The election of Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) as president of the United States in 1877 had far-reaching consequences for American politics and society and was particularly harmful for African-Americans. Hayes, a Republican, finished virtually tied with his Democratic opponent, Samuel Tilden (1814–1886), in one of the closest contests in American history. Behind closed doors in Washington, DC, the two parties reached a deal to resolve the disputed election. Under the terms of the pact, the Democrats reached a deal Hayes could take office, in exchange for a promise from the Republicans to end Reconstruction in the South.
For blacks, the end of Reconstruction and the removal of federal troops from the South was a disaster. After the Civil War (1861–1865), the federal government had attempted to improve the conditions in the South for blacks by enforcing civil rights legislation with military force. For the brief period between 1865 and 1877, blacks enjoyed unprecedented political power in the South, and several blacks even won election to Congress.
Many white Southerners, however, were appalled by Reconstruction and did everything in their power to thwart racial equality. Most notoriously, some Confederate veterans formed a terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, to harass blacks and intimidate federal officials.
The compromise that ended the 1877 election benefited both parties but consigned African-Americans in the South to nine decades of segregation. Hayes, meanwhile, a former Union brevet major general from Ohio, had an uneventful presidency. He retired after a single term and died in Ohio in 1893.
1. In 1861, after the start of the Civil War, Hayes was eager to join the action, declaring that he would “prefer to go into it if I knew I… was to be killed… than to live through and after it without taking any part.”
2. Hayes was elected to the House of Representatives from Ohio in 1864, while on active duty, but refused to leave his post to take office until December 1865.
3. By tradition, Hayes and Tilden did not actively seek the presidency in 1876, leaving the actual campaigning to their staffs.
The American entry into World War I in 1917 marked a significant milestone in the evolution of the United States into a world superpower. The war against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was the first time American troops fought in the fields of Europe. It was also the first war to make use of modern technological innovations like airplanes, tanks, and chemical weapons. Finally, the decision of US President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) to seek war marked a huge shift in American foreign policy away from isolationism and toward more active engagement with European and world affairs.
The war started in Europe in 1914 after the assassination of an Austrian prince, Franz Ferdinand. In retaliation for the killing, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on the Balkan country of Serbia, which was suspected of harboring the assassins. From there, the war quickly spiraled into a continent-wide conflict pitting the Central Powers of Austria-Hungary, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire against the Allies of France, Italy, Great Britain, and Russia.
Initially, Wilson and the American public wanted no part in the European conflict. World War I was the first modern war, and the level of bloodshed was terrifying. Both sides deployed poison gas. In a famous poem, British soldier Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) described the horror of watching his countrymen “guttering, choking, drowning” in deadly seas of green gas. With no American interests at stake, the United States quickly declared its neutrality in 1914.
However, in 1915 German submarines began sinking American ships, which they suspected were carrying weapons to the Allies, causing American public opinion to turn against Germany. In the spring of 1917, angered by the German attacks, Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany, and it did so on April 6.
Most American soldiers fought in France, with a smaller contingent dispatched to Italy. American troops took part in an Allied offensive in the summer of 1918, culminating in the Second Battle of the Somme. Although French and British armies did the vast majority of the actual fighting in World War I, the entrance of the United States helped convince Germany that it would be pointless to continue. The German monarchy was overthrown, and new German leaders signed an armistice with the Allies on November 11, 1918—the day now celebrated as Veterans Day.
1. Fifty members of the House of Representatives voted against entering the war, including Rep. Jeanette Rankin (1880–1973) of Montana, the first woman elected to Congress, who also cast the only vote against entering World War II in 1941.
2. Wilson’s secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), was adamantly opposed to US entrance into the war, and ultimately resigned in protest.
3. German diplomats tried to convince Mexico to enter World War I on their side, offering to return Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to Mexico if the United States was defeated.
The term Jim Crow refers to an assortment of laws adopted in many Southern states after the Civil War (1861–1865) that imposed legal restrictions on African-Americans. Jim Crow laws, which remained in effect in many states into the 1960s, covered even the most intimate aspects of everyday life. Blacks were forced to use separate waiting rooms at bus stations, separate bathrooms, and even separate drinking fountains from whites. Jim Crow also forbade blacks and whites to marry and imposed strict racial segregation in public schools.
After the end of Reconstruction in 1877, white Southerners moved swiftly to reestablish white supremacy in the South by passing a wave of segregation codes. The Supreme Court gave legal sanction to Jim Crow in its controversial 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that sanctioned “separate but equal” facilities. Emboldened by the Plessy decision, southern states passed a second wave of Jim Crow laws in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Jim Crow was more than a legal system. It was also an unspoken code of racial customs and taboos. In the post–Civil War South, blacks were expected to call white men “sir,” get out of the way of whites on the sidewalk, and avoid even making eye contact with white women. Black men of any age were expected to answer to “boy.” This code—especially the stricture on contact with white women—was enforced by lynch mobs.
