Don’t Know Much About History

In thirty-five years, from the Civil War’s end to the twentieth century, America moved with astonishing speed from a war-torn nation of farmers to an industrial empire holding far-flung possessions. By the end of the First World War in 1918, the United States stood among the first rank of global powers.

Powering this dynamic growth was a lightning bolt of industrial development that spread railroads, built steel mills, and opened oil fields. This industrial surge was joined to a simultaneous explosion of practical invention, best exemplified by names that are now familiar parts of the American vocabulary: Edison, Bell, Westinghouse, Wright, and Pullman.

But progress carries a price tag. It was, as Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner titled their collaborative novel about this era, The Gilded Age: beautiful on the surface, but cheap, base, and tarnished underneath. For every mile of railroad laid, every ton of coal or iron ore mined, thousands of workers died. Many of them were immigrants or war veterans, miserably underpaid, working in unsafe and unsanitary conditions, with little or no political voice. The new fortunes being made opened up an era of astonishing corruption. The outlaws of the Wild West were small-time hoodlums compared with the politicians of New York and Washington, who brazenly bilked millions, and to the millionaire industrialists who kept these politicians in their pockets.

Since the Revolution, the American political process had opened up through agonizingly slow reforms, but power remained in the tight grip of the few. That was what the Founders had envisioned: a nation ruled by an enlightened aristocracy comprising gentlemen with the leisure and education to debate issues and rule judiciously. But in this period of a growing empire, more than ever before, the keys to government were pocketed by the powerful and wealthy, the great industrial and banking magnates who literally owned the government and turned it to their personal enrichment. It was what Alexander Hamilton might have had in mind when the Constitution was being debated, and it was light-years away from the agrarian republic that Jefferson envisioned.

The new industrialists were America’s Medici, and they dictated American policies as surely as those Italian bankers had owned popes and principalities. Viewed beside Morgan, Gould, Rockefeller, and Carnegie, the postwar presidents in office were either weak, inept, or corrupt. Not until the rise of Theodore Roosevelt—himself the scion of a wealthy family and certainly no liberal in the modern sense of the word—would the White House be powerful enough to challenge these merchant princes.

Pitted against them were the powerless. Immigrant laborers dying in the deserts and mountains as the railroad inched across the West. The urban poor working the factories and only slowly acquiring power through the unions that were fought with the deadly force of state militias and federal troops. Homesteaders who lost out to the railroad czars and cattle barons in incredible land grabs. Women filling the sweatshops of the swelling cities, yet still invisible on Election Day. And the Indians, last remnants of the millions in America when Columbus arrived. It was the subjugation of the few unconquered tribes that opened this era, but they did not go gently to their deaths.

AMERICAN VOICES

GENERAL WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN, 1867:

The more Indians we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians, the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers.

CHIEF GALL, a leader of the Hunkpapa Sioux warriors at Little Bighorn:

If you had a country which was very valuable, which had always belonged to your people . . . and men of another race came to take it away by force,what would your people do? Would they fight?

What happened at Custer’s Last Stand?

The most famous Indian battle in American history was a final flourish to the Indians’ hopelessly valiant war dance. The battle itself was simply the result of the actions of one vain, headstrong—some have suggested mad—soldier, George Armstrong Custer. The Indian victory at the Little Bighorn merely hastened the inevitable: the brutal end of Indian resistance and extinction for their singular way of life.

While the white men wearing blue and gray uniforms fought one another to the death, there were about 300,000 American Indians left in the West. They had been pushed and pressed inward from both coasts by the War of 1812, Manifest Destiny, the Mexican War, the California and Colorado gold rushes, and all the other reasons that whites had for stripping the Indians of their hunting lands. The “permanent Indian frontier” pledged by Andrew Jackson during the removals earlier in the century had long been breached by private and public enterprises, as had every treaty in the sad history of the Indians. When the Civil War ended, the politicians, prospectors, farmers, railroad builders, and cattlemen were ready to take up where they had left off when the war interrupted.

The most powerful and numerous of the surviving tribes were the Sioux, divided into several smaller groupings: the Santee Sioux of western Minnesota, who had tried to accept white ways; the Teton Sioux, those extraordinary horse warriors of the Great Plains, led by the Oglala chief Red Cloud; the Hunkpapa, who would produce Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse; and the Tetons’ allies, the Cheyenne of Wyoming and Colorado. Farther south were other tribes: the Arapaho of Colorado; the Comanche of Texas; the Apache, Navajo, and Pueblo of New Mexico.

For twenty-five years, from 1866 to 1891, the United States army fought a continuous war against these Indian tribes at considerable cost in lives and money. The final thrust began when the Sioux balked at the opening of the Bozeman Trail, a route to the gold fields of California that passed through Indian territory in Montana. Under Red Cloud, the Sioux attacked, destroying the forts that the army was trying to build along the trail. A treaty in 1867 ended this phase of the fighting, but it would get worse. Herded onto small reservations overseen by the scandalously corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Indians attempted to live under the white man’s rules.

Gold again proved the undoing of any hope for peace. Trespassers on the Indian reservations in South Dakota’s Black Hills, led by Custer himself, found gold, and there was soon a rush into the territory. The Indians were ordered off the land, but decided to go on the warpath instead. Joined by the Cheyenne, the Sioux concentrated their strength in the Bighorn River region of southern Montana. In the summer of 1876, setting out against specific orders to refrain from attacking, Custer led his 250 men in a direct frontal assault, ignoring warnings that from 2,000 to 4,000 Indians awaited his attack. Sitting Bull, the spiritual leader of the Sioux, had dreamed of a victory over the soldiers, but had performed a “Sun Dance” just before the battle and was too weak to fight. Led by Crazy Horse and another chief, Gall, the Indians destroyed Custer’s force to the last soldier, allowing only a half-Indian scout to escape from the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876.

Of course, it didn’t read that way in the newspapers back East. In the midst of the nation’s Centennial celebrations, an outraged nation read only of a massacre of brave soldiers by bloodthirsty Indians. The romanticized reports of “Custer’s Last Stand,” and a famous painting of the scene, provoked a furious popular and political reaction, demanding total warfare on the Sioux. The army’s response was savage, and half of the United States army was sent to exact revenge. The remnants of the Sioux tribe were hunted down, their camps wiped out, forcing them onto reservations. In May 1877, Crazy Horse led some of the last free Sioux into the Red Cloud reservation to surrender. Sitting Bull took the Hunkpapa into Canada, where a government agent allowed them to live and hunt freely. In September 1877, thirty-five-year-old Crazy Horse was arrested under the guise of a meeting with General Crook of the U.S. Army. Seeing that he was about to be taken captive, the war chief resisted, was bayoneted by a soldier, and died.

After the Sioux wars came the great mopping-up battles in the Northwest, against Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, and in the Southwest, against Geronimo and his Apache. Captured in 1886, the ferocious chieftain Geronimo was displayed at the St. Louis World’s Fair, where he sold his picture postcard for a quarter.

AMERICAN VOICES

From the last words of CRAZY HORSE (1877):

We had buffalo for food, and their hides for clothing and for our teepees. We preferred hunting to a life of idleness on the reservation, where we were driven against our will. At times we did not get enough to eat, and we were not allowed to leave the reservation to hunt.

We preferred our own way of living. We were no expense to the government. All we wanted was peace and to be left alone. Soldiers were sent out in the winter, who destroyed our villages.

Then “Long Hair” [Custer] came in the same way. They say we massacred him, but he would have done the same thing to us had we not defended ourselves and fought to the last. Our first impulse was to escape with our squaws and papooses, but we were so hemmed in that we had to fight.

What happened at Wounded Knee?

The Little Bighorn had proved a costly victory for the Indians, only hastening the inevitable. Their subsequent battles against federal troops were all disastrous, as one Indian leader after another was captured or killed, and surviving bands were forced onto reservations. But in spite of the odds, some Indians refused to submit, leading to the last resistance movement of the nineteenth century and a notorious massacre that truly marked the end of the era of the Indian wars.

In 1888, a Paiute Indian named Wovoka spawned a religious movement called the Ghost Dance. Ghost Dancers believed that the world would soon end and that the Indians, including the dead of the past, would inherit the earth. Wovoka preached harmony among Indians and rejection of all things white, especially alcohol. The religion took its name from a ritual in which the frenzied dancers would glimpse this future Indian paradise.

The religion quickly took hold and was widely adopted by Indians throughout the Plains, the Southwest, and the Far West. But it took on new importance when two Sioux medicine men claimed that “ghost shirts” worn by the dancers could stop white men’s bullets, leading to a new militant fervor among some Indians.

Alarmed by the Ghost Dancers, the army attempted to arrest a number of Indian leaders, including the great chief Sitting Bull, who had not joined the Ghost Dancers but was then living on a reservation after touring with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Fearful of Sitting Bull’s influence, Indian police in the hire of the government went to arrest Sitting Bull. On December 15, 1890, during a scuffle, he was killed by the Indian police sent to capture him.

Another chief named Big Foot, also sought by the army, was dying from pneumonia and wanted peace. But three days after Christmas Day in 1890, his band of some 350 women, children, and men was intercepted by an army patrol and taken to an encampment at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Reservation. There on the morning of December 29, 1890, as the Indians were surrendering their weapons to the soldiers, the gun of a deaf Indian named Black Coyote discharged. Whether it was accidental or deliberate is uncertain. But the soldiers immediately panicked, and turned their guns and artillery pieces on the disarmed Indians. At least 150 Indians, and probably as many as 300, died in the barrage. Wounded Knee was the Indians’ “last stand.”

The following twenty years would be the nadir of American Indian history, as the total Indian population between 1890 and 1910 fell to fewer than 250,000. (It was not until 1917 that Indian births exceeded deaths for the first time in more than fifty years.) But nearly facing extinction, the American Indian proved resilient if nothing else. With agonizingly slow progress, Indians gradually gained legal rights. In 1924, all native-born United States Indians were granted American citizenship. The ruling was in large measure a reaction of gratitude to the large number of Indians who fought for America during World War I, yet paternalism, discrimination, and exploitation were still commonplace.

By the time of the Great Depression (see Chapter 6), the plight of the Indians on reservations was, in the words of one government report, “deplorable.” During Franklin Roosevelt’s tenure, a cultural anthropologist named John Collier was appointed commissioner of Indians and proposed sweeping reforms that would recognize the right of Indian tribes to remain distinct and autonomous, with rights beyond those of other Americans. This was the so-called New Deal for Indians but it was a short-lived period of reform, replaced by the subsequent policy of “termination” under which the government sought to end the special status of Indians. As late as 1954, some states still kept Indians from voting. Yet, by the time of the 1980 census, there were some 1.5 million American Indians (including Aleuts and Eskimos), among the fastest-growing minority groups in America. As a group, however, they remain among the poorest and most unemployed Americans.

Must Read: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An American Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown; 500 Nations: An Illustrated History of North American Indians by Alvin M. Josephy Jr.

AMERICAN VOICES

BLACK ELK, an Oglala holy man who was present at Pine Ridge in 1890 (from Black Elk Speaks, as told through John G. Neihart):

I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. . . .

The nation’s hoop is broken and scattered, there is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.

AMERICAN VOICES

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Public school children first recited the pledge as they saluted the flag during the National School Celebration held in 1892 to mark the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America. The original pledge was probably written by Francis Bellamy (1855–1931), a minister and Socialist. Some scholars believe James B. Upham (1845–1905) wrote the pledge. Both men were from Boston and worked for The Youth’s Companion. The National Flag Conferences of the American Legion expanded the original wording in 1923 and 1924.

In 1942, Congress made the pledge part of its code for the use of the flag. In 1954, during the anti-Communist fervor of the times, it added the words “under God.” Bellamy, a Socialist, would never have intended those words to be used.

Who were the cowboys?

This nation, turning 100 years old, had no Odyssey, no St. George slaying the dragon, no Prometheus. The emerging American genius for making a lot of money was a poor substitute for King Arthur and his knights (although the Horatio Alger myth of rags to riches was good for a lot of mileage). Without a mythology and set of ancient heroes to call its own, America had to manufacture its heroes. So the mythmaking machinery of nineteenth-century American media created a suitably heroic archetype in the cowboys of the Wild West. The image was of the undaunted cattle drivers living a life of reckless individualism, braving the elements, staving off brutal Indian attacks. Or of heroic lawmen dueling with six-guns in the streets at high noon. This artificial Wild West became America’s Iliad.

It was an image so powerful, appearing first in the newspapers and reinforced in dime novels and later through countless Hollywood movies, television series, and cigarette commercials, that it entered the American political mentality. This code of the cowboy shaped policy and presidents, perhaps most notably Teddy Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan.

The heyday of the cowboy lasted approximately twenty years, from 1867 to 1887. The life wasn’t as glamorous or as romantically dangerous as it has been portrayed. The modern politicians’ comparison of drug-ravaged urban streets to the Wild West does a disservice to the West. The famed cow and mining towns of Tombstone, Abilene, Dodge City, and Deadwood had fewer shootouts and killings in their combined history than modern Washington, D.C., has in a few months.

