• The period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the twentieth century was an era noted for the widening social and economic gap between the powerful and the powerless, the haves and have-nots. It was sardonically labeled the Gilded Age for its greed and vulgarity, marked by conspicuous consumption by the newly rich as they flaunted their enormous personal wealth.

Urban America

• The United States became a nation dominated by rapidly growing cities. Millions of European and Asian immigrants, as well as migrants from America’s rural areas, streamed into cities, attracted by the plentiful jobs and excitements they offered. The growth of cities brought an array of problems, among them widespread poverty, unsanitary living conditions, and new forms of political corruption. Even more challenging was the development of neighborhoods divided by racial and ethnic background as well as social class.

Political Culture

• Political life during the Gilded Age was shaped by three main factors: the balance of power between Democrats and Republicans, the high level of public participation in everyday politics, and the often corrupt alliance between business and political leaders at all levels of government. While industrialists and large commercial farmers prospered, small farmers struggled with falling crop prices, growing indebtedness to banks and railroads, and what they considered big-city greed and exploitation. The election of 1896 symbolized the central conflict of the Gilded Age: the clashing cultural and economic values of two Americas, one older, small-scale, and rural, the other newer, large-scale, and urban.

America’s Move to Town

• People from rural areas were attracted by the jobs and excitements of city life. Many had been pushed off the land by new agricultural machinery that sharply reduced the need for farmworkers. Immigrants especially congregated in the cities along the Atlantic and Pacific coast where they arrived on ships from Europe or Asia. More and more of these city dwellers had little or no money and nothing but their labor to sell. Most people in NYs densely populated borough-Manhatten lived in rented houses or in congested, low-cost buildings called tenements, where residents, many of them immigrants, were packed like sardines in poorly ventilated and poorly lit apartments.

Growth in All Directions

• Several advances in technology helped city buildings handle the surging populations. In 1889, the Otis Elevator Company installed the first electric elevator, which made it possible to construct much taller buildings. During the 1880s, engineers also developed cast-iron and steel-frame construction techniques that allowed for taller structures—“skyscrapers.” Cities grew out as well as up, as horse-drawn streetcars and commuter railways let people live farther away from their downtown workplaces. In 1873, San Francisco became the first city to use cable cars that clamped onto a moving underground cable driven by a central power source. The commuter trains and trolleys allowed a growing middle class of business executives and professionals (accountants, doctors, engineers, sales clerks, teachers, store managers, and attorneys) to retreat from crowded downtowns to quieter, tree-lined “streetcar suburbs.”

Crowds, Dirt, and Disease

• Such urban growth frequently occurred with little planning or regulation. Rapidly expanding cities often suffered from poor housing, unhealthy living conditions, and frequent infectious diseases and fires. Late nineteenth-century cities were dirty, smelly, and disease-ridden. The child-mortality rate in many tenements was as high as 40 percent. Streets were filled with contaminated water, horse urine and manure, and roaming pigs. Garbage and raw sewage were carelessly dumped into streets and waterways, causing epidemics of infectious diseases such as cholera, typhoid fever, and yellow fever. So-called sanitary reformers—public health officials and engineers— eventually created regulations requiring more space per resident as well as more windows and plumbing facilities.

The New Immigration - A Surge of Newcomers from Europe

• The so-called “old immigrants” who came before 1880 were mainly Protestants and Roman Catholics from northern and western Europe. This pattern began to change, however, as the proportion of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, especially Russia, Poland, Greece, and Italy, rose sharply. After 1890, these “new immigrants” made up a clear majority of the newcomers. Their languages and cultural backgrounds were markedly different from those of most old immigrants or of most native-born Americans. Immigrants were usually desperately poor and needed to find jobs—quickly. Many were greeted at the docks by family and friends, others were met by representatives of immigrant-aid societies or by company agents offering low-paying and often dangerous jobs in mines, mills, sweatshops, and on railroads. Since most immigrants knew little if any English and nothing about American employment practices, they were easy targets for exploitation. Companies eager for workers gave immigrants train tickets to inland cities such as Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. As strangers in America, most immigrants naturally wanted to live in neighborhoods populated by people from their homeland. The largest cities had vibrant immigrant districts with names such as Little Italy, Little Hungary, and Chinatown, where immigrants practiced their native religions and customs and spoke and read newspapers in their native languages.

