In the wartime presidential election of 1864, President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), a Republican, selected Democrat Andrew Johnson (1808–1875) as his running mate. Johnson, a United States senator from Tennessee, had remained loyal to the Union even after his home state seceded, a decision that made him a hero in the North. By selecting a Southern Democrat as his running mate, Lincoln hoped to send a message of national unity in the midst of the Civil War (1861–1865). With public opinion buoyed by military victories over the Confederacy in late 1864, Lincoln and Johnson ended up winning by an overwhelming margin, reflecting the public’s support for the president’s war policies.
Johnson was picked as a symbol, but Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865, unexpectedly elevated him to the presidency. As president, Johnson initially pleased Republicans by promising harsh punishment for Confederate leaders. But major rifts soon opened between the headstrong Johnson and congressional Republicans. Johnson wanted the Southern states quickly readmitted to the Union, while the Republicans supported military occupation of the South and strong enforcement of civil rights laws to protect freed slaves.
The conflict between Johnson and the Republicans intensified when the president restored authority to some former Confederate officials. Johnson also fired a cabinet officer, Edwin Stanton (1814–1869), against the wishes of Congress. The acrimony between Johnson and the Republicans peaked in 1868, when the House of Representatives impeached him for violating the Tenure of Office Act, a law that prohibited Johnson from firing members of the cabinet without congressional authorization. The Senate, however, declined to convict Johnson, and the Tenure of Office Act itself was later declared unconstitutional.
Support for congressional Republicans mounted in the late 1860s, causing Johnson to lose the Democratic nomination for a second term. In 1869, he was replaced in the White House by Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885), a Republican. Johnson briefly returned to the Senate, but died a few years later.
1. Johnson did not attend school and was illiterate until his twenties, when his wife, Eliza, taught him to read.
2. When Johnson was a young boy, his father, Jacob, died trying to save two of his wealthy employers from drowning.
3. Only one other president, Bill Clinton (1946–), has been impeached. The Senate has never “convicted” an impeached president, the final step under the Constitution before a president can be removed from office.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States was among the largest industriaized nations on earth. But unlike Great Britain, France, and other major European powers, it had a relatively puny military and no overseas empire.
Starting in the 1890s, with the Indian wars finished, many Americans argued that it was time for the United States to build up its military and begin playing a greater role in world affairs. After a century of isolationism, they felt the country needed to make itself an equal of the Europeans in global politics.
The annexation of Hawaii and the Spanish-American War, both in 1898, were two of the first examples of the new American imperialism. After the Spanish-American War, the United States suddenly had its empire: Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Samoa, and, briefly, Cuba.
Supporters cited national pride and a desire to “civilize” backward corners of the world as justifications for the new American imperialism. A famous and influential poem by Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), “The White Man’s Burden,” published in an American magazine in 1899, portrayed imperialism as a selfless and altruistic effort to help “half devil and half child” peoples enjoy the benefits of Western civilization.
As might have been expected, the inhabitants of the new US possessions were somewhat less enthusiastic about American imperialism. In the Philippines, the Americans had to suppress an angry uprising of Philippine nationalists. In the United States, a strong anti-imperialist faction emerged in the 1900 election, led by Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925).
With the sobering experience of the Philippines, the passion for imperialism began to cool. The United States renounced control over Cuba a few years later and granted independence to the Philippines in 1946.
1. Kipling’s poem—a call for the United States to join France and Britain as an imperial nation—was written for a US audience because of the American involvement in the Philippines.
2. The Virgin Islands were acquired by the United States from Denmark in 1917 for $25 million.
3. In a 1998 referendum, voters in Puerto Rico soundly rejected independence from the United States.
Starting with the publication of A Century of Dishonor in 1881, Native American rights advocate Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) called national attention to the mistreatment of indigenous peoples in the West. Her writing helped convince the United States Congress to pass laws in the 1880s intended to improve the miserable living conditions on Indian reservations. Unfortunately, however, most of those laws backfired, making reservation life even more difficult. Still, in her brief career, Jackson inspired a major reassessment of US policy toward Native Americans.
Born Helen Fiske in Amherst, Massachusetts, she married Edward Hunt in 1852 and then started writing poetry and essays after his 1863 death in a gunfire accident. She sometimes used the signature “H. H.” on her pieces. Helen Hunt married William Jackson in 1875. She became interested in the plight of Native Americans in 1879 and started work on A Century of Dishonor that year.