The soul of the cowboy myth was the cattle drive, and it began with the famous trails out of Texas, where Spanish cattle introduced by the conquistadores later mixed with the English cattle of American settlers to produce a genetic marvel, the Texas longhorn steer. Moving north from Texas along trails like the Chisholm, charted out in 1867 by a half-Cherokee named Jesse Chisholm, the drives ended at the newly opened railheads in Kansas City and Sedalia in Missouri, Cheyenne in Wyoming, and Dodge City and Abilene in Kansas. The rowdiest of the Wild West towns, Abilene was founded by an Illinois cattleman as a railhead to meet the cattle drovers from Texas. It soon sported a boisterous barroom and brothel business that grew to meet the demand of the drovers who had just traveled from Texas over rugged terrain for several months, accompanied only by cattle who fattened themselves on the open range. The situation demanded “peacekeepers,” men whose histories were often more violent than those of the people they were supposed to police. The most famous was James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok, who shot only two people while presiding over Abilene; one of them was another policeman. But Hickok, and other western legends like Jesse James, were being brought back to easterners in newspaper reports and dime novels that made the West seem romantic and adventurous.

By the 1890s, the Wild West had already begun to fade. Cattlemen learned that the hearty steer could survive on the northern plains, killing off the need for the long drives. The advent of barbed wire in 1874 meant they were able to enclose huge areas of land (which they often didn’t own, or claimed under very questionable authority). The freebooting days of the postwar period were gradually replaced by cattle raising as big business, and the era of the cowboys and Wild West outlaws ended, their place taken by a much more sinister and ornery character, the American businessman.

AMERICAN VOICES

MATTHEW JOSEPHSON, describing the Gilded Age, in his 1934 book, The Robber Barons:

At Delmonico’s the Silver, Gold and Diamond dinners of the socially prominent succeeded each other unfailingly. At one, each lady present, opening her napkin, found a gold bracelet with the monogram of the host. At another, cigarettes rolled in hundred-dollar bills were passed around after coffee and consumed with an authentic thrill. . . . One man gave dinner to his dog, and presented him with a diamond collar worth $15,000.

Who were the robber barons?

Wall Street’s insider trading scandals and the New York City corruption high jinks of the 1980s are polite misdemeanors when viewed against the wholesale corruption of American business and politics during the late nineteenth century. This was the era when political genius took a backseat to a genius expressed in accumulating and holding more private wealth and power than had been possessed in history. One illustration of this power was the financier John P. Morgan Sr.’s refusal to make loans to the U.S. government because it lacked collateral. In 1895, Morgan bailed out a nearly bankrupt federal government by exchanging gold for U.S. bonds, which he promptly resold at an enormous profit.

The accumulation of American wealth in the hands of a few was nothing new; since colonial times a minority had held the vast majority of the nation’s wealth. But the late nineteenth century brought this concentration of wealth to unprecedented heights.

After the war, the lands of the West were opened up, cleared of Indians, and ready for the great surge. To reach these rich lands—to bring the cattle and wheat to eastern markets to feed the factory workers who made the tools and machinery to mine the gold, silver, and copper—called for cheap, fast transportation. Building more railroads required four basic components: land, labor, steel, and capital. The federal government provided the land; immigrants on both coasts supplied cheap labor; Andrew Carnegie provided the steel. And J. P. Morgan Sr. and Jr., the bankers’ bankers, provided the cash.

With unlimited vistas of western wealth, the plan to link East and West by railroad provided equally unlimited schemes to bilk the Treasury. Corruption came to the fore with the exposure of the Crédit Mobilier scandal in 1872. Massachusetts congressman Oakes Ames was a shovel maker and one of the directors of the Union Pacific Railroad, the company taking the line westward from Nebraska. Ames and the Union Pacific created a company called Crédit Mobilier of America, which was awarded all construction contracts. The company was paid $94 million by Congress for work actually worth $44 million. Ames had smoothed the way for this deal in Washington by spreading around plenty of Crédit Mobilier shares, selling them at half their value on the New York Stock Exchange. Among those enjoying this “insider trading” were congressional leaders, including future president James A. Garfield, and President Grant’s first- and second-term vice presidents, Schuyler Colfax and Henry Wilson, giving the “vice” in the title a whole new dimension.

The Central Pacific, owned by Leland Stanford, built eastward from California and did the same things, winning land grants, contracts, and enormous overpayments to Stanford’s railroad-owned construction company. Stanford got away with it and eventually built a university; Ames and Representative James Brooks of New York were censured by Congress, but neither of them got a university out of the deal. Other legislators were exonerated.

Besides the enormous costs in graft, the linking of East and West by rail, completed on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Point, Utah, cost thousands of workers’ lives as the lines snaked their way over mountains, across deserts, or through Indian territory, decimating the buffalo as they went to feed the workers. Workers’ lives and sound construction principles were cast aside, sublimated to greed and the rush to lay track to win bonuses. Bribes were paid by towns that wanted the railroad lines to run through them, and millions of acres of land were given away to the railroads as plums.

Grant’s two terms were boom times for the corruptible. Besides the Crédit Mobilier scandal, which reached into the White House, there was the Whiskey Ring scandal, which defrauded the government of millions in taxes with the assistance of the Treasury Department and Grant’s personal secretary, Orville Babcock, a man with his proverbial finger in every pie. In the Bureau of Indian Affairs, corruption was equally widespread, with millions in kickbacks paid to administration officials all the way down the line, ending up with Indians on the reservation getting rotten food, when they were fed at all.

The millions made in these scandals were still small change when compared against the fortunes being made by the so-called robber barons, a phrase coined by historian Charles Francis Adams in his 1878 book, Railroads: Their Origins and Problems. But they raised their form of thievery to sound business organizations and called them “trusts.”

For many of these men, such as Gould and Vanderbilt, the railroad was the ticket to enormous wealth. “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794–1877) started by building a Staten Island ferry business into a steamship empire, expanding into railroads after the war. Through graft and bribery, Vanderbilt built the New York Central into the largest single railroad line in America, passing down a vast amount of wealth to his family, who then gave new definition to “conspicuous consumption” with lavish parties at which guests dug in a trough for jewels.

Jay Gould (1836–92), one of Vanderbilt’s fiercest competitors, started with the Erie railroad line in New York, but was forced out after revelations of stock watering so blatant that officials in this “anything goes” era had to step in. Gould built a large empire with small lines in the Southwest, integrating them into a regional monopoly. In 1869, Gould and James Fisk, who had made millions selling shoddy blankets to the Union through Tammany Hall (see p. 273), attempted to manipulate the gold market, which was then governed by the traders in the Gold Room of the New York Stock Exchange rather than by the U.S. government, using an unwitting President Grant for their purposes. Slow to catch on to the scheme, President Grant stopped gold sales for a time, forcing up gold prices until he realized what was going on and released $4 million in gold, driving gold prices down on “Black Friday” (September 24, 1869), causing a stock market panic that set off a depression lasting several years. (Gould was later shot dead by a former business partner in a quarrel over a shared mistress.)

With corruption and monopoly at the core of the railroad systems, and the depression unleashed by the “Black Friday” panic, the railroads were ripe for disaster. By the 1890s, many of the lines were nearly bankrupt from intense competition and poor economic conditions. In stepped John Pierpont Morgan Sr. (1837–1913). (J. P. Morgan Sr. and Jr. are often confused, because of their names, appearance, and power.)

The son of an American banker who was based in London, Pierpont Morgan had not only avoided fighting in the Civil War, but had profited handsomely from it. Pierpont financed the purchase of some obsolete carbine rifles for $3.50 apiece. Then he refinanced the purchase of the same rifles to a second man who paid $11.50 each. The weapons were updated and resold for $22 each. In a three-month period, the government had repurchased its old, altered rifles at six times the original price, and Morgan had financed the whole deal. As Ron Chernow writes in his book The House of Morgan, “The unarguable point is that he saw the Civil War as an occasion for profit, not service. . . . Like other well-to-do young men, Pierpont paid a stand-in $300 to take his place when he was drafted after Gettysburg—a common, if inequitable practice that contributed to draft riots in July 1863.” Later during the war, when the gold market responded to war news with sharp ups and downs, Morgan tried to rig the market by shipping gold out of America.

By the turn of the century, Morgan had his hand in almost every major financial undertaking in America. His banking house was a millionaires’ club that loaned money to other banks. Through Morgan, a small group of men was able to take control of the railroads of America, and by 1900, Morgan owned half of America’s track mileage. His friends owned most of the rest, enabling them to set the railroad rates across the country.

In 1900 also, Morgan and steel king Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) met at a party. Carnegie scribbled a figure, Morgan agreed, and U.S. Steel was born, the first billion-dollar corporation. Unlike Morgan, Carnegie embodied at least a portion of the rags-to-riches myth. Born in Scotland, he immigrated to the United States with his family in 1848, and first worked in a cotton factory. His rise to power was mythic, going from telegraph clerk to secretary to the head of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and later becoming a Wall Street broker selling railroad commissions. When oil was found on a property he owned, Carnegie moved into the oil industry and later into iron and steel. Using an improved steel production technique called the Bessemer method, which he had seen in England, Carnegie revolutionized steel production in the United States, and with ruthless efficiency, he set out to control the American steel market.

Carnegie and one of his managers, Henry Clay Frick, were violently anti-union. In 1892, while Carnegie was in Scotland, Frick provoked a bloody strike when he demanded a pay cut and an end to the union at his Homestead plant in Pennsylvania. When the workers refused to accept Frick’s demands, he fired the entire workforce, surrounded the plant with barbed wire, and hired Pinkerton guards to protect the strikebreakers he brought in. Two barges carrying the Pinkerton guards were met by thousands of strikers and their friends and families, who kept the guards from landing, in a battle that left twenty strikers dead. Stiffening his back, Frick called on the state governor to send in 7,000 militiamen to protect the replacement workers. During the four-month confrontation, a young anarchist named Alexander Berkman—the lover of “Red Emma” Goldman (1869–1940), the most notorious anarchist leader of the day—shot Frick in the stomach, but only wounded him, and he was back in his office that day.

After the militia arrived, strike leaders were charged with murder, but all were acquitted. The plant kept producing steel with workers shipped in by railroad, and other Carnegie plants failed to join the Homestead strike, a union defeat that kept labor unorganized in Carnegie plants for years to come.

Another of the era’s “giants” was John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937), a bookkeeper by training who was once hired to investigate the investment promise of oil. Rockefeller told his employers it had “no future” and then invested in it himself, buying his first refinery in 1862. With a group of partners he formed the South Improvement Company, a company so corrupt it was forced out of business. Rockefeller responded by forming Standard Oil of Cleveland in 1870. Standard bought off whole legislatures, made secret deals with railroads to obtain favorable rates, and weakened rivals through bribery and sabotage until Rockefeller could buy them out with Standard Oil stock. By 1879, Standard controlled anywhere from 90 to 98 percent of the nation’s refining capacity at precisely the moment when oil’s value to an industrial society was becoming apparent.

Twenty years later, Standard Oil had been transformed into a “holding company” with diversified interests, including the Chase Manhattan Bank. The key to this diversification had been the invention of the “trust” by one of Rockefeller’s attorneys, Samuel C. T. Dodd, who was looking for ways around state laws governing corporations. Standard Oil, for instance, was an Ohio corporation prohibited from owning plants in other states or holding stock in out-of-state corporations. Dodd’s solution was to set up a nine-man board of trustees. Instead of a corporation issuing stock, Standard Oil became a “trust” issuing “trust certificates.” Through this new device, Rockefeller gobbled up the entire industry without worrying about breaking corporate antimonopoly laws. The idea was soon copied in other industries, and by the early 1890s, more than 5,000 separate companies had been organized into 300 trusts. Morgan’s railroad trust, for instance, owned all but 40,000 miles of track in America.

The trusts and the enormous monopolies kept prices artificially high, prevented competition, and set wages scandalously low. They were obviously not popular among working Americans. Standard Oil became the most hated company in America. Many of these monopolies had been built through graft and government subsidies, on the backs of poorly paid workers whose attempts to organize were met with deadly force. If any vague hope for reform rested in the presidency, it was a false hope.

For a generation, beginning with Andrew Johnson’s abbreviated term and the Grant years, the president almost seemed superfluous. In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–93) became president because of a fraudulent election that stole the presidency from Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, resulting in a compromise with Southern Democrats that killed congressional Reconstruction and any hope for civil rights in the South. When Grover Cleveland (1837–1908) was elected in 1884, he named William Whitney his secretary of the navy. Whitney had married into the Standard Oil fortune and set out to build a “steel navy” by buying Carnegie steel at inflated prices.

Attempts at “reform” were mostly dogs without much bark or bite, intended to mollify a public sick of corruption. The Interstate Commerce Commission, established during Cleveland’s administration to regulate railroads, was a charade for public consumption. Cleveland’s successor, Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901), was a former railroad attorney who had broken railroad strikes as a soldier. During his tenure, as a reaction to public sentiment, Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, named for Senator John Sherman, brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman, for the purpose of protecting trade against “unlawful restraints.”