The Nativist Response

• Many “nativists” were racists who believed that “Anglo-Saxon” Americans—people of British or Germanic background—were superior to the Slavic, Italian, Greek, and Jewish newcomers. Many were illiterate, but others only appeared so because they could not speak or read English. Some resorted to crime to survive, fueling suspicions that European nations were sending their criminals to America. Throughout American history, Congress has passed laws regulating immigration; largely, these statutes have been inconsistent in their goals and frequently motivated by racial and ethnic prejudice. In 1882, anti-Chinese sentiment in Congress prompted the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law to restrict the immigration of free people on the basis of race and class. The act, which barred unskilled Chinese laborers from entering the country for ten years, was periodically renewed before being extended indefinitely in 1902. Not until 1943 were barriers to Chinese immigration finally removed. The Chinese were not the only group targeted. In 1887, Protestant activists in Iowa formed the American Protective Association (APA), a secret organization whose members pledged never to employ or vote for a Roman Catholic. Three presidents vetoed bills banning illiterate immigrants: Grover Cleveland in 1897, William H. Taft in 1913, and Woodrow Wilson in 1915 and 1917. The last time, however, Congress overrode the veto, and the restriction of illiterate immigrants became law.

Cultural Life

• By the end of the century, sports of all kinds had become a major part of popular culture. Although only men could vote in most states, both men and women flocked to hear candidates speak at political meetings. In the largest cities, membership in a political party offered many social benefits

Saloons

• Still, the most popular leisure destinations for the urban working class were saloons, beer gardens, and dance halls. Saloons were the workingman’s social club and were especially popular among male immigrants seeking companionship in a strange land. Politics was often the topic of intense discussions in saloons.

Leisure for Women

• Married working-class women had even less leisure time than working-class men. Many were working for pay themselves, and even those who were not were frequently overwhelmed by housework and child-rearing responsibilities. Married working-class women often used the streets as their public space. Washing clothes, supervising children at play, or shopping at the local market provided opportunities for socializing. Single women, many of whom worked as domestic servants (“maids”) and had more leisure time than working mothers, flocked to dance halls, theaters, amusement parks, and picnic grounds.

The Impact of Darwinism

• Darwin showed how the chance processes of evolution give energy and unity to life. At the center of his concept was what Darwin called “natural selection.” Darwin’s theory of biological evolution was shocking because most people still embraced a literal interpretation of the biblical creation story, which claimed that all species were created at the same moment by God and remained the same thereafter.

Social Darwinism

• Although Darwin’s theory of evolution applied only to biological phenomena, many applied it to human society. Englishman Herbert Spencer, a leading social philosopher, was the first major prophet of what came to be called social Darwinism. Spencer argued that human society and its institutions, like the organisms studied by Darwin, evolved through the same process of natural selection. The “survival of the fittest,” in Spencer’s chilling phrase, was the engine of social progress. By encouraging people, ideas, and nations to compete with one another for dominance, society would generate “the greatest perfection and the most complete happiness.” Darwin dismissed Spencer’s social theories as “unconvincing.” He claimed that in the United States, Darwinism really meant Spencerism. Social Darwinism implied the need for hands-off, laissez-faire government policies; it argued against the regulation of business or of required minimum standards for sanitation and housing. To Spencer, the only acceptable charity was voluntary, and even that was of dubious value. In 1872, Spencer’s chief academic disciple, William Graham Sumner, began teaching at Yale University, where he preached the gospel of natural selection. Sumner’s most lasting contribution, made in his book Folkways (1907), was to argue that it would be a mistake for the government to try to promote equality since doing so would interfere with the “survival of the fittest.”