Founded in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) organized to improve race relations. It would take almost sixty years, however, until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 effectively abolished Jim Crow. Laws against interracial marriage were invalidated by the 1967 Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia.
1. The term Jim Crow is thought to derive from a racist song performed by blackfaced singers that was popular in the nineteenth century.
2. Many white home owners placed “covenants” on their homes forbidding their sale to blacks or Jews, a practice that was deemed unconstitutional in 1948.
3. Professional baseball had black players until 1890 but became segregated in the wave of Jim Crow that began in the decade that followed. Another black player would not take the field in the major leagues until Jackie Robinson (1919–1972) in 1947.
The Civil War (1861–1865) ended slavery, but it did not end the demand for labor in the cotton fields of the South. Although many of the old antebellum plantations were broken up after the defeat of the Confederacy, cotton remained the region’s most important cash crop. In the decades after emancipation, many African-American ex-slaves in the Deep South became trapped in the system of sharecropping, a new economic arrangement that replaced slavery as the basis of the agricultural economy throughout much of the region.
Sharecropping involved an exchange between tenant farmers and the land’s owner. The farmer was given seed and supplies and allowed to live on the land, and in exchange turned over a portion of the cotton or tobacco harvest to the landlord. In theory, sharecropping gave the farmer some financial independence.
In practice, however, many tenant farmers remained in dire poverty and were locked in an insurmountable cycle of debt to their landlord. For some sharecroppers, the system represented only a marginal improvement over slavery. Indeed, many tenant farmers found themselves working for their ex-masters on the same land they had once farmed as slaves.
Unlike slavery, however, sharecropping was not confined to African-Americans. Many poor whites in the South also ended up working as sharecroppers—under equally exploitative conditions.
Dissatisfaction with sharecropping, along with omnipresent racism and Jim Crow segregation, helped fuel the great migration of African-Americans out of the South beginning in World War I (1914–1918). Sharecropping itself, however, remained a common practice well into the twentieth century. One of the most famous depictions of Southern tenant farming was Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a semifictional 1941 book by writer James Agee (1909–1955) and photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975) chronicling a family of poor white sharecroppers in Alabama. Sharecropping is now virtually nonexistent in the United States.
1. A major catalyst for the end of sharecropping was a catastrophic Mississippi River flood in 1927, which caused many blacks to abandon the South.
2. The US Senate held hearings on sharecropping in 1880 and heard testimony from ex-slaves who were threatened with violence if they did not sign exploitative contracts. Still, Congress did nothing to end the abuses.
3. In addition to its economic unfairness, sharecropping provided an incentive to overfarm land. By the early 1900s, much of the farmland in the South was in poor condition, hurting tenant farmers further.
Puerto Rico, one of the last remaining vestiges of the Spanish empire in the New World, became part of the United States as a result of the peace treaty that ended the Spanish-American War in 1898. Since then, the heavily populated island has struggled to define its status and identity in the modern United States. Under current law, the island is not a state and its residents do not vote in federal elections or pay taxes, but all Puerto Ricans are considered United States citizens.
European settlement of Puerto Rico began much earlier than in any other part of the modern United States. Indeed, Christopher Columbus himself “discovered” Puerto Rico on his second expedition to the New World in 1493. Spain became the world’s most powerful empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and built massive fortifications to protect San Juan, the island’s seaside capital. Spanish sugarcane farmers enslaved and eventually decimated the island’s indigenous Arawak Indian population.
Spain’s empire was eventually eclipsed by Great Britain and France, and by the nineteenth century it was in serious decline. By the time the war with the United States began, Puerto Rico and Cuba were the last two outposts of Spanish colonial rule in the Caribbean. American troops invaded both islands during the war, made short work of the Spanish defenders, and were awarded the islands in the pact ending the conflict. A 1917 act of the US Congress gave Puerto Ricans US citizenship. In 1952, Puerto Rico became a self-governing commonwealth of the United States with its own constitution approved by the US Congress.
Since then, Puerto Ricans have voted several times—most recently in 1998—to remain part of the United States and keep their unique, ad hoc legal status. Puerto Rico is the only part of the United States that fields a separate Olympic team, and it is the only US territory where Spanish is the first language of most residents. However, thousands of Puerto Ricans serve in the United States military, and at present there is little political support in Puerto Rico for changes to the island’s unusual status quo.
