Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) ran for president of the United States five times, earning hundreds of thousands of votes from supporters dissatisfied with Gilded Age American capitalism. Although Debs never won more than 7 percent of the vote, he was a crucial force in the early years of the American labor movement, and his candidacy in 1908 marked the best-ever showing for a Socialist in the United States.
Eugene Victor Debs was born in Indiana and joined a railroad union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, at a young age. He became a union leader and publisher of the group’s magazine, but was jailed after a strike in 1894. In prison, he began reading the works of Karl Marx (1818–1883), the founder of socialism. Shortly after his release, determined to fight for worker’s rights in the political arena, Debs made his first run for the White House in 1900. He tried again in 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920.
Few Socialists actually expected Debs to win, but they hoped to draw attention to the nation’s growing economic inequalities and the party’s demands for women’s suffrage, an end to child labor, and safety regulations for mines and railroads. Arguably, the Socialists were successful, since all three major candidates in the 1912 election touted their commitment to labor issues first embraced by the Socialists.
Debs made his final, quixotic run for the presidency in 1920, when he was again in federal prison, this time for violating the Espionage Act. His imprisonment stemmed from a 1918 speech he gave in Canton, Ohio, attacking American involvement in World War I (1914–1918). After his fiery speech, Debs was arrested for obstructing the war effort, and the US Supreme Court upheld his ten-year jail sentence.
From behind bars, Debs won nearly a million votes and 3.4 percent of the electorate. The victor, Republican Warren G. Harding (1865–1923), pardoned Debs in 1921. His health ruined by incarceration, Debs died in 1926. Although the Socialist Party continues to field candidates for national office, none yet have approached the level of support Debs received.
1. Although one of the original founders in 1905 of the Industrial Workers of the World, a famous left-wing union, Debs dropped out of the organization a few years later when it did not commit to nonviolence.
2. In the 1908 presidential campaign, Debs’s campaign train was nicknamed the Red Special.
3. Although permitted by his wardens to release only one written campaign statement per week in the 1920 election, Debs won 919,799 votes and finished third, behind Harding and Democrat James M. Cox (1870–1957).
President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) set sail for France in December 1918, determined to change the world. The first president to make the six-day ocean voyage to Europe during his term in office, Wilson arrived at the peace conference in Paris with an ambitious, idealistic agenda: acceptance of the Fourteen Points, a plan for international cooperation that Wilson hoped would create a lasting peace on a continent ravaged by World War I (1914–1918).
The guiding principle of the Fourteen Points, which Wilson announced to the United States Congress during his 1918 State of the Union address, was self-determination. The defeated Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires both contained many bickering nationalities. Wilson wanted these groups to choose their own futures. The Fourteen Points also envisioned free trade, free navigation of the seas, and an international body called the League of Nations to police world disputes.
Wilson’s idealism, however, was considered naïve by the other victorious leaders who joined Wilson at the Paris conference. Compared to the United States, which had entered the war only in 1917, fellow Allies France, Great Britain, and Italy had suffered enormous casualties and destruction. They wanted payback and were annoyed by Wilson’s idealistic rhetoric. “Mr. Wilson bores me with his Fourteen Points,” the French prime minister reportedly said. “God Almighty has only ten!”
In total, Wilson spent six months in Paris—by far the longest period of time any sitting president has spent outside the United States—but failed to convince the British and French to support his proposals. The treaty, finally signed in the splendid seventeenthcentury Palace of Versailles in the Paris suburbs, imposed harsh reparations on Germany and ignored many of Wilson’s proposals. The Allies did agree to create a League of Nations, but when Wilson returned home, isolationists in the US Senate torpedoed even this modest achievement. Through its rejection of the Treaty of Versailles, the Senate refused to let the United States join the League of Nations that Wilson had created.
Although humiliated at home and abroad, time would vindicate many of Wilson’s positions. Many historians believe that the harsh terms and crushing reparations imposed on Germany caused so much resentment that they paved the way for the rise of Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) in the 1930s and World War II (1939–1941).
1. In order to show Wilson the full effects of German brutality, the French invited Wilson to tour the devastated countryside. Wilson refused to go because he preferred not to prejudice the peace negotiations, which further infuriated the French.
2. Wilson failed to bring any prominent Republicans with him to France, a move that alienated congressional Republicans and may have contributed to their opposition to the League of Nations.
3. In a move freighted with historical significance, the French forced Germany to sign the treaty in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, where they had surrendered to Germany in 1871.
