A woman well ahead of her time, Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927) achieved fame as one of the first successful female stockbrokers, the first woman to run for president of the United States, and a provocative opponent of sexual double standards in nineteenth-century American society. She was vilified in the press for her controversial support for “free love”—a euphemism for opposition to the institution of marriage—and eventually fled to England, where she died.
Born Victoria Claflin to a poor family in a small Ohio town, she married Canning Woodhull at age fourteen but divorced in her twenties. She then moved to New York City with her sister, Tennessee Claf lin (1845–1923), in 1868. The two women, supported by railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794–1877)—who was having an affair with Claf lin and believed the sisters possessed mystical spiritual powers—started a brokerage firm on Wall Street. The business was successful, and Woodhull used the proceeds to start a newspaper, Woodhull & Claf lin’s Weekly. Among other causes embraced by the newspaper, the sisters editorialized in favor of women’s suffrage, for legalized prostitution, and against mustaches on men. Despite their own backgrounds as stockbrokers, the sisters also published the first American edition of the Communist Manifesto in 1871.
Again drawing on her personal wealth, Woodhull ran for president in 1872. Her running mate was Frederick Douglass (1817–1895), the famous African-American civil rights advocate. Not only was Woodhull unable to vote in the race, she would not have been allowed to serve if she had won, since she was only thirty-four years old at the time, one year shy of the minimum age as established in the Constitution.
Fearless and utterly undeterred by the torrents of abuse she endured from mainstream Americans, Woodhull published an exposé of a prominent Protestant preacher, Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887), whom she accused of having an affair. Her purpose was to show that while women who supported “free love” were ostracized, prominent men were promiscuous without consequence. She was prosecuted for obscenity after leveling her accusations against Beecher, and she moved to England in 1877. She started another newspaper, the Humanitarian, and continued supporting women’s rights and other causes until her death fifty years later.
1. While she was in her teens, Woodhull’s supposed supernatural abilities allowed her to support her family by fortune-telling.
2. In 1871, Woodhull became the first woman to speak before the United States Congress.
3. Woodhull’s activities divided her fellow suffragists, some of whom, including Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), thought she went too far and gave the women’s movement a bad name.
In the 1898 treaty that ended the Spanish-American War, ownership of the Philippines, an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean, was transferred from Spain to the United States. Many Filipinos, who had expected independence, were outraged. A rebellion against the United States, known as the War of the Philippine Insurrection, began almost immediately after the arrival of American troops. In the brutal guerilla conflict, thousands of American troops were killed while trying to establish control over the islands. The war petered out after the capture of key rebel leaders, but quiet Philippine resistance to American rule continued.
The Philippines were colonized by the Spanish in the sixteenth century. Native Filipinos, tiring of centuries of Spanish rule, began agitating for independence in the 1880s. Rebal groups initially welcomed the Spanish-American War, hoping that the United States would back the independence movement. After the treaty, however, rebel leader Emilio Aguinaldo (1869–1964), who had battled the Spanish, simply switched targets and fought against the Americans he believed had betrayed him.
The United States, meanwhile, believed the Philippines would provide a strategic military outpost in the Pacific and a seat at the table of empires. Additionally, some Americans believed they had a responsibility to “civilize the natives.” The twin motives of imperialism—paternalism and greed—combined to fuel American support for the war. Still, a significant number of Americans, led by 1900 Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), opposed American involvement in the Philippines.
For American troops in the Philippines, war in the jungles of Southeast Asia was a hellish experience. Disease was rampant. Both sides were accused of serious human rights abuses and mistreatment of prisoners of war.
Two events caused the rebellion to falter. First, the Americans captured Aguinaldo, the rebellion’s most charismatic leader. Second, President William McKinley (1843–1901) appointed an Ohio judge, William Howard Taft (1857–1930), as governor of the archipelago. Taft, the twenty-seventh president of the United States, significantly softened American policies toward the Philippines, giving Filipinos more say in their government and draining support for the revolt. Still, the islanders continued to press for independence until they got it—on July 4, 1946.
1. Opposition to the war, under the banner of the Anti-Imperialist League, included unlikely allies like steel magnate Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), union leader Samuel Gompers (1850–1924), writer Mark Twain (1835–1910), and intellectual W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1963).
2. In the initial battles of the war, the Filipinos were astonished to see that unlike the Spaniards, American soldiers fought in the hot hours of daylight, making them far more formidable adversaries.