The book, which Helen Hunt Jackson mailed to every member of Congress, radically challenged the fundamental self-image of many Americans. In the nineteen century, many whites believed that expansion into the West had benefited Native Americans by spreading civilization, Christianity, and modern technology. Jackson strenuously disagreed. White expansion into the West, she wrote, had led to death, disease, and the wholesale theft of tribal lands. Jackson then published Ramona (1884), a novel exploring anti-Indian discrimination, which she hoped would shock the nation’s conscience the way Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) had galvanized opposition to slavery.
Although Jackson died of cancer in 1885, her work helped inspired the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. The act was intended to remove Native Americans from reservation life, which many well-meaning reformers believed would ease their economic isolation and poverty. In practice, however, the act was a disaster, and it enabled whites to acquire millions of acres of reservation land.
1. Jackson was born in the same year as fellow Amherst native Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), and the two classmates remained friends into adulthood.
2. At the time of her death, Jackson was at work on a children’s book about discrimination against Native Americans.
3. For publication in magazines and newspapers, Jackson often used a pseudonym, including “Rip Van Winkle,” instead of her real name.
John S. Pemberton (1831–1888), a Confederate war veteran and patent medicine impresario, invented Coca-Cola in Atlanta in 1886. Patent medicines—drinks or pills that claimed to have miraculous medicinal powers—were common in the United States before the government began regulating pharmaceuticals, and Pemberton hoped to market his fizzy new beverage as a “brain tonic and intellectual beverage.”
The health benefits claimed by Pemberton were nonsense. However, customers in Atlanta loved his refreshing mixture of sugar, caffeine, and cocaine, and the drink sold well. In 1888, Pemberton sold the rights to his creation to an Atlanta pharmacist, Asa Griggs Candler (1851–1929), who quickly began marketing the beverage across the nation. By 1900, Coke was the most popular soft drink in most of the United States. Today, the Coca-Cola Company is the world’s largest producer of soft drinks.
During the twentieth century, the company expanded around the globe, and Coca-Cola became the world’s most widely recognized product. Coke is now sold in virtually every corner of the world, even North Korea. On much of Earth, the red and white Coca-Cola logo rivals the American flag as a symbol of the United States.
In the history of American business, the triumph of Coke was an early example of successful branding. Prior to the twentieth century, the modern idea of branded consumer items was basically nonexistent; customers asked for cigarettes and shoes rather than Marlboros and Nikes. In theory, brands help the public because a company needs to protect the value of its brand name by maintaining high quality. But, according to some critics, brands like Coke also harm consumers by forcing them to pay inflated prices to deflect the cost of the company’s advertising and marketing.
Today, Coca-Cola remains the unrivalled king of brands. As of 2006, according to a survey by BusinessWeek magazine, Coca-Cola was the most valuable brand in the world, well ahead of number two, Microsoft.
1. Cocaine was eliminated from Coca-Cola in 1905, but the drink still contains extracts from coca leaves that are imported into the United States under special permission from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
2. Since 1935, Coca-Cola has been kosher.
3. “New Coke” was introduced in 1985 but was so unpopular that the company soon returned to its “classic” formula and logo.
To celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the New World, the city of Chicago staged a massive world’s fair in 1893 that was one of the most widely attended events of the nineteenth-century United States. More than 27 million people visited the 200 gaudy buildings erected at the sprawling fairgrounds south of downtown Chicago at a time when the total population of the United States was only about 63 million.
The fair’s White City, an elaborate complex of Beaux Arts buildings designed by famed architects Frederick Law Olmstead (1822–1903) and Daniel Burnham (1846–1912), featured thousands of exhibits showcasing the industrial progress of the United States since its independence. Visitors to the fair could marvel at demonstrations of electric light, sewing machines, elevated trains, skyscrapers, and other recent American technological innovations. The Ferris wheel, which made its debut at the fair and cost the then-princely sum of fifty cents per ride, was one of the event’s major attractions.
Hugely popular, the fair was a major event in American cultural history and helped fashion the modern self-image of the United States as a land of progress and optimism. The fair’s 65,000 exhibits presented a triumphant history of American innovation and promised a great future for the prosperous nation. Far surpassing any world’s fair held in Europe, the exposition capped off the Gilded Age of the United States with a symphony of awe-inspiring excess. For the city of Chicago, the fair marked the completion of its recovery from the devastating Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
In total, the exposition covered 633 acres, took 40,000 workers three years to build, and remained open to the public for six months. Afterward, all but two of the buildings at the site were demolished. The University of Chicago now occupies most of the area. Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry is the only major building that remains of the once-vast fairgrounds.