Reform Darwinism

• Sumner’s efforts to use Darwinism to promote “rugged individualism” and oppose government regulation of business prompted an alternative use of Darwinism in the context of human society. What came to be called reform Darwinism found its major advocate in Lester Frank Ward, a government employee who fought his way up from poverty and never lost his empathy for the underdog. Ward’s Dynamic Sociology (1883) singled out one aspect of evolution that both Darwin and Spencer had neglected: the human brain. It focused on collaboration rather than competition. Government, in Ward’s view, should pursue two main goals: alleviating poverty, which impeded the development of the mind and promoting the education of the masses. Reform Darwinism was a pillar of the progressive movement.

Realism in Literature and Art

• Before the Civil War, Romanticism had dominated American literature and painting. Romantics such as the transcendentalists in New England believed that fundamental truths rested in the unseen world of ideas and spirit. During the second half of the nineteenth century, however, a new generation calling themselves “realists” began to challenge the Romantic tradition. A writer in Putnam’s Monthly noted in 1854 a growing emphasis on “the real and the practical.” This emphasis on “realism” matured into a full-fledged cultural force, as more and more writers and artists focused on depicting the actual aspects of urban-industrial America: scientific research and technology, factories and railroads, cities and immigrants, labor unions, and social tensions. The worship of money was the most common theme in realistic novels and short stories during the Gilded Age. In William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Bromfield Corey announces that money “is the romance, the poetry of our age.” Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), declares that she “must have a great deal of money” to be happy.

Gilded Age Politics

• The real movers and shakers of the Gilded Age were not the men in the White House or Congress but the owners of giant corporations. These “captains of industry” regularly used their wealth to “buy” elections and favors at all levels of government.

Local Politics and Party Loyalties

• Perhaps the most important feature of Gilded Age politics was its local focus. Most political activities occurred at the state and local levels. Unlike today, the federal government was an insignificant force in the daily lives of most citizens. Americans during the Gilded Age were intensely loyal to their political party, which they joined as much for the fellowship and networking connections as for its positions on issues. Unlike today, party members paid dues to join, and party leaders regularly demanded large campaign contributions from the captains of industry and finance. Collis Huntington, a California railroad tycoon, admitted that bribery in the form of campaign contributions was expected. In cities crowded with new immigrant voters, politics was usually controlled by “rings”—small groups who shaped policy and managed the nomination and election of candidates. Each ring typically had a powerful “boss” who used his “machine”—a network of neighborhood activists and officials—to govern. The party in power expected the government employees it appointed to become campaign workers and to do the bidding of party bosses.The jobs given to party loyalists covered a wide range, from cabinet posts to courthouse clerk positions. The largest single source of political jobs was the postal service, which accounted for half of all federal civilian employees. Those who were awarded government jobs were expected to contribute a percentage of their salary to the political party. The corruption associated with the patronage system eventually drew criticism from “civil service reformers,” who pushed through legislation designed to limit such patronage and introduced a “merit system” for government employment based on ability and experience.

National Politics

• Several factors gave national politics during the Gilded Age its distinctive texture. Most important was the close division between Republicans and Democrats in Congress. Because neither party was dominant after the revival of the Democratic party in 1876, they both avoided controversial issues or bold initiatives for fear of losing a close election. Party loyalty was often an emotional choice. Third political parties, such as the Greenbackers, Populists, and Prohibitionists, appealed to specific interests and issues, such as currency inflation, railroad regulations, or legislation to restrict alcohol consumption. Party loyalties reflected religious, ethnic, and geographic divisions. After the Civil War, the Republican party remained strongest in New England, upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the Midwest. Republicans tended to be Protestants of English or Scandinavian descent. The Democrats were a more diverse coalition of conservative southern whites, northern Catholics of German or Irish Catholic backgrounds, and others repelled by the Republicans’ claim to be the “party of morality.”. During the 1880s, Protestant Republicans infuriated many immigrants and Catholics of Irish, Italian, or German backgrounds by promoting efforts to limit or prohibit the consumption of alcoholic beverages. They also pushed for nativist policies to restrict immigration and the employment of foreigners. Between 1869 and 1913, from the first term of Ulysses S. Grant through the election of William Howard Taft, Republicans monopolized the White House except for two nonconsecutive terms of New York Democrat Grover Cleveland. Otherwise, national politics was remarkably balanced. Between 1872 and 1896, no president won a majority of the popular vote.