3. The casualties of the Philippine war were far greater than in the Spanish-American conflict that had precipitated it. In all, more than 4,000 American soldiers died in the Philippines.
The infamous 1896 US Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson dealt a major blow to racial equality by permitting Jim Crow segregation in hotels, railroad cars, and schools. In the wake of the ruling, Southern states in the early twentieth century officially imposed second-class status on African-Americans through a system of legal segregation that remained in place until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Plessy v. Ferguson originated in New Orleans in 1892, when a black man, Homer Plessy, was arrested after he attempted to ride in a “whites only” railroad car. In court, Plessy and his supporters unsuccessfully argued that Louisiana’s segregation laws violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which required equal protection under the laws, regardless of race.
The Supreme Court upheld Plessy’s criminal conviction in its 8-1 decision, holding that “separate but equal” accommodations were allowable under the Constitution. The lone dissenter, Justice John Marshall Harlan (1833–1911), wrote a lengthy and eloquent attack on the “separate but equal” doctrine:
The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race … is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds.
As Harlan predicted, Plessy v. Ferguson has come to be regarded as one of the most shameful rulings in the Supreme Court’s history. About sixty years later, the Court overturned the Plessy ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), removing the constitutional basis for segregation and leading to the eventual demise of Jim Crow laws.
1. After losing his case, Plessy was forced to pay a $25 fine for sitting in the whites-only car.
2. Justice Harlan, the sole dissenter, had been a slaveholder himself before the Civil War (1861–1865) but recanted his support for slavery afterward.
3. Harlan’s grandson, John Marshall Harlan III (1899–1971), was also a Supreme Court justice.
“Give me enough Swedes and whiskey
and I’ll build a railroad to hell.”
—James J. Hill
James J. Hill (1838–1916), the builder of the Great Northern Railroad, was one of the last of the legendary nineteenth-century railroad barons. A businessman of great ambition and vision, he was nicknamed the “Empire Builder” for completing the fourth transcontinental railroad, which stretched from Chicago to Seattle across the windswept northern prairie. Hill’s Great Northern was the only transcontinental railroad built without government subsidies, a testament to his legendary business acumen.
Hill was born in Ontario and eventually moved to the American Midwest. He worked in a variety of shipping and railroad businesses and purchased the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad in 1878. At the time, the railroad’s grandiose name was no more than a fantasy; it served only a few towns in Minnesota and was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Over the next twenty years, Hill worked relentlessly to expand the company, which he eventually renamed the Great Northern.
The Great Northern crossed inhospitable territory—Idaho, North Dakota, and Montana—that had virtually no industry or white inhabitants in the late 1800s. Hill encouraged farmers to move into the areas opened up by the railroad, and he started mines and factories himself to provide business for the line. Although Hill’s aggressive expansion was not without controversy—and often came at the expense of Native Americans—he is regarded by historians as a key figure in the settlement of the American Northwest. His railroad also played a decisive role in the development of Seattle, its western terminus, as a major American city.
Fifty years after Hill’s death, the railroad merged with its biggest competitor, the Northern Pacific. Most of the tracks built by Hill are now owned by the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad, and every day dozens of freight trains roll across the route he forged over the Rocky Mountains.
1. An Amtrak route named in honor of Hill, the Empire Builder, runs from Chicago to Seattle along the tracks constructed by Hill in the nineteenth century.
2. One of Hill’s engineers was John F. Stevens (1853–1943), who went on to become the chief engineer for the Panama Canal.
3. To build the Great Northern, Hill convinced Congress to allow him to expropriate lands from American Indian reservations.
In 1890, the United States government declared that the American frontier was closed. Although a few pockets of the West remained unsettled, census takers noted with little fanfare, “there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.”
To historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932), a professor at the University of Wisconsin, the closing of the American frontier was an event of epochal significance. Since the arrival of the earliest European settlers, Turner pointed out, American values had been shaped by the existence of a wild frontier to their west. Now, after three centuries, it was gone.
In 1893, Turner gave a speech to fellow historians at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago outlining his “frontier thesis.” In this celebrated lecture, he claimed that the now-vanished frontier had helped create America’s sense of “freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society”—indeed, its very identity as a youthful nation:
This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West.
Jackson’s frontier thesis would become one of the most influential ideas in the study of American history. The nation’s ideology, Turner argued, was inseparably linked to its geography. The same spirit of exploration, acquisition, and rugged individualism that drove the pioneers, he said, also animated American society at large.