1. Puerto Rico means rich port in Spanish.
2. Spanish and English are both considered official languages in Puerto Rico; the United States itself does not have an official language.
3. Puerto Rico’s Olympic basketball team shocked the world by beating a US squad full of NBA superstars at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece.
Author Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) popularized the hardboiled detective fiction genre in a series of crime thrillers based on his experiences as a private detective in the 1920s. Although Hammett’s creative output largely ceased after the 1930s, his novels influenced many other crime writers, including Raymond Chandler (1888–1959), and established the loner cop who plays by his own rules as a stock character in American crime movies and television.
Prior to the 1920s, the archetypal detective in fiction was Sherlock Holmes, an upright citizen who pieces together clues to put ne’er-do-wells behind bars. Hammett’s detectives were different. Only slightly more ethical than the criminals they chased, his heroes cheated, bribed, and lied to solve their cases.
Hammett’s most famous detective in this mold was Sam Spade, the main character of The Maltese Falcon (1930), who was immortalized by the tough-guy actor Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957) in the 1941 film version. The hero of most of Hammett’s novels and short stories, however, was a nameless detective called the Continental Op, an operative for the Continental Detective Agency. Many of the Op’s exploits were based on Hammett’s own cases. For instance, in Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest (1929), the Op is dispatched to a violent mining town in the Rocky Mountains to investigate the murder of a newspaper publisher; Hammett himself had been stationed in Butte, Montana, during a bout of labor strife shortly after World War I (1914–1918).
The Thin Man (1934) was Hammett’s last major work and one of his most beloved, featuring Nick and Nora Charles as a hard-drinking crime-solving couple. The book was the basis for a series of successful movies. Hammett himself had begun a famous romance with the playwright Lillian Hellman (1905–1984) at about the same time, an affair that would last for the rest of his life.
Hammett’s politics veered sharply leftward during the 1930s in response to the author’s growing concern over the spread of fascism in Europe. In the anticommunist atmosphere after World War II (1939–1945), he was imprisoned for six months for refusing to answer questions about a communist-affiliated organization of which he was a member. He lived most of his last years drinking heavily at a cottage in rural New York or with Hellman at her house on the Upper East Side of New York City. A veteran of both world wars, he is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
1. After the McCarthy hearings, Hammett’s books were briefly pulled from some overseas State Department libraries, until President Eisenhower (1890–1969) criticized the move as an overreaction to the author’s communist sympathies.
2. It was Hammett’s lover, Lillian Hellman, who famously refused to answer McCarthy’s questions, saying she would not “cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”
3. Hammett’s first short story was published in 1922 by The Smart Set, a magazine edited by the famous journalist H. L. Mencken (1880–1956).
The only woman to win four Academy Awards for Best Actress, Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) played strong, no-nonsense women in a string of hit films like The Philadelphia Story, The African Queen, and On Golden Pond. Saucy and playful, her characters were an inspiration to independent women and a delight to moviegoers.
A graduate of Bryn Mawr, an all-women’s college in Pennsylvania, Hepburn began her acting career on the stage in New York. She moved to Hollywood in 1932 but briefly returned to Broadway after a string of flops in the late 1930s. The Philadelphia Story, a runaway 1940 hit that also starred actors Cary Grant (1904–1986) and James Stewart (1908–1997), relaunched her movie career.
Hepburn insisted on having creative control of her own movies and was largely able to select her male costars—a Hollywood rarity. In 1942, she picked Spencer Tracy as her costar in Woman of the Year, beginning one of the most fabled romances in Hollywood history. Although married, Tracy began a love affair with Hepburn that would continue until his death in 1967. During that span, they would star in nine movies together.
Although a versatile actress, Hepburn’s characters were usually tart, athletic, and upper-crust, much like Hepburn herself. Famous for her athletic abilities, patrician New England accent, and preternaturally straight posture, Hepburn also made it popularly acceptable for women to wear pants, complaining that skirts were uncomfortable.
Of the forty films Hepburn made during her career, she garnered Academy Award nominations for twelve of them and won Oscars for Morning Glory (1933), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968), and On Golden Pond (1981). Slowed by old age, she made her final movie appearance in 1994, alongside Annette Benning (1958–) in the film Love Affair. A trailblazing woman and one of the best-loved actresses in Hollywood history, she died in 2003 at age ninety-six.
1. Hepburn is unrelated to Audrey Hepburn (1929–1993), another famous twentieth-century actress who starred in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and My Fair Lady (1964).
2. In 2004, Cate Blanchett (1969–) won an Oscar for her portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator.
3. Hepburn’s older brother, Tom, killed himself when she was a teenager. Deeply saddened, Katharine adopted Tom’s birthday as her own in his memory.