Hayes To Harrison - Hayes and Civil Service Reform

• President Rutherford B. Hayes brought to the White House in 1877 both a lingering controversy over the disputed election results (critics called him “His Fraudulency” or “His Accidency”) and uprightness that was in sharp contrast to the barely concealed graft of the Grant era. Hayes appointed a Democrat as postmaster general in an effort to clean up an office infamous for trading jobs for political favors. The son of an Ohio farmer, Hayes was wounded four times in the Civil War. He went on to serve in Congress and as governor of Ohio. Hayes had been the compromise presidential nominee of two factions fighting for control of the Republican party, the so-called Stalwarts and HalfBreeds, led, respectively, by Senators Roscoe Conkling of New York and James G. Blaine of Maine. The Stalwarts had been “stalwart” in their support of President Grant during the furor over the misdeeds of his cabinet members. Further, they had mastered the patronage system (spoils system) of distributing political jobs to party loyalists. The Half-Breeds supposedly were only half loyal to Grant and half committed to reform of the spoils system. To his credit, President Hayes tried to stay above the petty bickering. He joined the growing public outrage over corruption, admitting that his party “must mend its ways” by focusing on Republican principles rather than fighting over the spoils of office. “He serves his party best, who serves his country best,” Hayes declared. It was time “for civil service [government jobs] reform. He appointed a committee to consider a “merit system” for hiring government employees, as used in some European countries. In a dramatic gesture, Hayes also fired Chester A. Arthur, a Stalwart Republican who ran the New York Customs House, because Arthur had abused the patronage system. Hayes’s commitment to cleaning up politics enraged Republican leaders. In 1879, Ohio congressman James Garfield warned Hayes that “if he wishes to hold any influence” with fellow Republicans, he “must abandon some of his notions of Civil Service reform.” For his part, Hayes confessed that he had little hope of success because he was “opposed by . . . the most powerful men in my party.” On economic issues, Hayes held to a conservative line that would guide his successors—from both parties—for the rest of the century. His answer to demands for expansion of the nation’s money supply (which would become one of the leading issues of the late nineteenth century) was a resounding no: he vetoed the Bland-Allison Act (1878), a bipartisan effort to increase the supply of silver coins. When the Democrat-controlled Congress convinced many Republicans to help overturn Hayes’s veto, the president confided in his diary that he had become a president without a party

Garfield, Author and the Pendleton Act

• With Hayes choosing not to pursue a second term, the Republican presidential nomination in 1880 was up for grabs. Former President Grant wanted the nomination but was unwilling to campaign for it. In the end, the Stalwarts and Half-Breeds were forced to select a compromise candidate, Congressman James A. Garfield. Garfield had been a minister, a lawyer, and a college president before serving in the Civil War as a Union army general. In an effort to please the Stalwarts and also win the crucial swing state of New York, the Republicans named Chester A. Arthur, whom Hayes had fired as head of the New York Customs House, as their candidate for vice president. The Democrats, even more, divided than the Republicans, selected Winfield Scott Hancock, a retired Union general who had distinguished himself at the Battle of Gettysburg but had done little since. In large part, Hancock was chosen to help deflect the Republicans’ “bloody-shirt” attacks on Democrats as the party of the Confederacy. Yet Hancock undermined that effort by supporting southern efforts to strip blacks of voting rights. Embedded in the voting, however, was a worrisome pattern: the Democrats won all the southern states, and the Republicans won all the northern states. Politically, the Civil War was not over. Moreover, in future presidential elections, if the Republicans lost New York State, they would lose the White House. Securing the nation’s most populous state thus became central to Republican strategy