It was a weak law made even more puny when the Supreme Court ruled in 1895 that a company owning 98 percent of the nation’s sugar-refining capacity was a manufacturing monopoly, not one of commerce, and was therefore immune to the law. During an extremely conservative, pro-business period, the high court also ruled that antitrust laws could be used against railway strikers who were “restraining trade.” This Alice in Wonderland Court took its perverse interpretations another step when it ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment, passed to guarantee the rights of freed slaves, was a protection for corporations, which the court said were “persons deserving the law’s due process.”

Were any honest fortunes made? Of course. As the nation spread west—at the expense largely of the vanishing Indian—incredible opportunity opened up for Americans—many of them newly arrived immigrants or their children—to prosper. But in the broad historical sweep, it is safe to say that the era—and the nation—belonged to a small group of wealthy men, in other words, a plutocracy. As conservative historian Kevin Phillips recently wrote in Wealth and Democracy, “The measure of the Gilded Age, beginning in the 1870s, was that by the 1890s the goliaths of U.S. business, railroading, and finance had gained de facto control over many state legislatures, the federal judiciary, and the U.S. Senate.”

AMERICAN VOICES

From ANDREW CARNEGIE’S article “Wealth” (published in the North American Review, 1890):

The Socialist or Anarchist who seeks to overturn present conditions is to be regarded as attacking the foundation upon which civilization itself rests, for civilization took its start from the day when the capable, industrious workman said to his incompetent and lazy fellow, “If thou dost not sow, thou shalt not reap,” and thus ended primitive Communism by separating the drones from the bees. One who studies this subject will soon be brought face to face with the conclusion that upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends—the right of the laborer to his hundred dollars in the savings bank, and equally the legal right of the millionaire to his millions. . . . Not evil, but good, has come to the race from the accumulation of wealth by those who have had the ability and energy to produce it.

Of what was William Tweed boss?

In New York, quite a bit of energy and ambition were directed toward acquiring wealth. But much of it was being acquired through systematic corruption on a grand scale. The epidemic of greed didn’t begin or end with Washington and the great captains of industry. It extended to the local level, perhaps most notoriously in New York, the seat of power of William Marcy Tweed (1823–78), the infamous “boss” of Tammany Hall. The word Tammany was a corruption of the name Tamanend, who was a Delaware Indian chief of the early colonial period said to be “endowed with wisdom, virtue, prudence, charity.” These were qualities in conspicuously short supply in the club named for the chief.

Tammany began as one of many fraternal societies that adopted Indian names in post-Revolution days. Unlike the Society of Cincinnatus, which was reserved for Washington’s officers, groups like Tammany were for the common soldier, and their political value soon became apparent to clever power brokers like Aaron Burr and Martin Van Buren. By the time of the Civil War, the clubs not only had political pull, but had become quite corrupt, serving as a conduit for government contracts to crooked suppliers who sold the Union shoddy blankets and maggot-ridden meat.

A mechanic by trade, Tweed rose to his greatest heights of power ostensibly as chief of the Department of Public Works in New York City. But that small title gave no sense of the grip he possessed on almost every facet of city life. As the leader of Tammany Hall, the New York City Democratic clubhouse, he built a simple but effective means of control. In exchange for the votes of the waves of immigrants, factory workers, disenchanted homesteaders returning to the city, and even their dead relatives, Tweed and his ring arranged small “favors”—a job, an insurance settlement. With these votes, Tweed could maneuver favorable bills through the New York legislature at will. Rich in electoral votes, New York also wielded immense political clout in presidential politics, and Tweed used this power as well. Fraudulent contracts, patronage in the highest offices, kickbacks, false vouchers—all the usual tools of corruption were raised to an art form by Tweed’s Tammany Club.

Tweed’s most notable opponent was the cartoonist Thomas Nast, who once received an offer of $500,000 from Tweed not to run a particular cartoon. Tweed could well afford the bribe; conservative estimates of his rape of New York’s treasury ran upwards of $30 million, derived from every deal in New York, from the building of the Brooklyn Bridge to the sale of the land for Central Park.

It was only when a Tweed associate felt shortchanged that Tweed got into trouble. In 1872, Samuel Tilden (1814–80), a reform Democrat and future governor of New York who later lost the White House in an election scandal that stripped him of the electoral votes he rightfully deserved, finally won a conviction of Tweed. Sentenced to twelve years in jail, the boss escaped to Cuba and then to Spain, only to be returned by Spanish authorities despite the lack of an extradition treaty between the two countries. While in jail, Tweed made a full and damning confession, expecting immunity. But he died in prison, the only member of the ring to be convicted.

Tammany’s shenanigans did not end with the breakup of the Tweed ring. Powerful “sachems” continued their hold on New York’s legislature into the twentieth century. When Theodore Roosevelt entered the New York State legislature in the 1880s, Tammany’s influence was still prevalent in state politics, and the club held the key votes that controlled almost all legislation.

One of the most colorful of Tammany’s sachems was George Washington Plunkitt, who once instructed a newspaper reporter on the distinction between “honest” and “dishonest” graft. “There’s an honest graft,” said Plunkitt, “and I’m an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin’: ‘I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.’ . . . I’m tipped off, say, that they are going to lay out a new park at a certain place. . . . I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can and then there is a rush to get my land. Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that’s honest graft.”

AMERICAN VOICES

HAMILTON S. WICKS, witness to the Great Oklahoma Land Rush (April 22, 1889):

On the morning of April 23, a city of 10,000 people, 500 houses, and innumerable tents existed where twelve hours before was nothing but a broad expanse of prairie. The new city changed its appearance every twenty-four hours, as day by day the work of construction went on. The tents were rapidly superseded by small frame structures, until at the end of a month there were scarcely any tents to be seen. The small frame structures in turn gave place to larger ones, and a number of fine two-story frame buildings were erected on the principal thoroughfares before the end of sixty days.

Wicks described the birth of the city of Guthrie, Oklahoma. Enid and Oklahoma City were also begun that day. The land rush was the result of the federal government opening up lands under the Homestead Act. Fifty thousand prospective settlers waited until noon of April 22 when the rush began and they could stake a claim to a homestead. Many other people had already jumped the gun—they would be called Sooners. The land had been opened up by confiscating territory from the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole) who had been relocated there during the removals earlier in the nineteenth century (see Chapter 3, “What Was the Trail of Tears?”). These Indians had made the unfortunate decision to side with the Confederacy during the Civil War.

What happened at Haymarket Square?

While the wealth piled higher in the houses of Morgan and Rockefeller, the working men and women of America fell deeper and deeper into poverty, victimized by the periodic depressions of the late nineteenth century. The forces of labor were slow to organize, confronted by the combined power of the businessmen and banks working in league with state and federal governments. Unions also had to contend with the natural difficulties of organizing workers who did not all speak the same language and were suspicious of one another. The Irish hated the Italians. The Germans hated the Irish. They all hated the Chinese. And, of course, blacks were beyond the pale to most white workers. The idea of integrated unions was unspeakable to white workingmen, most of whom were preoccupied with fighting for jobs rather than with obtaining decent wages and safer conditions.

But small gains had been made. In 1860, shoe workers in Lynn, Massachusetts, organized a strike on Washington’s Birthday. At their peak, the strikers numbered 10,000 workers marching through the city. While refusing to recognize the union, the factory owners conceded on wages, and it counted as the first real victory in American labor history.

It would be a long time before labor could claim another one. The post–Civil War period was littered with the bodies of strikers who were killed by strikebreakers, hired guards, or soldiers. Among those worst off were coal miners, who faced nightmarish dangers for pennies. In 1875, in Pennsylvania, a group of Irish coal miners organized as the Molly Maguires, taking their name from an Irish revolutionary organization. Infiltrated by an informer, the Molly Maguires were accused of violence, leading to the execution of nineteen members of the group.

Two years later, in 1877, there were massive railroad strikes spreading across the country, brought on by wage cuts imposed on workers already laboring twelve hours a day for low pay. By the time this wave of strikes was over, more than a hundred people had died and a thousand strikers were jailed. But the idea of organized labor had begun to take root, and the first generation of powerful national unions was emerging. The first was the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor, begun in 1869, which quickly acquired a large measure of political and negotiating power. In 1884, robber baron Jay Gould suffered the indignity of bargaining at the same table with the Knights, whose membership blossomed to more than 700,000. But the history of the Knights would end in smoking disaster.

In Chicago, in 1886, the Knights of Labor were involved in a strike to force an eight-hour workday. On May 3, 1886, strikebreakers at the McCormick Reaper Company were attacked by striking workers, and police fired on the crowd, killing six and wounding dozens more. The next day, several thousand people gathered at Haymarket Square to protest the police action. As the police arrived to break up the rally, a bomb was thrown into their midst, killing seven officers.

Although there was no real evidence, blame fell on anarchist labor leaders. Anarchists were those who believed in the replacement of government with free cooperation among individuals. Fears of anarchist cells in America’s cities incited a wave of panic across the country. Within months, several anarchist labor leaders were tried and quickly convicted. Some of them were hanged, and others received life sentences. (In 1893, three surviving anarchists still in prison were pardoned by German-born governor John Altgeld, who was convinced of their innocence but committed political suicide with the pardon.) Tarred with the anarchist brush after the Haymarket Square riot, the Knights of Labor were badly discredited. By 1890, their membership had fallen to 100,000.

Their place would be filled by two more powerful leaders, Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) and Samuel Gompers (1850–1924). Debs’s labor career began with work as a locomotive fireman—a dirty, dangerous job, as was almost all railroad work of the period. Thousands of workers were killed or maimed each year in accidents and boiler explosions. In the midst of another severe economic depression in 1893, Debs organized the militant American Railway Union, which absorbed remnants of the Knights of Labor and called for a strike in 1894 against the Pullman Car Company. Since Pullman cars were to be found on almost every train in the country, the strike soon became national in scope. The strike peaked when 60,000 railworkers went out, and the federal government, at the railways’ behest, stepped in. Attorney General Richard Olney, a former railroad lawyer, declared that the strike interfered with federal mails; the Supreme Court agreed, and President Grover Cleveland called out troops to suppress the strike. After a pitched battle in Chicago, in which strikers were killed, Debs was arrested and jailed for contempt of court. He later joined the Socialist Party and ran for president five times.

Cigarmaker Samuel Gompers played it far more safely. Making the sweatshops of the Lower East Side of New York his base, Gompers wasn’t interested in utopian dreams of improving society. Rather than organizing for political ends, Gompers stuck to “bread and butter” issues such as hours, wages, and safety, organizing the American Federation of Labor (AFL) as a collection of skilled craft unions. Presiding over the AFL almost continuously from 1886 to 1924, Gompers used the strike fiercely and effectively, winning eight-hour days, five- and six-day work weeks, employer liability, mine safety reforms, and, above all, maintaining the right of collective bargaining, a term that is accepted entirely today, but that reeked of Communism when it was introduced. The AFL’s effectiveness in working for laborers’ specific interests rather than for the broad social changes sought by anarchists or Socialists showed in its growth. With about 150,000 members in 1886, the union passed the million-member mark in 1901.

They were impressive gains, but they might have been larger. The federation had a great shortcoming, however, that hurt it morally and probably reduced its effectiveness in the long run. The AFL had hung out a sign that read “No Colored Need Apply.”

AMERICAN VOICES

SAMUEL GOMPERS (1894):

Year by year man’s liberties are trampled underfoot at the bidding of corporations and trusts, rights are invaded and law perverted. In all ages wherever a tyrant has shown himself he has always found some willing judge to clothe that tyranny in the robes of legality, and modern capitalism has proven no exception to the rule.

You may not know that the labor movement as represented by the trades unions, stands for right, stands for justice, for liberty. You may not imagine that the issuance of an injunction depriving men of a legal as well as a natural right to protect themselves, their wives, their little ones, must fail of its purpose. Repression or oppression never yet succeeded in crushing the truth or redressing a wrong.

Who were the Populists?

While organized labor inched painfully toward acceptance, the other people who suffered most from the economic upheavals of the period were the farmers. The millions of small farmers, principally in America’s West and South, were at the mercy of many forces besides the weather that they were unable to control: eastern banks controlled credit; manufacturing monopolies controlled the price of machinery; eastern railroad trusts set freight prices; depression wiped out land values and sent crop prices spiraling downward. With the population booming and mechanization increasing farm efficiency, it should have been a time of plenty. Instead, farmers were being squeezed tighter and tighter, forced to sell their lands at panic prices and move to factory jobs in the cities.

But a backlash set in, producing a wave of farm belt radicalism that swept the country. Locally it produced farmers’ organizations called Granges that gained sufficient political clout to press for reforms, although many of these, like the Interstate Commerce Commission, proved to be unloaded guns in the war against monopolies. In the South, for the first time since the end of the Civil War, poor blacks and working-class white farmers began to see that they shared common problems and interests, and the beginnings of an alliance of black and white farmers emerged. The farmers also reached out to join with city workers to form a powerful new alliance that could transform American politics.

Meeting in St. Louis in 1892, the Grangers and remnants of the Knights of Labor organized the People’s, or Populist, Party. In a national convention later that year, the Populists put together a platform calling for national ownership of railroads and telegraph and telephone systems, a system of keeping nonperishable crops off the market, and a graduated income tax. Their platform was an eloquent indictment of the times: “We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized. . . . The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced. . . . The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few. . . . From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.”

