William Seward (1801–1872) served as secretary of state during and after the Civil War (1861–1865), becoming one of the most successful diplomats in American history by preventing foreign interference in the war and later negotiating the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.
A native of New York, Seward was elected to the United States Senate in 1848 as a Whig. A leading Senate opponent of slavery, he voted against the Fugitive Slave Act and the Compromise of 1850. After the disintegration of the Whig Party in the 1850s, he joined the fledgling Republican Party, which was formed from the wreckage of the Whigs to oppose the extension of slavery.
Seward ran for president in 1856 but lost the Republican nomination to John Fremont (1813–1890). He tried again in 1860, running against a field of Republicans that included Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865). In the 1860, campaign, Seward was perceived as the more radical antislavery candidate, compared to the more moderate Lincoln. After Lincoln’s victory, Seward received his cabinet post as a consolation prize.
As secretary of state, Seward had the difficult task of convincing foreign powers, especially Great Britain, then the greatest power in the world, to stay out of the Civil War. Several leading British politicians, including the prime minister, Lord Palmerston (1784–1865), initially sympathized with the Confederacy. Seward and the American ambassador in London, Charles Francis Adams (1807–1886), the son of John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), successfully lobbied the British government to remain neutral.
At the end of the war, the gang of assassins that murdered President Lincoln also intended to kill Seward. On the night of Lincoln’s assassination, Seward was stabbed in his bed, but he survived. He remained secretary of state under President Andrew Johnson (1808–1875) and negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million. Mocked as “Seward’s folly” at the time, Alaska became the forty-ninth US state in 1959.
1. As governor of New York between 1839 and 1842, Seward took an early stand against slavery by refusing to extradite three men to Virginia, where they faced charges of helping slaves escape.
2. Seward’s first instincts were not always very wise. In 1861, he advised Lincoln to start a war with European countries in order to promote American unity and dampen the Southern drive for secession.
3. At the time of the attempt on his life, Seward was wearing a neck brace from a previous injury, which may have saved his life by shielding him from the assassin’s dagger.
On the night of February 15, 1898, a massive explosion rocked the Spanish harbor of Havana, Cuba. Within seconds of the blast, an American battleship docked at the city, the USS Maine, was in flames. The mysterious explosion aboard the Maine, which Americans immediately blamed on the Spanish, killed 266 American sailors.
Two months later, taking “Remember the Maine!” as their rallying cry, the United States Congress declared war on Spain. The brief Spanish-American War, a decisive victory for the United States, resulted in the acquisition of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam from Spain. The war also permanently ended the Spanish presence in the New World 400 years after the voyages of Christopher Columbus.
The roots of the war far predated the sinking of the Maine. By the 1890s, the island of Cuba was one of a few remaining vestiges of Spain’s once vast colonial holdings. Many islanders were fed up with Spain’s heavy-handed rule. Americans, mindful of their own revolution against the British, instinctively sympathized with the Cuban rebels, who had tried unsuccessfully to drive out the Spanish in 1895.
In the wake of the failed rebellion, the American press printed sensational horror stories about Spanish mistreatment of Cuban prisoners. The so-called yellow press portrayed the Spanish as monsters and agitated for American intervention in Cuba.
The Maine had been sent to Havana to keep an eye on the situation. Although the sinking was blamed on a mine planted by the Spanish, some modern naval experts believe the explosion was more likely caused by a coal fire aboard the ship.
The war with Spain, a withered remnant of its former self, was short and decisive. American forces landed in Cuba and Puerto Rico in the summer of 1898 and vanquished the Spanish defenders. In the Pacific, the US Navy defeated a Spanish fleet to seize control of Manila, the Philippine capital.
Under the terms of the peace treaty that ended the war later that year, the United States kept all the islands taken from Spain, establishing itself as a true global power at the dawn of the twentieth century.
1. Although short, the war was enormously expensive. Thousands of soldiers were called up, and while very few actually saw fighting, in total they collected millions of dollars in pensions for decades after.
2. The naval battle of Manila Bay resulted in no Americans killed, establishing American power in the Pacific at virtually no cost.
3. In all, the Spanish-American War claimed 345 men killed in combat—and 2,565 killed by disease.
In 1882, Congress passed an unprecedented law called the Chinese Exclusion Act that was intended to prevent Chinese people from immigrating to the United States. The law—the first such prohibition aimed at a specific ethnic group—not only prohibited Chinese immigration, but also made it illegal for existing Chinese immigrants to become naturalized citizens.