A Presidency Cut Short

• In his inaugural address, President Garfield gave an impassioned defense of civil rights, arguing that the “elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787.” The end of slavery, he said, “has added immensely to the moral and industrial forces of our people. It has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both.” But he also confirmed that the Republicans had ended efforts to reconstruct the former Confederacy. Southern blacks were on their own now; they had been “surrendered to their own guardianship.” Garfield would have no time to prove himself as president, however. On July 2, 1881, after only four months in office, he was walking through the Washington, D.C., railroad station, headed to a vacation in Vermont, when he was shot in the arm and back by Charles Guiteau, a former Republican who had been turned down for a federal job.

The Civil Service Commission

• People saw little potential in the new president, Chester A. Arthur, who had been Roscoe Conkling’s trusted lieutenant. Yet Arthur surprised most political observers by distancing himself from Conkling and the Stalwarts and becoming a civil service reformer. Throughout his presidency, he kept a promise not to remove any federal officeholder purely for political reasons. He also made cabinet appointments based on merit rather than partisanship. Very little is known about President Arthur. Just before he died, he had all of his official papers and correspondence burned. Why he did so remains a mystery. Unlike most presidents, there is no library or museum dedicated to Arthur’s career. He wanted obscurity, and he got it. In 1883, momentum against the spoils system generated by Garfield’s assassination enabled George H. Pendleton, a Democratic senator from Ohio, to convince Congress to establish a Civil Service Commission, the first federal regulatory agency. Because of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, at least 15 percent of federal jobs would now be filled on the basis of competitive tests (the “merit system”) rather than political favoritism. In addition, federal employees running for office were prohibited from receiving political contributions from other government workers.

The Campaign of 1884

• Chester Arthur’s efforts to clean up the spoils system might have attracted voters, but they did not please Republican leaders. So in 1884 the Republicans dumped the ailing Arthur (he had contracted a kidney disease) and chose as their nominee James Gillespie Blaine of Maine, the handsome, colorful secretary of state, former senator, and longtime leader of the Half-Breeds. Blaine had secretly sold his votes on measures favorable to a railroad corporation. Nobody proved that he had committed any crimes, but the circumstantial evidence was powerful: his senatorial salary alone could not have built either his mansion in Washington, D.C. or his palatial home in Augusta, Maine. The editor of a New York newspaper jokingly called the anti-Blaine Republicans Mugwumps, after an Algonquian Indian word meaning “big chief. The Mugwumps, a self-appointed group of reformers dedicated to promoting honest government, saw the election as a “moral rather than political” contest. Centered in the large cities and major universities of the northeast, the Mugwumps were mostly professors, editors, and writers who included in their number the most famous American of the time, writer and humorist Mark Twain. Like the Liberal Republicans before them, the Mugwumps sought to reform the patronage system by declaring that all federal jobs would be filled solely on the basis of merit. Their break with the Republican party over patronage testified to the depth of their convictions. The rise of the Mugwumps, as well as growing national concerns about political corruption, prompted the Democrats to nominate New Yorker Grover Cleveland. Cleveland had first attracted national attention in 1881 when he was elected mayor of Buffalo on an anti-corruption platform. He was elected governor of New York in 1882, and he continued to build a reform record by fighting New York City’s corrupt Tammany Hall ring. As mayor and as governor, he repeatedly vetoed bills that he felt served private interests at the expense of the public good. He supported civil service reform, opposed expanding the money supply, and preferred free trade to high tariffs. Although Cleveland was known for his honesty and integrity, he was hurt by two personal issues: the discovery that he had paid for a substitute to take his place in the Union army during the Civil War, and a juicy sex scandal that erupted when a Buffalo newspaper revealed that Cleveland, a bachelor, had befriended an attractive widow named Maria Halpin, who named him the father of her baby born in 1874. Cleveland had discreetly provided financial support for the child. Near the end of the nasty campaign, Blaine and his supporters committed two fateful blunders in the crucial state of New York. The first occurred at New York City’s fashionable Delmonico’s restaurant, where Blaine went to a private dinner with 200 of the nation’s wealthiest business leaders to ask them to help finance his campaign. Blaine’s second blunder occurred when a Protestant minister visiting Republican headquarters in New York referred to the Democrats as the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion [the Confederacy].” Blaine, who was present, let pass the implied insult to Catholics—a fatal oversight since he had cultivated Irish American support with his anti-English talk and repeated references to his mother being a Catholic. Democrats claimed that Blaine was, at heart, anti-Irish and anti-Catholic. The two incidents may have tipped the 1884 presidential election. The electoral vote was 219 to 182 in Cleveland’s favor, but the popular vote ran far closer.