These weren’t the rantings of wild-eyed college kids who had just read Karl Marx. The Populists were working-class, backbone-of America types who had been pushed too far by the excesses of business in league with government. The men in power did not watch idly. In the South, Democrats undermined the Populist organizing effort by heightening racial fears. The mass of urban workers were never drawn to Populism, preferring to deal with the Democratic machines that they thought were defending their interests. In the election of 1892, in which Democrat Grover Cleveland recaptured the White House he’d lost four years earlier to Benjamin Harrison, the Populists finished a distant third. But the Populists still made strides as a third party, especially in the farm belt states, where they captured state legislatures, a governorship, and a substantial number of congressional seats in 1894. The two major parties realized that these farmers were a force to be reckoned with.

AMERICAN VOICES

Populist organizer MARY ELIZABETH LEASE (1890):

What you farmers need to do is raise less corn and more Hell!

What was the Cross of Gold?

During the next few years the real issues raised by the Populist Party were drowned in an obscure argument over currency. By 1895, the conflict over gold versus silver coins had absorbed all political debate in the country. “Free silver” became the new Populist rallying cry, a demand to return America to a standard using both silver and gold coins. To many Populists, this simplistic response to the depression brought about by a panic in 1893 seemed to be a cure-all. But it was a diversion that camouflaged the serious economic problems confronting the country, and it sapped much of the Populist Party’s energy.

President Cleveland was a staunch supporter of the gold standard. But when federal gold reserves fell to near-bankruptcy levels in 1896 and Cleveland had to turn to J. P. Morgan for a bailout, his political life was finished. Morgan and his associates turned around and sold off at an enormous profit the government bonds they had received, and Cleveland was seen as a Morgan puppet, which, in the public eye, was no different from being in league with the devil.

With Cleveland politically dead, some Democrats saw the Populist manifesto as a way to hold on to the White House. A young delegate-at-large from Nebraska, William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) spotted the political gold to be found in the “free silver” cry, and he seized the moment.

Addressing the Democrats’ 1896 nominating convention, the silver-tongued Bryan captured the audience of 20,000 with a speech regarded as the most thrilling and effective in party convention history. Raising the banner of silver against gold, western farmers against eastern business, Bryan said, “Burn down your cities and leave our farms and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”

With a great theatrical flourish, he concluded, “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns,” and extending his arms like Christ crucified, Bryan said, “You shall not crucify mankind on a Cross of Gold.”

The speech was met with wild acclaim, and the following day, Bryan—who was being subsidized by western silver and copper interests—was named the Democrats’ choice—at age thirty-six the youngest presidential nominee ever. With the Democrats chanting “Cross of Gold,” the Populist platform had been co-opted and the Populists were forced to throw their support behind Bryan. Populism was Jonah in the belly of the mainstream Democratic whale.

In the meantime, the guiding hand and pocketbook of the wealthy Ohio industrialist “kingmaker” Mark Hanna literally bought the Republican nomination for Ohio’s governor William McKinley (1843–1901). In a campaign thoroughly modern in its “packaging” of a candidate, the Hanna-led Republicans outspent the Democrats by $7 million to $300,000. McKinley’s election marked the triumph of eastern industrial interests over western farm interests. One of McKinley’s first acts in office was to kick Senator John Sherman up to the State Department, allowing Hanna to take Sherman’s Senate seat. Populism as an effective political third party was just about finished, joining the long list of American third parties that had burst into prominence, only to flicker and fade after a brief flash of brilliance.

What did “separate but equal” mean?

Homer Plessy was seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth black. But when he tried to sit in a railroad coach reserved for whites, that one-eighth was all that counted. Plessy was arrested, in accordance with an 1890 Louisiana law separating railroad coaches by race. Plessy fought his arrest all the way to the Supreme Court in 1896. Unfortunately, this was the same Supreme Court that had protected corporations as “persons” under the Fourteenth Amendment, ruled that companies controlling 98 percent of the sugar business weren’t monopolies, and jailed striking workers who were “restraining trade.”

In Plessy’s case, the arch-conservative, business-minded Court showed it was also racist in a decision that was every bit as indecent and unfair as the Dred Scott decision before the Civil War. The majority decision in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson established a new judicial idea in America—the concept of “separate but equal,” meaning states could legally segregate races in public accommodations, such as railroad cars and public schools. In his majority opinion, Justice Henry Brown wrote, “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”

The problem with this fine notion, of course, was that every facet of life in the South was increasingly separate—schools, dining areas, trains and later buses, drinking fountains, and lunch counters—but they were never equal.

The lone dissenter in this case, as in so many others during this period, was John Marshall Harlan (1833–1911) of Kentucky. In his eloquent dissent, Harlan wrote, “The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway, 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.

“. . . We boast of the freedom enjoyed by our people above all other peoples. But it is difficult to reconcile that boast with a state of the law which, practically, puts the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow-citizens, our equals before the law.”

In practical terms, the Supreme Court of this period had turned congressional Reconstruction upside down. Its perversion of the Fourteenth Amendment had been used to protect corporations instead of blacks. Plessy v. Ferguson had given the Court’s institutional stamp of approval to segregation. It would be another sixty years before another Supreme Court decision overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine.

Who was Jim Crow?

With the blessing of the Supreme Court, the floodgates opened. In the years following the Plessy decision, almost every former Confederate state enacted “separate but equal” laws that merely gave the force of law to what had become a fact of life—slavery under a new name. And to blacks and whites alike, the name was Jim Crow.

Like Uncle Tom of the minstrel shows that followed in the wake of Stowe’s momentous novel, the name Jim Crow came from a white man in blackface. According to historian Lerone Bennet Jr., a white entertainer named Thomas Dartmouth Rice wrote a song-and-dance tune that became an international hit in the 1830s.

Weel a-bout and turn a-bout

And do just so

Every time I weel about

I jump Jim Crow.

“By 1838,” writes Bennett, “Jim Crow was wedged into the language as a synonym for Negro.” And the image it conveyed was of a comic, jumping, stupid rag doll of a man.

Jim Crow railroad cars came first, creating the situation addressed in Plessy. Afterward came separate waiting rooms, factory entrances, and even factory windows. Eventually Jim Crow said that white nurses couldn’t tend black patients and vice versa. Black barbers couldn’t cut the hair of white women and children. Perhaps most damaging was the separation of education into white and black schools, a system in which white schools regularly received ten times the funding of black schools, and teaching was as segregated as the classrooms. Some states failed to provide blacks with high schools, a fact that carried over well into the twentieth century. In fact, there was no facet of life that was untouched by Jim Crow, even criminal life: in New Orleans, prostitution was segregated.

At the roots of Jim Crow were two fears. One was sexual—the fear, either primal or institutionalized, of black men having sexual contact with white women. In the words of one notable southern politician of the time, “Whenever the Constitution comes between me and the virtue of the white women of the South, I say to hell with the Constitution.”

The other fear combined politics and economics. When the Populist movement threatened to unite poor blacks and whites, the old elite white regimes in the South drove poor whites back into line with fear of black economic power. Voting fell back along strict racial lines. Ultimately, Jim Crow meant the end of black voting power in the South, as restrictive registration laws kept blacks away from the ballot boxes through poll taxes, literacy requirements, and a dozen other technical tricks.

Where laws failed to keep blacks in their place, another technique proved even more effective: the terror of lynching. Blacks were strung up throughout the South with impunity through much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often but not always on the pretext of the rape of a white woman. Lynchings of blacks became so commonplace that they were advertised in newspapers, providing a sort of spectator sport.

Out of this period stretching from the late nineteenth century to the recent past, the major black voice in America was one of accommodation. Booker T. Washington (1859–1915) was born a slave but was able to receive an education under congressional Reconstruction. Working as a janitor to pay his way through Hampton Normal and Agricultural School, he became a schoolteacher. He was clearly an impressive figure who could mesmerize a crowd, as Frederick Douglass had done a generation earlier. Almost single-handedly he built Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute from a shack beside a church into the major vocational training school for blacks in the country. In a sense, Washington was trying to adopt the rags-to-riches American dream for southern blacks, preaching the virtues of hard work and economic survival through education and advancement into the professions. Critics of Washington, both in his day and later, complained that his accommodation to and acceptance of the status quo was weak, even cowardly. Others have defended Washington as one man who was doing his best in a time of very limited options. After all, he lived in a time when a lynch mob needed no more excuse to hang a man than that he was “uppity.”

AMERICAN VOICES

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, “The Atlantic Compromise” (1895):

To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are. . . .”

The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest of folly.

Who fought in the Spanish-American War?

The racism expressed in Jim Crow didn’t end at southern, or even American, borders. The vigorous rise of a belief in white, Anglo-Saxon superiority extended overseas. One popular writer of 1885 was the clergyman Josiah Strong, who argued that the United States was the true center of Anglo-Saxon virtue and was destined to spread it over the world. “This powerful race,” wrote Strong in the best-selling book Our Country, “will move down upon Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond.” Then, borrowing from Charles Darwin, whose ideas were being floated around, Strong concluded, “Can any one doubt that the result of this competition of races will be the ‘survival of the fittest’?” Strong left no doubt as to who he thought the “fittest” was.

Strong’s message found a receptive audience in the corridors of American power, and a few years later the message went out in a war with Spain. This was America’s muscle-flexing war, a war that a young and cocky nation fought to shake off the cobwebs, pull itself out of the economic doldrums, and prove itself to a haughty Europe.

Watching England, Germany, France, and Belgium spread their global empires in Asia and Africa, America fought this war to expand and protect its trade markets overseas, capture valuable mineral deposits, and acquire land that was good for growing fruit, tobacco, and sugar. It was a war wanted by banks and brokers, steelmakers and oilmen, manufacturers and missionaries. It was a war that President McKinley didn’t seem to want, and a war that Spain certainly didn’t want. But there were a lot of powerful people who did want it. And, perhaps above all, it was a war the newspapers wanted. War, after all, was good for circulation.

The ostensible reason for going to war with Spain was to “liberate” Cuba, a Spanish colony. A fading world power, Spain was trying to maintain control over a native population that demanded its freedom, as America had demanded and won its independence a century earlier. When Spain sent a military governor to throw rebels into concentration camps, America acted the part of the outraged sympathizer. It was a convenient excuse. But an element of fear also played into the game. There was already one black republic in the Western Hemisphere, in Haiti. The United States didn’t want another one in Cuba.

Forces outside the government were matched by powerful men inside it who wanted war. Chief among them were Henry Cabot Lodge (1850–1924), the influential senator from Massachusetts; Theodore Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy, and Captain Alfred Mahan, author of a book called The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783, an influential work calling for expansion of American naval power to bases around the world, especially in the Pacific. Roosevelt, the great admirer of the cowboy spirit, once told a friend, “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.”

Lodge was an even more outspoken booster of American imperialism. When President Cleveland failed to annex Hawaii in 1893, Lodge lashed out angrily and spoke about his aims for America: “In the interests of our commerce and our fullest development, we should build the Nicaraguan canal, and for the protection of that canal and for the sake of our commercial supremacy in the Pacific we should control the Hawaiian Islands and maintain our influence in Samoa. . . . Commerce follows the flag, and we should build up a navy strong enough to give protection to Americans in every quarter of the globe.”

Pressing the war cries from the outside were the two most powerful newspaper czars in American history, William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951) and Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911). Both men had learned from the Civil War that war headlines sold newspapers. Tabloid headlines depicting Spanish atrocities against Cubans became commonplace, and the influential papers of both men were outdoing each other in the sensationalized screaming for war. The expansionist doctrine that had grown out of Manifest Destiny also sold newspapers, so the papers of both men were soon hawking war. When the artist Frederic Remington (1861–1909) went to Cuba to send back pictures for Hearst’s papers, he cabled his boss he couldn’t find a war. “You furnish the pictures,” Hearst supposedly responded in a fury. “I’ll furnish the war.” Whether apocryphal or not, the story is an accurate indication of how both Hearst and Pulitzer viewed the war—as a circulation boon—and they were not afraid of sensationalizing any accounts of Spanish atrocities to heighten the war fever.

Against the urgings of party and press, and of businessmen and missionaries calling for bringing Anglo-Saxon Christianity to the world, McKinley tried to avert war. But finally he found it easier to go with the flow. Through a series of diplomatic ultimatums, McKinley pushed Spain into a corner of a room and then closed the only window that would have provided escape. What Secretary of State John Hay would call a “splendid little war” lasted a few months. But like all wars, it carried a price in lives and perhaps in virtue.

MILESTONES IN THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR

1898

January 25 The U.S. battleship Maine arrives in Havana Harbor. Its stated purpose is to protect the interests of Americans who are being brutalized by the Spanish governor, according to reports in the tabloids.

February 9 A private letter by Spain’s ambassador to the United States is published in Hearst’s New York Journal in which President McKinley is characterized as feebleminded, provoking a wave of indignation, fanned by the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers.

February 15 The battleship Maine mysteriously explodes while anchored in Havana Harbor, resulting in the deaths of 260 crew members. The newspapers and war hawks soon trumpet, “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” as a battle cry. The source of the blast is said to be an external explosion. While the Americans claim the blast was caused by a mine in the harbor, Spanish authorities assert it was an internal explosion, perhaps in the heavily loaded ship’s magazine.