Chinese laborers had begun coming to the West Coast in large numbers in the 1850s, prompted by unrest in China and lured by construction jobs in the United States. Construction of the first transcontinental railroad relied heavily on Chinese labor—about 1,000 immigrant workers died in avalanches and accidents during construction.
However, many Americans immediately developed an intense hatred for the newcomers. Western states enacted discriminatory statutes making it illegal for Asian immigrants to own property or open businesses. Convinced that Chinese immigrants constituted a “yellow peril,” San Francisco and other California cities created segregated schools for Asian children.
Racial antagonism in the West mounted as people from Japan, the Philippines, and Korea began immigrating to the United States in the early twentieth century. The exclusion law was expanded to cover all Asians and reaffirmed by Congress in the Immigration Act of 1924.
The exclusion act had a particularly cruel impact on Asian-American families, making it very difficult for wives left in Asia to join their husbands in the United States. The initial 1882 law even stripped Chinese-American children born on American soil of their citizenship, although the US Supreme Court overturned this blatantly unconstitutional provision in 1898.
The United States did not eliminate the exclusion act until World War II (1939–1945), in deference to its wartime ally, China. Even then, however, the quota for Chinese immigrants was set extremely low. Indeed, Chinese immigration would not resume on a basis equitable with other groups until the mid-1960s.
1. The 1924 law also limited immigration from southern and eastern Europe—to exclude Italian and Polish Catholics, along with Jews—while encouraging immigration from Protestant northern Europe.
2. Laws forbidding Chinese-Americans from marrying whites in California were not repealed until 1948.
3. Many state governments tried to forbid the immigration of Chinese women, and the gender ratio of Chinese-born men to women in California was around ten men for every woman.
The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), founded in 1887, was the first regulatory agency created by the federal government to rein in the power of private corporations in American life. Congress gave the ICC the authority to set railroad rates and ensure that shippers were treated fairly. Strongly opposed by the railroad industry, the ICC marked a significant change in the relationship between American business and government, as lawmakers began to move cautiously against corporate excess.
By the late nineteenth century, railroads handled the vast majority of freight. Especially in the West, shippers usually had few other options. Many farmers complained that private rail corporations abused this massive economic clout by charging exorbitant rates to captive shippers, and they demanded federal intervention. Regulating railroads became a key goal of the Progressive movement, which gained strength through the 1880s and 1890s.
The ICC represented the first attempt to establish limits on the power of the rail barons. Under the Interstate Commerce Act establishing the agency, railroads had to publish their rates and were not allowed to discriminate among shippers. Together with the Sherman Antitrust Act, passed three years later, the ICC reflected the growing opposition to unfettered laissez-faire economics.
The impact of the act was mixed. Although the ICC was able to tame some of the worst abuses of the rail companies, its powers were limited. Throughout the Progressive Era, politicians like William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) would agitate for tighter railroad regulation and greater enforcement powers for the ICC.
In historical terms, however, the ICC was highly significant. The agency created the precedent for government regulation of business and served as a model for subsequent regulatory efforts. In the twentieth century, the scope of government intervention in private industry would expand dramatically. The ICC itself, ironically, was abolished in 1995 after the decline of railroads as a major economic force.
1. The power of the railroads in the nineteenth-century United States was so great that when the industry divided the country into four time zones in 1883, the country had little choice but to adopt “railroad time,” leading to the modern system of standard time zones.
2. The railroad industry was briefly nationalized during World War I (1914–1918), but returned to private ownership after the war.
3. Key backing from the ICC came from the Grange, a populist movement that started in the 1860s to protect agricultural interests. The Grange still exists and is now headquartered in Washington, DC, across the street from the White House.
John Muir (1838–1914) was one of the founders of the modern conservation movement and led a successful campaign to preserve major tracts of California wilderness from human development. Muir’s effort to establish Yosemite National Park would inspire similar campaigns elsewhere and helped convince President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) to protect millions of acres of wilderness in the early twentieth century.
The first national park, Yellowstone, had been created by the United States Congress in 1872. Prevailing attitudes of the nineteenth century, however, had little interest in natural preservation, and for decades Yellowstone remained the sole federally protected area.
The Scottish-born Muir had immigrated to the United States as a child and moved to California after the Civil War (1861–1865). He was captivated by the rugged splendor of the Yosemite Valley, a wild stretch of a mountain range called the Sierra Nevada located east of San Francisco, during his first visit to the region in 1868. Muir climbed most of the peaks around Yosemite, and in 1889 he wrote the first proposal to protect the area from development and livestock grazing. Yosemite National Park was established by Congress in 1890, but it did not include Yosemite Valley.