1. Chicago got its nickname “the Windy City” from a New York City newspaper editor who thought Chicagoans were a bunch of windbags with all their boasting about the fair. The rugged winds off Lake Michigan served to cement the appellation.
2. Chicago mayor Carter Harrison was assassinated by a disgruntled job seeker at the fair two days before it closed.
3. One exhibit at the fair was a map of the United States made entirely of pickles.
One of the most distinctive literary voices of twentieth-century American fiction, William Faulkner (1897–1962) wrote rich, haunting novels set in the small towns and backwoods of his native Mississippi. The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 for his innovative, stream-of-consciousness storytelling, Faulkner’s most well-known works include The Sound and the Fury (1929), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936).
Born into a prominent Mississippi family as William Falkner, the author added the u to his name in the 1920s before launching his literary career. He published his debut novel, Soldier’s Pay, in 1926. Faulkner’s first novels varied in subject, tone, and setting. Mosquitoes (1927) was a comic novel set in New Orleans, while Sanctuary (1931) was an attempt at pulp fiction. With the publication of The Sound and the Fury, however, a dense, serious tale of an unraveling Southern family, Faulkner found his literary métier.
The Sound and the Fury is told in a nonlinear fashion and can be a challenging read. Most of the story takes place in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional Mississippi locale inspired by his hometown of Oxford, where Faulkner set many of his most famous stories and novels. In the text, Faulkner frequently departs from conventional syntax and grammar to render the thoughts and feelings of the characters. In one section, the character Quentin Compson is tormented by guilt because, among other things, his father had to sell part of the family’s property to pay for his college tuition:
On what on your school money the money they sold the pasture for so you could go to Harvard dont you see you’ve got to finish now if you dont finish he’ll have nothing
Sold the pasture His white shirt was motionless in the fork, in the flickering shade …
The great-grandson of a Confederate colonel, Faulkner explored the troubled racial history of the South and the region’s class dynamics in many of his novels. His impenetrable prose style, although frequently criticized, often reflected the excruciating contradictions of the region. The Nobel Prize raised Faulkner’s stature, and he went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes.
1. Faulkner was desperate to fight in World War I (1914–1918) but was rejected by the US Air Force; he moved to Canada and joined the Canadian Royal Air Force by posing as an Englishman.
2. He published a book of poetry in 1924, The Marble Faun, taking the title from a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864).
3. In total, Faulkner published seventeen books set in Yoknapatawpha County.
On a cold, wet day in March 1936, photographer Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) was driving through California when she spotted a family camped in the mud at the side of the road. Lange pulled over, chatted with the migrant farm workers for a few minutes, and quickly snapped six pictures of the group.
A few days later, one of Lange’s six black-andwhite shots, titled “Migrant Mother,” was wired around the world and quickly became the most famous visual icon of the Great Depression. Lange’s picture, a bleak portrait of thirty-two-year-old Florence Owens Thompson and two of her children, captured in a single poignant image the human misery of the nation’s economic crisis. In the picture, the two children bury their heads in Thompson’s shoulders while she seems to stare out wearily at the unforgiving road.
Before the Depression, Lange had worked as a conventional studio photographer in California. Starting in the mid-1930s, however, she began receiving commissions from the federal government’s Resettlement Administration to document the nation’s woes. Along with other well-known photographers like Walker Evans (1903–1975), Lange eventually took thousands of pictures of the homeless, breadlines, abandoned farms, and ramshackle motels in her travels across the United States.
Although journalistic in nature, Lange’s Depression-era photography had a distinctive warmth and intimacy. In Lange’s pictures, she managed to convey the resilient dignity of Americans affected by the Depression. For instance, although it is clear from “Migrant Mother” that Thompson’s family is in dire poverty, Lange shows the mother with her head held up, her determination to persevere clear.
A compassionate ally of the downtrodden, Lange joined her friend Ansel Adams (1902–1984) during World War II (1939–1945) in photographing the plight of Japanese-Americans imprisoned at internment camps, pictures so effective they were banned by the government. Lange died in 1965, one of the most accomplished photographers in American history.
1. Lange was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, as Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn, but she adopted her mother’s maiden name after her father abandoned the family.
2. Many of Lange’s Depression-era photographs are now housed at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, where they are accessible to the public.
3. The Oakland Museum in Oakland, California, owns the largest collection of Lange’s prints and keeps many on permanent display.