Nebraska lawyer William Jennings Byran (1860–1925) ran for president as a Democrat three times, losing each time by a wide margin. The self-proclaimed candidate of the common man, he railed against big business and wealthy eastern financiers. Although the “Great Commoner” lost each of his elections, in the long term many of his ideas would become law, and he was deeply influential within the Democratic Party.
Bryan’s start in national politics came in 1896, amid a raging debate over the gold standard. In the late nineteenth century, American currency was backed by gold, meaning that the total amount of money in circulation was linked to the quantity of gold in the government’s vaults. Easterners and the middle class liked the gold standard because it offered economic stability, but the system made it difficult for farmers to repay loans. Many westerners favored moving to a silver standard, which would make money much less scarce, resulting in inflation but making it easier for them to repay debts.
It is difficult now to appreciate how heated and emotional this debate over two metals became. In his famous speech to the Democratic convention in 1896, one of the most well-known pieces of oratory in American history, Bryan thundered against the gold standard, comparing the plight of indebted farmers to the suffering of Jesus Christ himself. “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns,” he raged. “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Goldbugs, as supporters of the gold standard were called, were aghast, believing the silver standard proposed by Bryan represented nothing less than a threat to the economic foundations of the Republic.
Bryan lost to Republican William McKinley (1843–1901), an advocate of the gold standard, in an election whose turnout of 80 percent has never been matched since. Bryan ran again in 1900 and 1908, expanding his platform to criticize imperialism in American foreign policy, crusade against corporate monopolies, and support the regulation of railroad rates.
He was appointed secretary of state in 1913 but resigned in protest of World War I (1914–1918). A passionate Christian fundamentalist, Bryan, in his last act in public life, aided in the prosecution of John Scopes (1900–1970) for teaching evolution in Tennessee. He died at age sixty-five just days after the trial ended.
1. In 1896, Bryan was nicknamed the “Boy Orator” for his youthful looks. Twelve years later, in the 1908 campaign, his nickname was amended to the “Balding Boy Orator.”
2. Bryan was thirty-six years old when he ran for president in 1896, only a year past the minimum age of thirty-five stipulated in the Constitution.
3. Bryan was the first presidential candidate to break with precedent by actively campaigning for the office. He gave 600 speeches to five million people, all without the aid of loudspeakers.
John Pershing (1860–1948) led the United States Army during World War I (1914–1918). American soldiers under Pershing’s command, nicknamed “doughboys,” provided crucial support to the Allies in the final year of the war. Pershing’s army was the first American force to fight in a European conflict. Pershing himself returned home after the war to a hero’s welcome: a ticker tape parade in New York. Elevated to the highest ranks in the army, he remained on active duty until the eve of World War II (1939–1945) and was a mentor to many of the generals who commanded the second American war in Europe.
Pershing was born in Missouri and graduated from the West Point military academy in 1886. Promoted to general after the Spanish-American War (1898), Pershing led the American troops that fruitlessly searched for the Mexican bandit Pancho Villa (1878–1923) in 1916.
When the United States Congress declared war on Germany in 1917 to enter World War I, President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) picked Pershing to lead the American expeditionary force. Simply getting America’s four million soldiers across the Atlantic Ocean proved an enormous logistical challenge, since the US Navy possessed virtually no transport ships at the time. Indeed, it would take eight months before Americans soldiers began arriving in Europe in great numbers. They made a strong impression on the French, who were astonished by the cheerful, singing American soldiers.
Arguably Pershing’s most significant accomplishment on behalf of his country and his troops was to resist pressure from France and Great Britain to use American soldiers as spares in their depleted armies. Battered by three years of trench warfare and inept leadership, the French and British armies were in wretched shape.
Pershing argued with the Allied leaders to ensure that whenever possible, American troops would fight in American units. American troops saw significant action in 1918, and total US deaths amounted to 49,000 soldiers killed in action. The American troops tipped the numerical balance in Europe in favor of the Allies, and Germany agreed to an armistice on November 11, 1918, ending the war.
1. Pershing’s military career was aided by family connections. His father-in-law, US Senator Francis Warren of Wyoming, was the powerful chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee.
2. Pershing was nicknamed “Black Jack” after commanding a regiment of black soldiers as a young lieutenant in Cuba.
3. Pershing was the first American general to make use of airplanes in combat. American pilots scored their first aerial victory on April 14, 1918.
African-American historian and sociologist W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1963) led the small group of young African-American intellectuals who successfully challenged black civil rights leaders to take a harder line against racial segregation in the early twentieth century. DuBois went on to edit the nation’s leading civil rights journal, Crisis, from 1910 to 1934, publishing many of the movement’s most influential essays. In his later years, disillusioned by the lack of progress toward racial equality, DuBois joined the Communist Party, moved to the African nation of Ghana, and renounced his American citizenship.