March 9 By unanimous vote, Congress appropriates $50 million “for national defense,” and the country moves toward a war footing.

March 27 President McKinley offers Spain several conditions to avert a war that is widely desired by the banking and military interests of the country. The conditions include negotiations with Cuban rebels, revocation of concentration camps, and U.S. arbitration to settle the rebel question in Cuba. While Spain seems to express willingness to negotiate and accept McKinley’s conditions, war hawks continue to apply pressure.

April 11 McKinley delivers a “war message.” Fearing peace will split his party, he ignores Spanish peace overtures as the call for war is pressed by the Hearst and Pulitzer papers, Henry Cabot Lodge in Congress, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt.

April 19 Congress adopts a war resolution calling for Cuban independence from Spain and evacuation of Spanish forces from the island. The measure asserts that the United States is uninterested in exerting control over the island, and the coming war is depicted as a war of “liberation” of a western colony from a European power, which will allegedly permit the Cubans to “determine their fate.”

April 20 To prevent the use of diplomatic channels to avoid a war, the Spanish ambassador’s passport is returned before he can deliver the U.S. ultimatum. A day later, Spain breaks off diplomatic relations with the United States.

April 22 Congress passes the Volunteer Army Act, which calls for organization of a First Volunteer Cavalry—a “cowboy cavalry” that the press will christen Rough Riders. Resigning his post as assistant secretary of the navy and chief instigator of war within the McKinley administration, Theodore Roosevelt takes a commission as lieutenant colonel of the brigade, which is commanded by Leonard Wood. Hundreds of applications for the Rough Riders come from all over the country, and Roosevelt will draw on Ivy Leaguers as well as cowboys. The U.S. Navy begins a blockade of Cuban ports, and a Spanish ship is captured in the first actual encounter of the war.

April 23 McKinley issues a call for 125,000 recruits.

April 24 Spain declares war on the United States.

April 25 The United States declares that a state of war exists as of April 21, the day Spain broke off diplomatic relations.

May 1 While Cuba is the focus of hostilities, the United States launches a surprise naval attack on the Philippines. Commodore (later Rear Admiral) Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron has been preparing for this attack for some time, at the secret order of Theodore Roosevelt. In a seven-hour battle outside Manila Bay, where the outdated and outgunned Spanish ships have maneuvered to avoid civilian casualties, the United States sinks all the Spanish ships, killing more than 300 Spanish, at a loss of no American ships and incurring only a few wounded. With a quick and easy victory under its belt, America’s hawkishness quickly explodes into outright war fever.

May 12 The United States bombards San Juan, Puerto Rico.

May 19 With American assistance, the Philippine guerrilla leader Aguinaldo arrives in Manila. At the same time, back in Cuba, the Spanish fleet moves into Santiago Harbor.

May 25 The first American troopships leave for Manila. McKinley calls for another 75,000 volunteers.

May 29 The American fleet blockades the Spanish fleet in Santiago Harbor.

June 10 A force of 647 marines lands at Guantanamo Bay, beginning the invasion of Cuba.

June 22 Nearly 20,000 American troops arrive at the fishing village of Daiquiri, eighteen miles east of Santiago.

June 24 Led by Joseph Wheeler, formerly of the Confederate cavalry—who occasionally lapses in battle and calls the Spanish Yankees—and Leonard Wood, 1,000 regular army and Rough Riders, accompanied by several war correspondents, win the first land battle of the war at Las Guasimas, Cuba. In his first action, Roosevelt is accompanied by two major war correspondents and is already being marked as a war hero.

July 1 The battles of El Caney and San Juan Hill. Against much smaller Spanish forces, Americans take heavy casualties in the major pitched battle of the war. An American balloon sent aloft to observe Spanish troop placements simply gives the Spanish gunners a perfect indication of American positions. More than 6,000 U.S. soldiers suffer 400 casualties at El Caney against a Spanish force of only 600. At San Juan Heights, confusion and delayed orders result in severe U.S. casualties as Spanish guns rake the waiting troops. Colonel Theodore Roosevelt finally takes the initiative, leading an assault first on Kettle Hill and a second charge on San Juan Heights. After successfully taking San Juan Heights, the American forces have command of Santiago below. But the American position is very weak. They are short of supplies, and casualties are heavy. Yellow fever and malaria have already begun to take their toll, as the Spanish defenders had expected. Roosevelt himself writes to Henry Cabot Lodge, “We are within measurable distance of a terrible military disaster.” After the Battle of San Juan Heights, 1,572 Americans are dead or wounded, but Roosevelt achieves instant war-hero status.

July 3 Against his own belief that he is risking certain defeat, Spanish admiral Cervera is ordered to break through the American blockade of Santiago Harbor. After the battle, the Spanish fleet is utterly destroyed. There is one American dead, another wounded.

July 4 In the Pacific, American troops take the deserted Wake Island.

July 8 Admiral Dewey takes Isla Grande near Manila.

July 10 With the destruction of the Spanish fleet guarding Santiago, U.S. troops launch a final attack on the city. By agreement with the Spanish command, there will be no resistance.

July 17 Santiago surrenders to American forces, and the U.S. flag is raised over the government building.

July 25 The town of Guánica in Puerto Rico is taken by U.S. troops.

July 26 Through the French ambassador, Spain requests peace terms. The “splendid little war” ends after three months of fighting. McKinley announces the following terms: independence is granted to Cuba; the United States takes control of Puerto Rico; the United States will occupy Manila until further negotiations.

August 9 McKinley’s terms are accepted by Spain, and a protocol of peace is signed.

What did America gain from the Spanish-American War?

There were 5,462 American deaths in the war, only 379 of which were battle casualties. Yellow fever, malaria, and other diseases were primarily responsible for most of them. Tainted meat sold to the army by the Armour Company may have led to some others. When Roosevelt and his men had opened tinned meat on the way to Cuba, they promptly tossed the putrid contents overboard.

In the aftermath of the war, several unexpected developments arose. America found itself not only in possession of Cuba and Puerto Rico as the island bases Henry Cabot Lodge hoped for, but in control of Wake Island, Guam, and the Philippines as well. President McKinley was somewhat uncertain about what should be done with them. His choices were to give them back to Spain, or to give them to France or Germany, which seemed foolish; to leave them alone seemed equally foolish. The best remedy was to keep them for America. With the annexation of Hawaii in 1898, America had in place its “stepping-stones” to a new Pacific empire.

The people in the Philippines had other ideas about whom they needed protection from. Emiliano Aguinaldo, the rebel leader brought back to the Philippines by Admiral Dewey, was no more interested in American rule than he had been in Spanish rule. What followed was a war more bloody than the one with Spain: the Philippine incursion. It carried with it all the earmarks of a modern imperial war: massive strikes against civilians, war atrocities, and a brutality that had been missing from American wars with Europeans. Fighting against the “brown” Filipinos removed all excuses for civility. The Philippines would be an unhappy “protectorate” in the American Pacific for years to come. Five thousand Americans died fighting the Filipinos.

The other development that came home from Cuba was a real, live war hero in Teddy Roosevelt. Unashamedly, he rode his Rough Rider fame into the statehouse of New York in 1898, where his reform-minded ideas unsettled fellow Republicans and the industries they represented. A number of Republicans felt it would be an eminently prudent idea to stash Teddy away in the vice president’s office, where he couldn’t do any harm. Senator Mark Hanna did not join in this thinking. The chairman of the Republican Party, Hanna commented, “Don’t any of you realize there’s only one life between this madman and the presidency?”

Roosevelt initially balked at the post, believing that the office was a political dead end. The bullet fired by anarchist Leon Czolgosz, which struck President McKinley in Buffalo in September 1901, changed all that. At age forty-two, Theodore Roosevelt became the youngest president in American history. In one of his first acts in office, he invited Booker T. Washington to the White House. It was an act that the South would never forgive or forget.

Who built the Panama Canal?

While America prepared for war in Cuba, the American battleship Oregon, stationed off the coast of California, was ordered to Cuba. Steaming around South America, the Oregon was followed in the press like the Kentucky Derby. The voyage took two months, and while the Oregon arrived in time to take part in the Battle of Santiago Harbor, it was clear that America needed a faster way to move its warships from ocean to ocean.

This wasn’t a new idea. The dream of connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific had been held almost since Balboa stood on the cliffs of Darien in modern Panama. President Grant sent a survey team to look for the best route to dig a canal across Central America, and an American company later built a small railroad line to take steamship passengers across the isthmus, drastically cutting travel time from coast to coast.

Plenty of other people saw the commercial as well as strategic advantages of this undertaking. In 1880, a French group led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, chief architect of the Suez Canal, put together a company with the capital of thousands of investors to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, then still a part of Colombia. In the growing macho mood of America’s leaders, President Hayes announced that no European country would control such a canal, saying, “The policy of the country is a canal under American control.”

Corruption on a grand scale, miserable engineering plans, the harsh realities of the Central American jungle with its rainy-season floods, earthquakes, yellow fever, and malaria doomed the de Lesseps effort. After some preliminary excavations and thousands of deaths by accident and disease, the French company abandoned its canal cut amid a national scandal and left everything behind, the rusted machinery looking like some mechanical dinosaurs fossilized in the dense jungle.

After the war in Cuba and the Oregon incident, the American appetite for a canal was reawakened. President McKinley authorized a commission to investigate the best route for the canal. When Roosevelt, the great apostle of American sea power, took the White House, the enthusiasm became that of a raging bull. Initially, Roosevelt tilted toward a Nicaraguan canal, a longer route but thought to be an easier dig. A Nicaraguan canal also offered the advantage of being closer to American ports on the Gulf of Mexico. An angry Senate debate followed, with Senator Mark Hanna leading the way for Panama. When the French company dropped the asking price for its assets from $109 million to $40 million, the Panama route became more attractive. Only one problem remained. The “dagos” in Colombia, in Roosevelt’s phrase, who still owned the territory, were asking too much.

The solution presented to Roosevelt was simple. If Colombia stood in the way, just make a new country that would be more agreeable. Led by a former director of the French canal company with U.S. Army assistance, Panamanians revolted against Colombia in November 1903. The American battleship Nashville steamed south and pointed its guns in Colombia’s direction, and Panama was born with the U.S. Navy for a midwife.

Recognized faster than any new government had ever been, Panama’s regime received $10 million, a yearly fee of $250,000, and guarantees of “independence.” In return the United States got rights to a ten-mile swath across the country—the Canal Zone—“in perpetuity.” Since the zone comprised most of Panama and would be guarded by American troops, the United States effectively controlled the country. Years afterward, Roosevelt would proudly say, “I took the Canal and let Congress debate.”

A few months later, Americans took over the remnants of the French project, and in 1904 the first Americans were in Panama. From day one, the work was plagued by the same problems the French met: tropical heat, the jungle, and the mosquitoes. One of the few positive results of America’s Cuban experience was the discovery that mosquitoes spread yellow fever, and the disease had been eliminated from Havana during the American occupation. But there were still plenty of people who thought the idea that mosquitoes carried disease was nonsense, and they kept U.S. Army doctor William Gorgas, the health officer in Panama, from carrying out a plan of effective mosquito control.

When railroad builder John Stevens came to Panama in 1905 as head of the project, to give the dig the organization it needed, he also gave Dr. Gorgas a free hand to eliminate malaria and yellow fever, a task accomplished with remarkable efficiency, given the circumstances of the environment and lack of scientific appreciation. Unfortunately, Jim Crow also came to Panama. Most of the laborers were blacks from the Caribbean. They were housed and fed separately, and paid in silver, while whites were paid in gold. According to David McCullough’s epic account of the creation of the canal, The Path Between the Seas, the death rate by accident and disease for blacks was about five times that of whites in Panama.

Without explanation, Stevens left the dig, replaced by army engineer George W. Goethals. Roosevelt put an army man in charge so he couldn’t quit as previous administrators had done in the face of the project’s overwhelming difficulties. Taking over in 1907 and building on the plan and reorganization left behind by Stevens, Goethals completed the canal ahead of schedule and under budget, despite the challenges the canal posed and the enormous changes the original plan had undergone as work proceeded. More remarkably, according to McCullough, it was completed without suspicion of corruption, graft, kickbacks, or bribery.

First planned under McKinley, aggressively begun by Roosevelt, and carried out by his successor, Taft, the Panama Canal was completed in 1914, under Woodrow Wilson. Ironically, the grand plans for a gala opening were canceled. War in Europe was looming, and news of the canal’s completion was lost in preparations for the coming hostilities.

Must Read: The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal by David McCullough.

AMERICAN VOICES

ORVILLE WRIGHT, describing the first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina (December 17, 1903):

The machine lifted from the truck just as it was entering on the fourth rail. Mr. Daniels took a picture just as it left the tracks. I found the control of front rudder quite difficult on account of its being balanced too near the center and thus had a tendency to turn itself when started so that the rudder was turned too far on one side and then too far on the other. As a result the machine would rise suddenly to about 10 ft. and then as suddenly, on turning the rudder, dart for the ground. A sudden dart when about 100 feet from the end of the tracks ended the flight. Time about 12 seconds (not known exactly as watch was not promptly stopped).