Although stymied in his initial efforts to save Yosemite Valley, Muir found a powerful ally in Teddy Roosevelt, who became president in 1901. An avid hunter and outdoors enthusiast, Roosevelt passionately supported natural preservation and put millions of acres of federal land under protection. Yosemite Valley was added to Yosemite National Park in 1906, fulfilling Muir’s longtime ambition.
As part of the campaign to create Yosemite, Muir in 1892 founded an organization, the Sierra Club, which would become a major political force in favor of natural preservation. For his role in leading the initial efforts to protect nature, Muir is often referred to as the father of the national park system.
1. Muir is featured on the back of the 2005 California state quarter.
2. Raised by strict, religious parents, Muir is said to have memorized the entire New Testament.
3. Muir’s home in Martinez, California, is now preserved as a National Historic Site. A California Wilderness Preserve is also named in his honor.
When the author Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) committed suicide at his Idaho home in 1961, his death was mourned around the world. In Paris, every major newspaper put the news on the front page. In Spain, a bullfighter killed two bulls in honor of the late writer. In Hyannis, Massachusetts, President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) issued a statement hailing the late author as “one of the great citizens of the world.”
The international plaudits were a testament to Hemingway’s enormous significance in twentieth-century Western literature. A larger-than-life figure thanks to his taste for guns, liquor, big-game hunting, and war, Hemingway was the rare novelist who was also a global celebrity.
Born in Illinois in 1899, Hemingway began his writing career when he went to work as a reporter for the Kansas City Star at age seventeen. He volunteered as a medic after the United States entered World War I (1914–1918) and later returned to Europe as a war correspondent in Greece.
Hemingway’s years as a newspaper writer had a major impact on his famously direct writing style. As a reporter, he had been taught to “use short sentences. Use short paragraphs.” Although Hemingway befriended many leading modernists—often coming to the aid of the famously wordy James Joyce (1882–1941) during bar fights in Paris during the 1920s—his style was economical, bracing, and simple.
Hemingway’s macho persona—he was a homophobe and a well-known fan of bullfighting—played a significant role in his fame. He returned to Europe during the Spanish civil war (1936–1939) and wrote arguably his most famous novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), based on his wartime experiences. He also covered World War II (1939–1945) and famously boasted of having “liberated” the Hotel Ritz bar in Paris after the defeat of the Nazis.
After the war, Hemingway spent time in Cuba, where his last significant novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), is set. The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize, restored Hemingway’s literary reputation to its prewar heights. However, Hemingway’s health declined in the 1950s, and he killed himself with a shotgun blast after receiving unsuccessful electroshock therapy for depression.
1. A bullfighting aficionado, Hemingway claimed to have seen 1,500 bulls killed in the ring.
2. The title of For Whom the Bell Tolls was taken from a poem by the seventeenth-century English poet John Donne (1572–1631).
3. Hemingway survived a plane crash in Uganda in 1954.
Over a career spanning eight decades, avant-garde painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) produced hundreds of lush, colorful paintings of shells, clouds, churches, bones, and flowers, a body of work that made her one of the foremost twentieth-century American artists and a lasting influence on a generation of abstract painters.
O’Keeffe was born in Wisconsin and lived in New York City for many years, but she is most closely associated with the American Southwest. The sun-scorched desert landscape near the ranch she bought in New Mexico provided the inspiration for much of O’Keeffe’s best-loved art.
One of O’Keeffe’s most famous paintings, Black Iris III, completed in 1926, provides a characteristic example of her groundbreaking style. To the viewer, the painting is immediately recognizable as a single purple flower. But in its details and color, the flower is hardly “realistic.” In O’Keeffe’s vivid rendering, the flower is full of undulating curves and rich, modulated shades of purple. The painting also contains fairly overt references to female anatomy, a recurring theme in O’Keeffe’s work.
Starting in the late 1920s, O’Keeffe and her husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), traveled often to New Mexico, where O’Keeffe settled permanently after his death. The haunting desert landscape and the region’s distinctive adobe architecture figured in many of her later paintings.
In recognition of her contribution to American art, President Gerald Ford (1913–2006) awarded O’Keeffe the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. Despite failing eyesight, she continued to work until age ninety-six, shortly before her death.
1. O’Keeffe worked briefly creating fruit advertisements for the Dole Company.
2. Her parents, Francis and Ida O’Keeffe, were dairy farmers in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.
3. Before becoming famous, O’Keeffe briefly worked as an art teacher in the Amarillo, Texas, public school system.