In 1906, just a month before her death, a frail Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) took the stage at a national women’s rights convention in Baltimore. After repeating one last time her lifelong goal of equal voting rights, Anthony closed her speech with an emotional tribute to her longtime colleagues in the suffrage movement. “With such women consecrating their lives,” she told the delegates, “failure is impossible.”
Anthony, for decades the lead organizer of the women’s rights movement, had consecrated her own life to the cause from an early age. Born in Massachusetts to a Quaker family, Anthony became involved with the temperance, suffrage, and antislavery movements in the 1850s. After the Civil War (1861–1865), she devoted herself fully to the women’s movement, organizing the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869.
Unlike some other women’s rights leaders, Anthony focused her energies almost entirely on winning the right to vote. Through the NWSA, she organized a network of thousands of activists and personally lobbied the United States Congress and state governments to enfranchise women. At the time of her death, four states had granted women the right to vote. Fourteen years after her death, the movement created by Anthony finally won passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women equal voting rights nationwide.
Anthony’s indefatigable energy as an organizer helped sustain the momentum for women’s rights that began to build after the war. He famous, optimistic words—“failure is impossible”—would become a mantra for succeeding generations of women’s rights campaigners.
1. Some of Anthony’s strong-willed nature came from her father, Daniel, who was expelled from his local Quaker church for allowing dancing in his home.
2. Anthony was arrested and fined $100 for voting illegally in the 1872 presidential election, but she refused to pay the fine.
3. Anthony backed Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) in the 1872 election, rather than the free-spirited first-ever female candidate, Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927), whom the prudish Anthony viewed with disdain.
The Sears, Roebuck catalog built the American West—literally, in many cases. On easy credit, pioneers could buy an entire mail-order house from the famed Chicago retailer, complete with cans of paint, 750 pounds of nails, and assembly instructions. A major commercial force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Sears mail-order catalog changed the way Americans shopped and provided affordable access to farming supplies, household goods, and the houses themselves for the first generation of settlers in the West.
Simple in concept, the mail-order catalog represented a major improvement over the rural general stores many Americans had relied on previously. By cutting out the local retailer, the mail-order firm offered significantly lower prices. Richard Sears (1863–1914) and Alvah Roebuck (1864–1948) published their first catalog, featuring only watches and jewelry, in 1888, but by 1895, the catalog was 532 pages long and included stoves, guns, bicycles, clothes, shoes, and hundreds of other wares. The passage of the Rural Free Delivery Act of 1896, which extended home delivery of the US Postal Service to rural areas, greatly expanded the company’s reach and helped break the stranglehold general stores had on isolated farming regions.
By the early twentieth century, Sears, Roebuck and Co. recorded tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue from its thousands of products. Americans would buy more than 100,000 Sears houses, sold in several models with ritzy-sounding names like Maywood and Whitehall, many of which are still standing.
In historical terms, the publication of the Sears catalog was a key event in the evolution of American consumer culture. For the first time, the catalog made cheap, reliable goods available to a wide segment of the American population. Sears expanded into the retail market when it opened its first department store in 1925. The company was successful for decades, but by the 1990s it had lost its preeminent place in retailing to competitors like Wal-Mart. The famous catalog operation ceased in 1993. Nevertheless, the debut of the trailblazing Sears, Roebuck catalog is considered one of the most important commercial milestones in American business.
1. Sears built the tallest building in the United States, Chicago’s Sears Tower, as its headquarters in 1973.
2. One of the items offered in the first general Sears catalog, published in 1893, was a child’s doll priced at forty-five cents.
3. Between 1909 and 1912, the company tried unsuccessfully to sell mail-order automobiles.
The massive earthquake that struck San Francisco on the morning of April 18, 1906, nearly destroyed a major American city and is among the worst natural disasters in United States history. About 3,000 people were killed in the quake, which measured about 7.7 on the Richter scale. Until Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the San Francisco earthquake was the costliest disaster in the nation’s history, and it remains the nation’s deadliest earthquake.
Modern San Francisco was barely sixty years old at the time of the disaster. The city was a jumble of quickly constructed wooden buildings and overcrowded slums. Shoddy construction caused much of the quake damage; indeed, it was the fires that roared through the city in the aftermath of the tembler, rather than the quake itself, that caused the majority of the death and destruction.
At the time, the carnage in San Francisco was unprecedented in the United States and it dealt a profound shock to Americans as details spread across the country by telegraph. By the time the fires were contained four days later, about three-quarters of the buildings in San Francisco had been destroyed. The San Franciscan author Jack London (1876–1916), surveying the damage, exclaimed, “San Francisco is gone.”