What happened at Kitty Hawk?

On December 17, 1903, two self-taught engineer-inventors named Wilbur and Orville Wright did something that other people had only dreamed of for centuries. In a 750-pound plane powered by a twelvehorsepower motor and launched from a railroad track laid in the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, they flew the first heavier-than-air craft. Surprisingly, their initial success didn’t cause much of a stir. Many people, including the members of the press, initially did not believe them. Even the U.S. Army was dubious and refused to offer the Wrights a contract for more than three years.

But their first flights launched a revolutionary era of aviation heroics. It is astonishing to think that those brief flights would lead to a moon landing only sixty-six years later, while also creating a huge industry in wheeled luggage and small bags of roasted nuts.

In September 1908, Orville Wright took the first passengers on a flight. One passenger, Thomas Selfridge, holds an unfortunate distinction. He was the first man to die in a plane crash from injuries suffered on September 17, 1908.

What was the “big stick”?

That he would start a revolution to suit his needs came as no surprise to anyone who knew Theodore Roosevelt. His record to that point—as cattle rancher, New York State legislator, civil service commissioner, New York City police commissioner, Navy secretary, soldier, governor of New York, and then president—had been to act forcefully and leave questions of law, propriety, and good sense for others. His favorite saying, used often in public and private, was an old African proverb: “Speak softly, and carry a big stick; you will go far.”

Although he rarely spoke softly himself, he was always ready to use a big stick, abroad and at home. His first chance to use the big stick came when 140,000 mine workers went on strike in May 1902. Underpaid, forced to buy overpriced supplies in company stores and to live in company-owned houses, the miners were kept in perpetual debt and had organized as the United Mine Workers (UMW) under John Mitchell. The mine companies, owned almost exclusively by the railroads (meaning, for the most part, J. P. Morgan), refused to recognize the union or to negotiate. As the work stoppage threatened to cripple an economy largely run on coal power, Roosevelt stepped in and threatened to use troops. But unlike in the past, when they had been used as deadly strikebreakers to force workers back into the mines, these troops would operate the mines in the “public interest.” With this “big stick” over their heads, the mine owners agreed to accept the ruling of an Arbitration Commission, which ruled favorably for the miners. The victory was more Roosevelt’s than the union’s, but it allowed the cowboy president to carve another notch on his six-shooter.

Using the strengthened Sherman law, Roosevelt went after other selected targets, subjectively labeled “bad trusts,” such as the “beef trust” (Swift & Co. v. United States, 1905) and the American Tobacco Company. Roosevelt was hardly a radical; he believed that monopoly was fine as long as it could be regulated, and that there were benevolent trusts, such as International Harvester. But his tenure produced reforms that were significant and long-lasting, such as the strengthening of the Interstate Commerce Commission, the creation of a cabinet-level Department of Labor and Commerce (later separated into two departments), and the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, a law inspired by a bunch of “muckrakers” (see below).

In foreign affairs, Roosevelt was even more willing to wield his big stick, especially in the Caribbean and the Philippines. In 1904, he sent troops into the Dominican Republic, which had reneged on debts to Great Britain. Roosevelt put Americans in charge of Dominican revenues until the debt problem was solved. This was an example of what was called the Roosevelt Corollary, which added to the Monroe Doctrine and said the United States had “international police power” to correct wrongs within its “sphere of influence.” Though effective, Roosevelt’s overbearing treatment of nations he viewed as racially inferior won America no friends in Latin America, which had been reduced to a collection of vassal states.

Ironically, in the wake of policing the Caribbean and overseeing the subjugation of the Philippines, Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize by mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Divvying up substantial chunks of Asia, the treaty may have created more trouble than it solved. Japan got Korea and guaranteed that it would leave its hands off the Philippines, now in the American “sphere of influence.” But the high-handedness of Roosevelt’s dealings left a bitter taste in Japanese mouths.

To prove to the Japanese that he meant business, Roosevelt sent forth the big stick in the form of the Great White Fleet. The result of a modernization and overhaul of the navy, this armada of sixteen ships cruised around the world in 1907, an impressive display of American naval power that also pointed up to the Navy its shortcomings in being too dependent on foreign supplies at sea.

Must Read: Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough; The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris; Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris.

Who were the muckrakers?

“Big stick” was only one of Roosevelt’s frequent expressions that became enshrined in the language. Among presidents, he had a singular ear for a turn of phrase. A voracious reader with an astonishing sense of recall, he could quote at will from a wide range of sources, from African proverbs to obscure military dissertations or, in another famous case, John Bunyan’s allegory Pilgrim’s Progress. In 1907, exasperated by the work of a growing number of journalists who concentrated on exposing graft and corruption, Roosevelt compared them to Bunyan’s “man with the Muck-Rake,” a character so preoccupied with the filth at his feet that he fails to grasp for the “celestial crown.”

The appellation “muckraker” stuck and was happily accepted by a new breed of American journalist best represented by Ida M. Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair. In newspapers, magazines such as McClure’s and Atlantic Monthly, and books—both nonfiction and fiction—a generation of writers had begun to attack the widespread abuses that abounded in American business and politics. In a sense, the trend began with Twain and Warner in The Gilded Age. But muckraking reached its heights in the early twentieth century. In 1903, McClure’s began to serialize the articles written by Ida M. Tarbell (1857–1944) about Standard Oil. The result was her landmark investigation of the company, History of Standard Oil Company. At the same time, McClure’s was running a series by Lincoln Steffens (1866–1936) about urban corruption, collected in the book The Shame of the Cities (1904). McClure’s also ran early portions of social reformer Jane Addams’s book Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910). Addams founded Hull-House with Ellen Gates Starr as a settlement house to assist immigrants in adjusting to American life, and more than four hundred of these sprang up in cities around America, inspired by Addams’s example. At first culturally high-minded, the settlement houses eventually provided basic educational and health care that could not be found elsewhere for hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the sprawling tenements of the inner cities. But Addams and her colleagues were fighting an impossible battle in an era when government assistance to the poor was considered blasphemous and communistic.

In New York, the plight of immigrants also emerged through the reports and photographs of Jacob Riis, himself an immigrant. In his 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, Riis exposed the crime, disease, and squalor of the urban slums.

A new generation of novelists was adapting these journalistic techniques to fiction as well: Stephen Crane in Maggie, a Girl of the Streets; William Dean Howells in The Rise of Silas Lapham; Frank Norris in The Octopus. Perhaps most famous of all was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a novel that blisteringly exposed the disgusting conditions in the meatpacking industry in Chicago. (Read the book even today, and you may swear off sausage!) Publication of The Jungle in 1906 cut American meat sales overnight and immediately forced the industry to accept federal meat inspection as well as passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. These were the first toddling steps in modern consumerism, and the muckrakers were the ancestors of consumer advocates such as Ralph Nader, unsparing critics of fraud, abuse, and industrial and political corruption.

AMERICAN VOICES

JANE ADDAMS, from Twenty Years at Hull-House:

Our very first Christmas at Hull-House, when we as yet knew nothing of child labor, a number of little girls refused the candy which was offered them as part of the Christmas good cheer, saying simply that they “worked in a candy factory and could not bear the sight of it.” We discovered that for six weeks they had worked from seven in the morning until nine at night, and they were exhausted as well as satiated. . . .

During the same winter three boys from a Hull-House club were injured at one machine in a neighboring factory for lack of a guard which would have cost but a few dollars. When the injury of one of these boys resulted in his death, we felt quite sure that the owners of the factory would share our horror and remorse. . . . To our surprise, they did nothing whatever, and I made my first acquaintance then with those pathetic documents signed by the parents of working children, that they will make no claim for damages resulting from “carelessness.”

Who were the Wobblies?

The Jungle was more than a muckraking novel. It was the most prominent example of a Socialist novel. Besides being a scathing exposé of meatpacking practices, the book was a call to workers to unite, ending with a utopian vision of a workers’ society. In fact, it had first been published in a Socialist newspaper, Appeal to Reason. Years of being associated with Soviet and Chinese Communism have permanently tarred socialism in the American mind as dangerous. But for a period in the early twentieth century it was a growing political force, especially among the working class, who saw it as a way to distribute wealth through government control rather than through private enterprise. Since few workers in America were getting any wealth distributed by the Morgans and Rockefellers, they decided to give socialism a try.

While the conservative, mainstream AFL stayed away from Socialist ideas, not wanting to be associated with the Bolshevism that was taking over Russia (where 10,000 American troops were involved in a secret war to prevent the Bolshevik revolution during World War I), another union sprang up and proudly unfurled the Socialist banner. It was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and its members became better known, for reasons historically unclear, as the Wobblies. Unlike the AFL, which was open only to white, skilled craftsmen, the Wobblies were organized to accept all workers into “one big union.” At their first meeting, in 1905, were “Big Bill” Haywood (1869–1928), a miner; Eugene V. Debs, leader of the Socialist Party; and Mary Harris “Mother” Jones (1830–1930), a seventy-five-year-old organizer for the United Mine Workers.

The Wobblies’ cause flared for about ten years, met with the full force of anti-union violence as its leaders were jailed, beaten, and, in the case of the legendary Joe Hill (1872?–1915), framed and executed, although he gained a sort of immortality in the song “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night.”

Under Debs, the Socialist Party attracted notable personalities, including Helen Keller, and managed to win as much as 6 percent of the presidential vote until the war intervened and in its wake the first powerful wave of anti-Communism swept the country, all but eradicating socialism as a force in American politics and life.

Who was W. E. B. DuBois?

One man who briefly joined the Socialists emerged from this period as the most eloquent and forceful voice for blacks since Frederick Douglass. In stark counterpoint to the accommodating spirit of Booker T. Washington (see p. 285), W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1963) became the trumpeter of a new spirit of “manly agitation.” The great civil rights upheaval in America was still half a century away, but DuBois was its John the Baptist, the voice in the wilderness. Born in Massachusetts, he was the first black to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard, in 1895. He taught, lectured, and wrote, his most notable work being the classic The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Rejecting Washington’s conservative restraint, DuBois joined in founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, at that time a white-dominated organization, and became editor of its journal, The Crisis, where he served for a quarter-century.

DuBois left the NAACP in 1934, when he promoted a more radical strategy and returned to teaching. Ten years later he rejoined the NAACP, and in 1945 was one of the Americans in attendance at the founding of the United Nations. DuBois later joined the Communist Party, left America, and renounced his citizenship, moving to Ghana, where he died.

Must Read: W. E. B. DuBois: A Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 by David Levering Lewis.

AMERICAN VOICES

W. E. B. DUBOIS,
from The Souls of Black Folk (1903):

So far as Mr. [Booker T.] Washington preaches thrift, patience, and industrial training for the masses, we must hold up his hands and strive with him, rejoicing in his honors and glorying in the strength of this Joshua called of God and of man to lead the headless host. But so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustices, North or South, does not rightly value the privileges and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds—so far as he, the South, or the nation, does this—we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them.

What was the Bull Moose Party?

Though he could have run for another term and probably would have won handily, given his popularity, Teddy Roosevelt accepted the unwritten rule observed since Washington (and unbroken until Teddy’s cousin Franklin D. came along). Having served out most of McKinley’s unfinished term and his own full term, Roosevelt left a handpicked successor in the White House in William Howard Taft (1857–1930). In 1908, with Roosevelt’s blessing and running on the Roosevelt record, Taft easily defeated the unsinkable William Jennings Bryan, who made his third unsuccessful bid for the White House. At the time, a common joke said the name Taft stood for “Take Advice From Teddy.”

Roosevelt decided that he would head off for an African safari to stay out of Taft’s way. But a year of bagging big game didn’t quench Teddy’s political hunting instincts. When he came back, he set about to recapture the Republican nomination from Taft, whose star could never shine as brilliantly as Roosevelt’s had. Pegged a conservative, Taft had actually brought more antitrust suits than Roosevelt had, including the one that broke up Standard Oil in 1911, and Teddy’s backers included a former Morgan banker. But this was to be an election fought to see who appeared most progressive. And it was Roosevelt who projected himself as the champion reformer. After a bloody battle in which Taft recaptured the Republican nomination, Roosevelt led a group of dissatisfied liberal Republicans out of the fold and into the Progressive Party. Claiming at one point that he was “as strong as a bull moose,” Roosevelt gave the party its popular name.

The Democrats struggled through forty-six ballots before turning to Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), then governor of New Jersey, a surprise choice, and, for his times at least, rather liberal. The Democratic Party solidified behind Wilson, especially in the South, where Roosevelt was never forgiven for welcoming Booker T. Washington to the White House. Taft essentially threw in the towel and stayed out of the campaign—later to head the Supreme Court, the job he really always wanted. In spite of an unsuccessful assassination attempt that seemed to confirm his invincibility, Roosevelt campaigned hard, and Wilson’s popular vote was less than the combined Taft-Roosevelt vote. (Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs polled 6 percent of the vote—nearly a million votes, and an indication that the political winds had clearly shifted to the left.) But Wilson’s electoral victory was sweeping. Taft won only two states and Roosevelt six. The rest of the country was solidly Democratic behind Wilson. And once again, a third-party candidacy had changed the course of American politics.