Although historians have since criticized many aspects of Turner’s theory, it unquestionably captured the zeitgeist of its moment. The closure of the frontier worried many Americans, who feared that without new frontiers to conquer, the nation would lose its vitality. The solution, to many Americans seeking to recapture the pioneer spirit, was imperialism. The same year that Turner gave his speech, the United States overthrew the government of Hawaii, beginning a new and controversial chapter in American expansion.
1. A year after his death in 1932, Turner was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Significance of Sections in American History.
2. The census defined frontier as any area with fewer than two residents per square mile.
3. Turner taught at the University of Wisconsin until 1910, when he moved to a professorship at Harvard.
“I, too, am America.”
—Langston Hughes, “I, Too”
The best-known poet of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s and one of the most influential African-American writers of the twentieth century, Langston Hughes (1902–1967) wrote hundreds of trenchant, poignant poems about the effects of bigotry and segregation on American blacks. Born in Missouri, Hughes lived most of his life in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, where he was a mentor and inspiration to many other leading black writers.
In his poetry, Hughes sought to foster black pride, puncture stereotypes, and outrage his readers by telling them about the injustices of white racism. He wrote about lynching, poverty, and the inner rage of blacks confined by segregation. Hughes considered himself a people’s poet and intended for his works to be read, not studied. They are direct, accessible, and often dramatic. The poem “Ku Klux,” for instance, is written in the first-person voice of an African-American kidnapped by the Klan. The title of the poem is truncated, but all of Hughes’s readers knew what the third word would be; likewise, the poem itself ends inconclusively, but readers understood the grim fate likely awaiting the black narrator accused of “sassin’” whites in the Deep South.
Although often dark and pessimistic, Hughes’s poetry is laced with occasional flights of optimism and humor. During Hughes’s lifetime, the civil rights movement made substantial progress toward equality, positive steps that were sometimes reflected in his poetry.
An eloquent champion of equality, liberation, and human dignity, Hughes has more recently been reclaimed as a gay black male icon.
1. Hughes’s first poem was published in the Crisis, the NAACP magazine founded by W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1963).
2. Hughes briefly enrolled in Columbia University but dropped out to pursue writing. He would later graduate from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.
3. Although Hughes flirted with communism in the 1930s, a time when few other political parties were willing to stand up for the rights of African-Americans, he never joined the Communist Party. Still, he was forced to testify at the McCarthy anticommunism hearings in 1953.
Perhaps the most beloved children’s movie in the history of American cinema, The Wizard of Oz was first released in 1939 and has enchanted generations of kids ever since. Although the film was not a runaway hit at the time of its initial premier, its reputation grew over the years, and dozens of the movie’s most memorable lines have seeped into the fabric of American popular culture.
Based on a book by L. Frank Baum published in 1900, the movie starred actress Judy Garland (1922–1969) in the leading role as Dorothy Gale, a Kansas farm girl mysteriously transported to the magical land of Oz. The movie’s first scenes, set in Kansas, were filmed in black-and-white, but the film shifts to color when Dorothy and her dog, Toto, begin their adventures in Oz.
The screenplay, a relatively faithful adaptation of Baum’s book, contains some of the most famous quotes in Hollywood history. To wit:
“I’ll get you, my pretty … and your little dog, too!”
“There’s no place like home.”
“Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Music also played a major role in the film’s success. The movie’s sound track included the famous tune “Over the Rainbow,” which won an Oscar for Best Song in 1940, has been covered by countless artists, and was recently voted the American Film Institute’s best-ever song in the history of American cinema.
Although a children’s movie, The Wizard of Oz was one of the most technologically ambitious films of its era, and it cost the MGM studio a then-astonishing $2.8 million. The film—which had five directors—employed a sound engineer to produce its sound effects, and it made extensive use of Technicolor film.
In the end, however, the singular allure of The Wizard of Oz owes much to Baum’s whimsical story and Garland’s acting. Garland, only seventeen years old when the movie propelled her to stardom, went on to act in dozens more musicals but died of a drug overdose in 1969.
1. The year 1939 yielded a bumper crop of classic films. The Wizard of Oz and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington were nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, but they both lost to Gone with the Wind.
2. Terry, the dog that played Toto, acted in a dozen other films and was reportedly paid more than some of the human extras in The Wizard of Oz.
3. One of the original pairs of ruby slippers Garland wore as Dorothy in the movie are now on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.