William Edward Burghardt DuBois was born in a small Massachusetts village in the Berkshire Hills and rarely encountered other African-Americans or overt racism during his childhood. A brilliant youngster, DuBois went to Fisk University in Tennessee on a scholarship.
During his summers at Fisk, he taught in local black communities and became increasingly aware of the hardships and problems that plagued Southern blacks. In many respects, his time in the South provided the foundation for his later political action.
DuBois became the first black person to receive a PhD from Harvard in 1895, where he studied under the famed philosopher William James (1842–1910). DuBois published his first book, about the international slave trade, in 1896. His most famous work, a collection of essays called The Souls of Black Folk, was published in 1903.
In 1895, DuBois began to write articles critical of Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), who was then considered the leader of the national African-American community. Disenchanted with Washington’s failure to fight against Jim Crow, DuBois in 1905 organized the Niagara movement and in 1909 helped found the NAACP to argue more forcefully against racial segregation.
DuBois published hundreds of essays, books, novels, and newspaper articles attacking segregation. In the 1920s, he became interested in communism, traveling to the Soviet Union in 1926. DuBois eventually parted ways with the NAACP, when his communist leanings became an embarrassment to the organization. DuBois, who was born only three years after the Civil War ended, died August 27, 1963, the day before Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington.
1. DuBois got his last name from a French Huguenot great-grandfather.
2. While editor of Crisis, DuBois supported World War I (1914–1918) and urged blacks to “close ranks” behind the war despite the second-class treatment endured by African-American soldiers.
3. DuBois never finished one of his favorite projects, called Encyclopedia Africana, but it was finally completed and published in 1999.
The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which was intended to prevent corporate monopolies, is regarded as one of the most important economic laws of the late nineteenth century. The act made it a crime for corporations to exercise monopolistic power in their line of business and empowered the federal government to break up companies that violated the law. Although enforcement of the law has been sporadic and sometimes controversial, the act has been a crucial tool for limiting the reach of big corporations in the American economy.
Named for Ohio senator John Sherman (1823–1900), the brother of Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman (1820–1891), the US Congress passed the law amid growing concern over the clout of the robber barons in the United States during the Gilded Age of the late 1800s. Companies like Standard Oil had a virtual lock on their markets, and they used their dominant position to squelch smaller competitors. Senator Sherman argued that these “trusts” intrinsically harmed the consumer because without viable competition, the conglomerates had virtually no incentive to lower prices.
The law was signed by President Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901) in 1890 but not vigorously enforced until President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) took office in 1901. Nicknamed the “trustbuster,” Teddy Roosevelt zealously battled the trusts, beginning dozens of investigations under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The United States Supreme Court eventually upheld the government’s most famous effort, a campaign to break up Standard Oil, in a 1911 ruling.
The true effectiveness of the Sherman Antitrust Act—and antitrust law in general—continues to generate heated debate among economists and politicians. Indeed, the arguments have changed little since 1890. Supporters of antitrust law argue that monopolies hurt consumers and so the government must intervene to prevent monopolies from forming. Opponents claim that antitrust laws go too far by preventing mergers that might increase efficiency. In United States v. Microsoft, one of the most famous recent antitrust cases, a federal judge ordered the breakup of the software company in 2000, an outcome that was eventually averted by a 2002 legal settlement in which the company agreed to change some of its business practices.
1. Sherman was nicknamed the “Ohio Icicle” because of his stiff, colorless personality.
2. One industry, Major League Baseball, enjoys a blanket exemption from antitrust law thanks to a 1922 Supreme Court ruling.
3. In addition to Standard Oil, the law was also used to break up the American Tobacco Company in 1911 and AT&T in 1984.
By 1900, the island of Manhattan was so overcrowded that commuting into the city was an increasingly difficult task. The patchwork system of horse-drawn streetcars and elevated trains was dangerous, congested, and unreliable, especially in bad weather. That year, to modernize the city’s transportation system, New York embarked on one of the most expensive public works projects in American history, the digging of New York City’s subways.
The idea of underground trains was not new. The first US subway, a short stretch of tunnel in Boston, had opened three years earlier. New Yorkers envisioned a far more ambitious network reaching every corner of their sprawling metropolis. It would take 7,700 workers four years to dig the first twenty-one miles of tunnel, which opened to passengers on October 27, 1904. Construction would continue for another thirty years, until the system measured more than 600 miles of track—far larger than any other American mass transit system.
Since their opening, New York’s subways have functioned as a sort of bellwether for the city’s overall condition. The system expanded rapidly before World War II (1939–1945) but languished in the 1950s and 1960s as city leaders like Robert Moses (1888–1981) concentrated on highway construction instead. By the 1970s, the subways were in disrepair, reflecting the city’s crime wave and financial woes. In the 1990s, as New York’s fortunes rebounded, the city began cleaning up the graffiti on railcars and buying much-needed new equipment.