Like his opponents, Wilson ran on a progressive reform platform he called the New Freedom. During his first administration, his legislative success was quite remarkable. Duties on foreign goods, the almost sacred weapon held by big business to keep out foreign competition, were reduced for the first time since the Civil War. The Sixteenth Amendment, imposing an income tax, was ratified. The Seventeenth Amendment, providing for election of U.S. senators by popular direct vote, was ratified. (Previously, U.S. senators had been chosen by state legislatures.) And a Federal Reserve Act gave the country its first central bank since Andrew Jackson’s time. In other key reforms, the Federal Trade Commission was created and the Clayton Antitrust Act was passed; both were intended to control unfair and restrictive trade practices, exempting unions and farm groups.

The shame of Wilson’s “progressive” administration was his abysmal record on civil rights. Under Wilson, Jim Crow became the policy of the U.S. government, with segregated federal offices, and blacks losing some of the few government jobs they held. Virginia-born, Wilson was a product of the post–Civil War South, and he reflected that mentality to a remarkable extent for a man who seemed so forward-thinking in other respects. But his treatment of blacks was of little concern to a nation that was warily watching the approach of a European war.

Who was Pancho Villa?

Under Woodrow Wilson, America went from “big stick” to Big Brother when it came to Latin America. With the nearly completed Panama Canal to defend, Wilson was going to ensure that American power in the hemisphere would not be threatened. Local unrest in the Caribbean left American troops controlling Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. All were pushovers for American military might. Less simple to deal with was the instability in Mexico that produced Pancho Villa.

Mexico had undergone a series of coups and dictatorships in the early twentieth century, leaving General Victoriano Huerta installed as president in 1911 with the help of the American ambassador and the blessings of foreign investors who wanted only the stability that allowed them to exploit Mexico. But President Wilson refused to recognize Huerta’s government, throwing Mexico into more turbulence. Using as a pretext the arrest of some American sailors, Wilson sent the U.S. Navy to invade Vera Cruz in 1914, and Huerta soon abdicated. The door was opened for another general, Venustiano Carranza, and two of his “generals,” Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. An illiterate Indian, Zapata made some claims for social reform by giving land to the poor. Villa was simply a bandit who eventually rose against Carranza and seized Mexico City.

In an attempt to undermine Carranza, Villa began to attack the United States. He killed a dozen American passengers aboard a train in northern Mexico, and then began to make raids across the border into New Mexico, murdering a group of American mining engineers. An outraged Wilson sent General John J. Pershing (1860–1948) into Mexico in pursuit of Villa. But chasing the wily outlaw general was like trying to catch the wind. Villa led the American troops deeper into Mexican territory on a nine-month fox hunt that only served to alarm Carranza, raising tensions between America and Mexico.

With involvement in Europe’s war growing more likely, Wilson relented and recalled Pershing from Mexico in 1917. Within a few years, Villa, Zapata, and Carranza were all dead by assassination in the turbulent world of Mexican politics, a world that was being drawn in by the powerful pull of European war.

How did a dead archduke in Sarajevo start a world war?

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was in the city of Sarajevo (in modern Yugoslavia), then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A group of young student nationalists who wanted to join independent Serbia to Austria’s south plotted to kill the archduke. One of them, Gavrilo Princip, shot the archduke in his automobile. Within days, the Austrian Empire declared war on Serbia, Austria’s tiny neighbor to the south, claiming it was responsible for the assassination. Allied to Serbia, Russia mobilized its troops. Austria’s ally Germany responded by declaring war on Russia and its ally, France. Also bound by defense treaties, Great Britain declared war on Germany as German troops began an invasion of Belgium on their way to France.

Ferdinand’s death was merely the spark that ignited a short fuse that exploded into what was then called the Great War, and only later, at the time of the Second World War, became known as World War I. Another way to put it is that the assassination was a final piece in a Rube Goldberg contraption, a crazy scheme of interlocking parts that finally sent Europe reeling into a war that covered most of the globe.

On the eve of war, Europe was more in the nineteenth century than the twentieth. The German Empire had been consolidated into the continent’s leading power during the late nineteenth century by the Iron Chancellor Bismarck, and was linked to the Austrian Empire through aristocratic bloodlines and military alliance. Together they constituted the Central Powers in Europe and were also allied to the Ottoman Empire, which controlled much of the modern Middle East. The German Empire had been partly built at French expense after Germany won a war in 1870 that humiliated France and gave Germany the rich territories of Alsace and Lorraine. Resentment over this loss and surrender of French territory had never subsided between the two nations, and France, in the wake of its disastrous defeat at Germany’s hands, had rearmed heavily, reorganized its armies, and become an intensely militarized nation with plans to eventually retake the steel-producing region it considered its property.

Thrown into this simmering stew of alliances was the coming revolution in Russia. Czarist Russia was tied to England and France through mutual defense treaties and bloodlines (the king of England and the czar were relatives). The threat of a Socialist revolution pledged to destroy the monarchy on its eastern borders pressed on Kaiser Wilhelm, Germany’s autocratic young leader who had dismissed Bismarck as chancellor.

As tensions heightened, all these nations had armed heavily, producing a state of military readiness that did wonders for the armament industry, and the huge munitions makers of Europe happily kept the cauldron bubbling. International tension was good for profits. But whenever countries feel so well armed, they believe themselves invincible—and that was the case in the major European capitals. The urge to use such might acquires a life of its own. Fierce nationalism, visions of invincibility, complicated alliances, and antagonism from an earlier century were combining to suck Europe into a violent maelstrom. Again, as throughout history, personalities determined the course of events as much as did economics or border disputes. Cooler heads and gentlemanly diplomacy were lost to nineteenth-century ideals of honor and country in a new century in which people didn’t know how powerful their destructive powers had become. Perhaps the men raised in the nineteenth century on chivalrous, aristocratic ideals and wars still fought on horseback had no idea what havoc their twentieth-century arsenals could wreak. The world of sabers and cavalry charges was giving way to such inventions as mustard gas, U-boats, and the flamethrower (perfected by Germany), the tank (developed by the British), and a new generation of hand grenades and water-cooled machine guns. When these modern tools failed, the ancient bayonet would be the weapon of last resort. The carnage was unbelievable in battles that have become legend. Marne. Ypres. Gallipoli. Verdun. Argonne Forest. Soon these fields and plains sprouted forests of crosses.

The scenes of battle were played out for the most part in Europe, especially on the flat plains in Belgium and France, where the inhuman trench warfare would eat bodies as a flame consumes dry wood. But the real prize was elsewhere. The bottom line was that the nations of Europe were fighting over the course of empire. The spoils of victory in this Great War were Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Whatever the professed reasons for going to war, it was the material wealth—the gold and diamonds of South Africa, the metals and rubber of Africa, the rubber of Malaysia, the oil of the Mideast—that was at the heart of the conflict.

By the time the archduke lay dead in Sarajevo, the competition had long since commenced. Germany was a well-established power in Africa, as was Belgium. France’s empire extended into Indochina. England’s empire covered much of Asia, Africa, and the Far East. British armies had already been bloodied in the Boer War for control of South Africa and in the Crimean War for control of the Middle East, where England had also taken over the Suez Canal. Supreme on the oceans, England was now threatened by a German navy that was being built with only one conceivable purpose—to challenge that British supremacy for eventual control of the wealth of the empire. The leaders of Europe knew their own national resources were exhaustible. Power, even survival, in the new age of industry and mechanization would come from control of these resources in the colonial worlds. The dead might pile up at Verdun, Ypres, the Marne, and a dozen other storied battlefields, but to the victor would go the riches of other continents.

Who sank the Lusitania, and what difference did it make?

For generations of American schoolchildren, the reason America finally decided to enter the war in Europe was to protect the open seas from German raiders in their U-boats who were killing innocent Americans aboard passenger ships. The most notorious example of this practice was supposedly the sinking of the passenger ship Lusitania. The problem with this explanation is that it has little to do with the facts.

Secure in its control of two continents and holding on to sufficient bits of an empire in Asia and the Pacific, America was wary of involving itself in Europe’s war. Avoiding “entangling alliances” had been the underpinning of American foreign policy since the days of Washington and Jefferson. Neutralism and isolationism were powerful forces in America, where a good deal of the population was descended from the countries now at one another’s throats in the mud of France. Eight million German Americans had no desire to see America at war with Germany. Another 4.5 million Irish Americans held no love for Great Britain, then in the midst of tightening its grip on Ireland as the Irish Republican movement was reaching its peak.

Early in May 1915, the German embassy in Washington published advertisements in American papers warning Americans to avoid sailing on British ships in the Atlantic. On May 7, 1915, the Cunard liner Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland. In only eighteen minutes, the huge ship went down, taking with it almost 1,200 of its 1,959 passengers and crew. Among the dead were 128 Americans.

President Wilson resisted the indignant clamor for war that followed the sinking, and dealt with the Germans through a series of diplomatic notes demanding reparations and German disavowal of passenger ship attacks. William Jennings Bryan, the American secretary of state, thought even these notes were too severe a response, and resigned. Although the German government agreed to make reparations, it held to its claim that the Lusitania was carrying armaments and thus was a war vessel. The British denied this, but it was later revealed that the Lusitania carried 4,200 cases of ammunition and 1,250 shrapnel cases, which exploded when the torpedo struck, speeding the Lusitania’s demise.

While the sinking definitely increased tension between America and Germany, the incident had little to do with drawing America into the war. President Wilson continued to press his policies of neutrality while seeking to negotiate a settlement. He campaigned for reelection in 1916 under the Democratic slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.” It would be April 1917, almost two years after the sinking, before America entered the war, already in its closing stages. In February 1917, the Germans began unlimited submarine warfare against all merchant shipping, including American ships, and Wilson broke off diplomatic relations with Germany. The crucial change came with the revelation of the Zimmermann Telegram, which uncovered a German plot to start a war between Mexico and the United States. British agents turned over this information to America, and when German submarines began to attack U.S. ships without warning in March, enraged Americans demanded war.

The stated reasons for America’s involvement were freedom of the seas and the preservation of democracy. But neither side in this war had a monopoly on illegal naval warfare. Nor was the democratic ideology so powerful among America’s allies that Wilson thought he should fight to maintain it as far back as 1914.

In his favor, Wilson tried admirably to restrain both sides and mediate a peace. But as in almost every other war America has fought, powerful forces in industry, banking, and commerce cynically thought that war was healthy. And if the world was going to be divvied up after the fighting was over, America might as well get its fair share of the spoils.

MILESTONES IN WORLD WAR I

1914

June 28 The crown prince of Austria, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, is murdered in the city of Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip. Using the assassination as a pretext, the Austro-Hungarian government declares war on Serbia, its tiny southern neighbor, five days later. Russia begins to mobilize its troops in defense of Serbia.

August 1 Allied to Austria, Germany declares war on Russia. Two days later, Germany declares war on France.

August 4 Bound by mutual defense treaties, Great Britain declares war on Germany as German troops invade Belgium on the way to France.

August 5 The United States formally declares its neutrality and offers to mediate the growing conflict. In America, opinions are divided two ways: pro-Allies press for aid for England, France, and Belgium, who are depicted as victims of barbarous German aggression and atrocities; neutralists and pro-Germans—mostly German Americans—both want the United States to avoid taking sides. Pro-Allies form the Lafayette Escadrille to join the French air force, while other Americans join the British army and the French Foreign Legion or, like Ernest Hemingway, become ambulance drivers. Irish Americans denounce any assistance to Great Britain.

August 6 Germany’s Central Powers ally, Austria-Hungary, declares war on Russia.

August 23 Japan declares war on Germany.

September 5 The Battle of the Marne. In the first horrific battle of the war, with each side taking casualties of 500,000, a French-English repulse of the German invasion stalls Germany’s plan to quickly subdue continental Europe before Allied forces can fully mobilize. Instead, German forces fall back, beginning three years of devastating, stalemated trench warfare. The defeat also forces Germany to step up its U-boat (Unterseeboot) warfare to counter British naval superiority, which threatens to cut Germany off from essential war supplies. Although the German U-boats initially concentrate their attacks on warships, the submarines eventually turn to commercial and passenger shipping, a strategy that will ultimately give the United States its justification to join the Allied side.

1915

January 28 The William P. Frye, an American merchant ship carrying wheat to England, is torpedoed by a U-boat, the first such attack against American commercial shipping.

January 30 Colonel Edward M. House (1858–1938), a Texan who was responsible for Wilson’s nomination and is now the president’s most powerful adviser, sails to Europe to attempt to mediate a peace agreement. Each side feels that a quick victory is possible, and all parties decline to negotiate.

February 4 Germany declares the waters around the British Isles a war zone, threatening all shipping that approaches England.

May 1 The American tanker Gulflight is sunk by a German U-boat. Germany apologizes, but the ocean war is escalating as the British call for a blockade of all German ports, despite President Wilson’s protest.

