opera, which was intended for an all-black cast but has been criticized for perpetuating negative racial stereotypes, have been controversial, but it produced several classic songs, including “Summertime.”
Porgy and Bess, however, would be Gershwin’s last major work. While in Hollywood working on a movie in 1937, Gershwin fell ill and died of a brain tumor.
1. The great Russian composers Sergey Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) and Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) were in the audience at the 1924 premier of Rhapsody in Blue at New York’s Aeolian Hall.
2. Gershwin’s popular musical comedies include Lady, Be Good (1924), Funny Face (1927), and Strike Up the Band (1930).
3. Parts of Rhapsody in Blue are used by United Airlines in its television commercials.