Fearing chaos, however, city leaders deliberately issued inaccurate statements that minimized the quake’s toll. In particular, they downplayed or ignored the quake’s impact on Chinatown, which was almost completely destroyed. Within a few years, much of the city had been hastily rebuilt. Today, visible traces of the earthquake are virtually impossible to find in San Francisco.
1. Another massive quake hit San Francisco in 1989, but fatalities were much lower, thanks in part to improved building codes.
2. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) declined several foreign offers of assistance, including a large donation from the empress of China.
3. Looting began shortly after the earthquake; the mayor issued a declaration the afternoon of the quake allowing police and US soldiers dispatched to the city to shoot miscreants on sight.
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) wrote seventeen novels and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 in recognition of his lifetime achievement. His greatest enduring legacy, however, may be a single book Steinbeck published in 1939, The Grapes of Wrath. A sensitive portrait of the fictional Joads, an Oklahoma family afflicted by the Great Depression of the 1930s, the novel was an immediate sensation that outraged readers with its stark, dramatic depictions of American poverty.
Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, and attended Stanford University. He never graduated, however, and ended up working as a handyman at a lodge near Lake Tahoe, where he wrote his first book, Cup of Gold (1929). The book sold only 1,500 copies, but it launched Steinbeck’s literary career. A conscientious writer, he wrote prodigiously throughout the 1930s and published one of his best-known early works, Of Mice and Men, in 1937.
In 1938, Steinbeck began The Grapes of Wrath. Early in the writing process, he realized the new novel’s huge potential. “If I could do this book properly it would be one of the really fine books and a truly American book,” he confided to his journal. Inspired by the plight of farmworkers near his native Salinas, the novel follows the Joad family on their migration from Oklahoma, where they lost their farm to foreclosure. After many hardships, the family finally reaches California but is mistreated by farm owners. Disillusioned, the young character Tom Joad experiences a political awakening. In one of the most memorable passages in the novel, he dedicates himself to the cause of helping poor families like his own. “Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there,” he says. “Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there.”
Although farm owners heatedly objected to their unflattering depiction in the novel and critics called Steinbeck a communist for questioning the virtues of capitalism, The Grapes of Wrath was an enormous hit. A US Senate investigation provoked by the book largely backed up Steinbeck’s claims about the conditions on California farms. Although he never again matched the popular success and social impact of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck published several more novels, including Cannery Row in 1945 and East of Eden in 1952, and wrote a number of screenplays.
1. After The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck was wrongly believed to be a communist—even by many actual communists, whom he disappointed by enthusiastically backing American involvement in the Vietnam War (1957–1975).
2. Steinbeck had notoriously small handwriting; his manuscript for The Grapes of Wrath was only 165 pages, but the typeset book was more than 600 pages.
3. The title of The Grapes of Wrath was chosen by Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol, from the song “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the words of which were written by the American reformer Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) in 1861.
In 1931, Paramount Studios signed a handsome twenty-seven-year-old actor from England to a movie contract. Tall, tan, and debonair, with an unforgettable cleft chin, the new acquisition had all the looks of a successful leading man. But there was a problem. His name, Archibald Leach, sounded terrible. So the studio gave him a new name, and thus did Cary Grant (1904–1986) begin his incredible Hollywood career.
Born in the English port city of Bristol, Leach ran away from home as a child and joined a traveling acrobatic troupe, where he learned stilt walking and other carnival tricks. He toured extensively in England and hit the vaudeville circuit in the United States for the first time in 1920. He also appeared in a number of stage musicals before making the leap to the silver screen.
In an ironic twist on his humble beginnings, in Hollywood Grant was often cast as a suave, upper-crust gentleman. He starred as an upright captain alongside legendary film tart Mae West (1892–1980) in his first leading role, She Done Him Wrong, in 1933. In an era of strict censorship, West famously teased Grant, “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?”—a line that some considered scandalously suggestive at the time.
Over his long career, Grant was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor twice—for his leading roles in Penny Serenade (1941) and None but the Lonely Heart (1944)—and almost all of his more than 70 movies were commercial successes. He played in thrillers like North by Northwest (1959) and lighter fare like The Philadelphia Story (1940). He often performed his own stunts, drawing on his acrobatic training, and he never played a “bad guy” in any of his films.
Grant retired in 1966 and obstinately refused huge offers to return to the screen. He was awarded a lifetime achievement Oscar in 1970.
1. Although he often played a breezy, happy-go-lucky character on screen, in real life Grant suffered from depression and was treated with LSD before the drug was criminalized.
2. Grant became an American citizen in 1942.
3. Grant had a turbulent personal life and was married five times.