May 7 The British ocean liner Lusitania is sunk by a U-boat. Germany claims—reliably, it turns out—that the liner carried munitions; the British deny this. Nearly 1,200 of the 1,959 passengers aboard die; 128 of them are Americans who had disregarded the warnings published by Germany in American newspapers to avoid passage on vessels carrying wartime cargoes. A diplomatic crisis follows, as Germany refuses to pay reparations or disavow the attack. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, a pacifist, resigns in protest over what he deems a tilt toward England in Wilson’s reaction to the Lusitania’s sinking. In a series of notes to Germany, Wilson warns against infringement of American rights. Although the sinking of the Lusitania has come down in history as one of the reasons the U.S. joined the war, the actual impact of the sinking was slight, and it would be almost two full years before America committed itself to war.

July 2 A German professor at Cornell University explodes a bomb in the U.S. Senate and shoots J. P. Morgan the next day. The captured professor commits suicide. A few days later, the head of German propaganda in the United States leaves on a New York subway train a suitcase filled with information about the existence of a German spy ring. It is found by the Secret Service and released to the press, further arousing anti-German sentiment.

July 25 The American merchant ship Leelanaw, carrying flax, is sunk off the coast of Scotland by a U-boat.

August 10 General Leonard Wood of Rough Riders fame establishes the first of several private military camps that will train 16,000 “unofficial” soldiers by 1916.

November 7 Twenty-seven Americans die in an Austrian submarine attack on the Italian liner Ancona.

December 7 President Wilson requests a standing army of 142,000 and reserves of 400,000.

1916

January 7 Responding to American pressure, Germany pledges to abide by international rules of naval warfare.

February 2 A congressional resolution warns Americans to avoid travel on ships owned by the warring nations. In response, President Wilson declares that American rights must be protected.

March 15 The Army Reorganization Act is passed by Congress. Under this measure, the army will be brought to a strength of 175,000 and the National Guard to 450,000 by the end of June.

March 24 Three more Americans die when a French ship is torpedoed in the English Channel, and public sympathies turn increasingly in favor of the Allied cause and against Germany.

April 20 The Easter Uprising begins. Organized with German assistance, the Irish rebellion is supposed to create a diversionary revolution in Ireland to distract Great Britain from the war in Europe. On Good Friday, April 21, both a German ship delivering arms to Ireland and a German U-boat carrying Sir Roger Casement to lead the uprising are captured by the British, who have discovered the plan through their intelligence reports. On Easter Monday, April 24, the Citizens’ Army strikes in Dublin without Casement’s leadership or the expected weapons, and takes over several buildings. A few days later, British troops recapture Dublin and put down the rebellion. Casement is quickly tried and hanged, as are fifteen of the rebels from Dublin. Seen as harsh “tyranny,” the executions are a severe blow to British prestige in America, while the German complicity is overlooked. American sentiment for England falls to its wartime low.

June 16 Wilson is renominated by the Democrats under the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” all the while preparing the nation for entrance into the war on the Allied side. Running on a platform of “Peace and Preparedness,” he is nearly defeated by Charles Evans Hughes, a Supreme Court justice and former governor of New York who has the bellicose Teddy Roosevelt’s still-influential support. It takes a week after Election Day to confirm that Wilson has carried California, where Hughes inadvertently snubbed the popular Republican governor, who then failed to campaign for him; this gaffe may have cost Hughes the state and the White House. By a thin popular and electoral margin, Wilson wins a second term. The East is solidly Republican, but the Democrat Wilson keeps the South and West. As a referendum on war policy, the election makes it clear that Americans want to stay out of the conflict. A few weeks after the election, Wilson asks the warring powers for their conditions for peace.

1917

January 22 In a speech to Congress, Wilson calls for a league of peace, an organization to promote the resolution of conflicts. But neither side is willing to agree to negotiations while holding on to the prospect of victory.

January 31 Having rapidly built its submarine fleet to over one hundred boats, Germany resumes unrestricted submarine warfare, believing it can starve the Allies into submission in six months.

February 3 Citing the German decision, Wilson breaks diplomatic relations with Germany.

February 24 In what will become known as the Zimmermann Telegram incident, the British Secret Service intercepted a telegram from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann to the German ambassador in Mexico, attempting to incite Mexico to join Germany’s side in the event of war with the United States. In return, Germany promises to help Mexico recover Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The British have held the note until an appropriate moment when its revelations will presumably push Wilson over the brink of his wavering neutrality and into war. After the telegram is released, there is an angry public outcry over what is considered German treachery.

February 26 After asking Congress for permission to arm merchant ships, Wilson is told by his attorney general that he has that power. He issues the directive on March 9.

March 15 The Czar of Russia is forced to abdicate after the Russian Revolution. The U.S. government recognizes the new government formed by Aleksandr Kerensky.

March 12–21 Five more American ships are sunk, all without warning.

April 2 Wilson asks Congress to declare war on Germany.

AMERICAN VOICES

WILSON’S war request to Congress:

It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free people as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at least free.

Wilson’s speech was met with wild applause, and Congress overwhelmingly approved war a few days later. After delivering the speech, Wilson told an aide, “My message today was a message of death for our young men. How strange it seems to applaud that.”

One of the only dissenting voices in Congress is that of Nebraska Senator George W. Norris, who speaks against the declaration of war, voicing the view of the war’s opponents that it is a fight for profits rather than for principles. Quoting from a letter written by a member of the New York Stock Exchange favoring the war and the bull market it would produce, Norris denounces the Wall Street view:

Here we have the man representing the class of people who will be made prosperous should we become entangled in the present war, who have already made millions of dollars, and who will make many hundreds of millions more if we get into the war. Here we have the cold-blooded proposition that war brings prosperity. . . . Wall Street . . . see[s] only dollars coming to them through the handling of stocks and bonds that will be necessary in case of war.

Their object in having war and in preparing for war is to make money. Human suffering and sacrifice of human life are necessary, but Wall Street considers only the dollars and the cents. . . . The stock brokers would not, of course, go to war. . . . They will be concealed in their palatial offices on Wall Street, sitting behind mahogany desks.

May 18 The Selective Service Act is passed, authorizing the registration and drafting of males between the ages of twenty-one and thirty. (The Supreme Court upholds the government’s right of conscription in January 1918 under the constitutional power to declare war and raise and support armies.) General John J. Pershing will lead the first contingent of Americans, the American Expeditionary Force, to France on June 24. The Rainbow Division, under Colonel Douglas MacArthur, will reach Europe on November 30.

June The Espionage Act is passed by Congress, ostensibly to prevent spying. However, it is used chiefly to silence American critics of the war. A year after its passage, Eugene Debs, the Socialist leader and presidential candidate, is arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison for making a speech that “obstructed recruiting.” Debs actually ran for president again in 1920 from prison, and was eventually pardoned by President Harding after serving thirty-two months.

July 4 The first military training field for airmen opens. At the outset of war the army has fifty-five planes; by war’s end there were nearly 17,000 planes in service.

November 6 The Kerensky government is overthrown by the Bolsheviks, who make peace with Germany in March 1918. The United States denies recognition of the new government.

December 7 The United States declares war on Austria-Hungary.

1918

January 8 Wilson’s Fourteen Points for Peace speech. The speech outlines a generous and liberal attempt to settle the war. The last of the points states, “A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” (This point will form the nucleus of the League of Nations.) Allied reaction is tepid. French prime minister Clemenceau says the Fourteen Points “bore him,” and adds, “Even Almighty God has only ten.”

March 21 Attempting a final concentrated assault before U.S. forces are fully involved, German troops mass for an offensive on the western front. Their eastern front is safe after the November treaty with the Bolsheviks and the collapse of the Italian forces. After an initial thrust, the Germans force the Allied lines back forty miles.

April 14 Named commander of Allied forces, French General Ferdinand Foch pleads for more troops, and 313,000 soldiers arrive by July.

June 25 After two weeks of fighting, a U.S. Marine brigade captures Belleau Wood. Casualties are nearly 9,500, more than half the brigade’s entire strength.

July 17 The Allies halt the German drive in the second Battle of the Marne. A German offensive is repulsed, and an Allied counteroffensive at Soissons turns the tide.

August Ten thousand American troops join in a Japanese invasion of Russian territory, occupying Vladivostok and some of Siberia. American troops become involved in the internal fighting as they join “White Russians” in the fighting against the Bolsheviks, and more than 500 Americans die fighting in Russia.

August 10 General Pershing establishes an independent American army with Allied permission. Colonel George C. Marshall is made operations officer.

September 14 American forces under Pershing take the salient at Saint-Mihiel.

September 26 More than 1 million Allied troops, including 896,000 Americans, join for an offensive in the last major battle of the war. Casualties reach 120,000. At the same time, British forces farther north crack the German line of defense, the Hindenburg Line.

October 3 Germany forms a parliamentary government as the army collapses and the navy revolts. The kaiser abdicates, and Germany begins peace overtures based on Wilson’s Fourteen Points.

October 30 Austria asks Italy for an armistice and surrenders on November 4.

November 11 Germany signs an armistice treaty at 5 A.M., and six hours later, at the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,” fighting ends. (For years, the day would be honored in America as Armistice Day, but in 1954 it was changed to Veterans Day, a federal holiday honoring all Americans who have fought or served in defense of the United States.)

1919

June 28 The Treaty of Versailles is signed, under which Germany is required to admit guilt, return the rich Alsace-Lorraine region to France, surrender its overseas colonies, and pay reparations that total $32 billion—reparations that won’t be collected. (Germany spent more than $100 billion to finance the war.) Under the treaty, German rearmament is strictly limited, and the Allies take temporary control of the German economy. The League of Nations is accepted by all signatories, but a Republican-controlled U.S. Senate, left out of the treaty negotiations by Wilson, refuses to ratify the treaty. Without American participation, the League of Nations is doomed to pointlessness.

September 25 On a cross-country tour to promote popular support for the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, President Wilson suffers a stroke in Colorado. Only a few insiders are allowed to see him, including Wilson’s wife, Edith (who literally makes presidential decisions during his recovery), his doctor, his secretary, and Bernard Baruch. Wilson should have turned over the reins of government to his vice president, but doesn’t. By November 1, he is sufficiently recovered to appear in control once more. During his absence, the Senate has hardened against the treaty and refuses to ratify it.

What was the cost of World War I?

The cost of the “war to end all wars” was nightmarish. Some 10 million died on the battlefields of Europe. Almost an entire generation of young men was decimated in Russia and France. The Russian combat death toll was 1,700,000; 1,357,000 French soldiers died, and 908,000 British. On the Central Powers side, German dead numbered 1,800,000; Austrians 1,200,000; and 325,000 Turks died in combat. Those were the dead fighters—another 20 million people died of disease, hunger, and other war-related causes. Six million more were left crippled. American losses for its short-term involvement in the war were 130,174 dead and missing and more than 200,000 wounded. The American wartime bill totaled around $32 billion.

Given these losses, the Allies were not in a forgiving mood, and the Versailles Treaty showed that they expected Germany to pay for the war that everyone had helped to start. But far more dangerous than the impossible economic terms demanded of Germany, Austria, and Turkey under the postwar settlements was the reshaping of the world map. Hungary, once part of a huge empire, lost two-thirds of its lands and was reduced to fewer than 8 million people. The independent states of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, with a corridor to the Baltic, were arbitrarily carved out of former Austro-Hungarian and German territory. Almost 3 million Austro-Germans were incorporated into Czechoslovakia. They were known as Sudeten Germans, and that name would loom large a few years later when a rebuilt Germany decided to annex the Sudetenland. The other half of the former empire became tiny Austria. And in 1939, it, too, would become part of the rationale for Germany’s aggression.

The lands of the Middle East that had been the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) were split among the winners, leaving Turkey a small, impoverished state. The Balkan peninsula, part of the Ottoman Empire, was divided into a handful of new states, including Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The British took Palestine, Jordan, and oil-rich Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). France won Lebanon and Syria. A young Vietnamese who had been living and studying in Paris attempted to get independent status for his country. When the French balked, Ho Chi Minh, as he was later known, went to Moscow to study the revolutionary techniques that he would later use to wrest Vietnam away from the French and American armies. The German possessions in Africa were similarly divided among the victors under a League of Nations “mandate” that simply transferred control of these African lands to new colonial powers.

In all these postwar dealings, the seeds were being sown for the next war in Europe as well as generations of deadly division in the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Indochina.

AMERICAN VOICES

HELEN KELLER, in a letter to Eugene V. Debs, whom she addressed as “Dear Comrade” (March 11, 1919):

I write because I want you to know that I should be proud if the Supreme Court convicted me of abhorring war, and doing all in my power to oppose it. When I think of the millions who have suffered in all the wicked wars of the past, I am shaken with the anguish of a great impatience. I want to fling myself against all brute powers that destroy the life, and break the spirit of man.

What most people know of Helen Keller (1880–1968) comes from the play and film The Miracle Worker, which tell the remarkable story of the relationship between Helen Keller, who became blind and deaf at the age of two, and her teacher Anne Sullivan. That story stops with Keller’s triumph in learning to sign. With Sullivan as her companion, Keller went on to Radcliffe, then Harvard’s female counterpart, from which she graduated in 1904 with honors. Born into a conservative Alabama family, Keller eventually became both an outspoken feminist and a pacifist. In 1909, she joined the Socialist Party and became friends with party leader Eugene V. Debs, who was imprisoned for expressing his antiwar views at the time Keller’s letter was written.