Today, ridership on the New York City subways far surpasses that of any other mass transit system in the United States. Construction of the subway will continue in the twenty-first century with a planned new Second Avenue line on the city’s east side.
1. Forty-four workers were killed in the construction of the first twenty-one miles of subway.
2. The original subway fare was five cents; it did not rise to a dime until 1948.
3. Until 1940, the operation of New York’s subways was contracted out to three private companies, Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT), Independent Subway (IND), and Brooklyn–Manhattan Transit (BMT), whose initials are still seen on the walls of some subway stations in the city today.
In 1973, the contemporary writer Alice Walker went on an expedition to locate the grave of one of her heroes, the Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960). Hurston had died in poverty in Florida, her seven books from the 1930s and 1940s out of print and largely forgotten. Walker was intent on saving Hurston from obscurity. The moving article Walker published in Ms. magazine about her search for Hurston’s grave revived popular interest in the author, whose most famous book, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), was finally republished in 1978 and is now considered a classic of African-American literature.
Hurston was born in Eatonville, Florida, and came to New York in the 1920s. In addition to her novels and plays, she was a noted folklorist who traveled the South recording the oral traditions of African-Americans, a collection of which was published in 2001 as Every Tongue Got to Confess.
Hurston was unpopular with influential African-American literary critics of her day, however, because of her right-wing political views, hatred of communism, and aversion to protest literature. Richard Wright (1908–1960), the leading black writer of the 1930s and 1940s, wrote a scathing review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, calling it “counter-revolutionary.” Other black writers distanced themselves from Hurston after she endorsed right-wing Republican candidates following World War II (1939–1945). Hurston particularly disliked what she regarded as the self-pity of some African-American novelists; she wrote that she refused to accept “the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a dirty deal.” Estranged from the black literary establishment, she worked as a maid and substitute teacher in Florida for the last years of her life.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is the story of a young woman named Janie Starks, whose first two marriages end unhappily but who finds happiness with her third husband. The novel focuses on Janie’s interior life and relationships; it was not intended, Hurston wrote in response to her predominantly male critics, as social commentary. She wanted readers to perceive Janie as a complete character, not solely as a diminished victim of racism. Hurston is cited as a heavy influence on more recent authors like Toni Morrison (1931–) and, of course, Alice Walker (1944–).
1. Hurston was the only African-American student in her class at Barnard, the prestigious all-women’s school in New York City.
2. Halle Berry (1968–) starred in a 2005 made-for-TV movie version of Their Eyes Were Watching God produced by Oprah Winfrey (1954–).
3. Hurston criticized the US Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision, which she felt undermined the tradition and importance of all-black schools.
Singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) helped popularize the folk music genre in the 1930s and 1940s. During a career cut short by illness, Guthrie wrote more than 1,000 songs. His dry, raspy voice and angry protest lyrics railing against social injustices inspired countless imitators, including a young Bob Dylan (1941–), who visited Guthrie in the 1960s as he lay dying in a New Jersey hospital from a rare genetic brain disease.
Oklahoma-born Woodrow Wilson Guthrie began performing country-and-western and folk songs in the mid-1930s, after spending several years aimlessly hoboing across the Depression-era United States. His angry songs about foreclosures, debts, and illness reflected the desperate poverty of the Dust Bowl. In Guthrie’s famous “Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd,” for instance, he sarcastically compared the notorious robber Pretty Boy Floyd to the banks foreclosing on many farms: “Some will rob you with a six-gun / And some with a fountain pen.”
In the late 1930s, Guthrie’s songs began to take on a more explicitly political, left-wing bent. Guthrie moved to New York City in 1940, where he was instantly embraced by urban intellectuals thirsting for the all-American “authenticity” provided by his folk songs. That year, he wrote his most well-known song, “This Land Is Your Land.” He published his best-selling autobiography, Bound for Glory, in 1943.
In the early 1950s, Guthrie’s health began to deteriorate mysteriously. Eventually, he was diagnosed with a fatal, incurable neurological disease, Huntington’s chorea, and committed to a hospital. He spent the last fifteen years of his life in misery, virtually unable to communicate after 1965. His reputation, however, only grew. During the folk revival of the early 1960s, a new generation of singers led by Dylan resurrected Guthrie’s songs for a new generation of fans.
1. After Guthrie’s death, his widow, Marjorie, set up a foundation to combat Huntington’s chorea, the Huntington’s Disease Society of America. There is still no cure for the rare disease. Guthrie’s mother, Nora, also died of Huntington’s.
2. Guthrie’s son, Arlo (1947–), is also a prominent recording artist who racked up a number of successes during the 1960s, including the famous single “Alice’s Restaurant.”
3. The 1976 film biography Bound for Glory starred David Carradine (1936–) as Guthrie.