Cleveland’s Reform Efforts

• During his first few months in office, President Cleveland struggled to keep Democratic leaders from reviving the self-serving patronage system. Democratic newspapers heaped scorn on him for refusing to award federal jobs to his supporters. One accused Cleveland of “ingratitude” toward those who had “delivered the vote.” Despite the president’s best efforts, about two-thirds of the 120,000 federal jobs went to Democrats as patronage during his administration. Cleveland was an old-style Democrat who believed in minimal government activity

Railroad Regulation

• He believed that railroads were charging unfairly high freight rates. States had adopted laws regulating railroads since the late 1860s, but in 1886 the Supreme Court declared in Wabash, St. Louis, and Pacific Railroad Company v. Illinois that no state could regulate the rates charged by railroads engaged in interstate traffic. Because most railroads crossed state lines, Cleveland urged Congress to close the loophole. Congress followed through, and in 1887, Cleveland signed an act creating the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), the first federal regulatory agency.

Tariff Reform and the Election of 1888

• President Cleveland’s most dramatic challenge to Big Business focused on tariff reform. During the late nineteenth century, the government’s high-tariff policies, shaped largely by the Republican party, had favored American manufacturers by effectively shutting out foreign imports, thereby enabling U.S. corporations to dominate the marketplace and charge higher prices for their products. As a result, the tariff revenues were producing an annual government surplus, which proved to Cleveland and the Democrats that the rates were too high. In 1887, Cleveland argued that Congress should reduce both the tariff rates and the number of imported goods subject to tariffs to enable European companies to compete in the American marketplace. His outspoken stance set the stage for his reelection campaign in 1888. To oppose Cleveland, the Republicans, now calling themselves the GOP (Grand Old Party) to emphasize their longevity, turned to the obscure Benjamin Harrison, a Civil War veteran whose greatest attributes were his availability and the fact that he was from Indiana, a pivotal state in presidential elections. The grandson of President William Henry Harrison, he had a modest political record, but he would do what he was told. The Republicans accepted Cleveland’s challenge to make tariffs the chief issue in the campaign. They enjoyed a huge advantage in campaign funding, as business executives contributed generously to their campaign. Matthew Quay, the powerful Republican boss of Pennsylvania who managed Harrison’s campaign, knew better. Harrison, he muttered, “ought to know that Providence hadn’t a damned thing to do with it! [A] number of men were compelled to approach the penitentiary to make him President.” Quay’s decision to distribute campaign money in key states and to promise federal jobs to loyalists also helped Republicans gain control of the House and the Senate. As the Republicans prepared for the inauguration, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, co-edited by Harrison’s son Russell, made clear the new president’s priorities: “This is to be a businessman’s Administration,” and “businessmen will be thoroughly well content with it.

Republican Activism under Harrison

• The Republicans took advantage of their control of the presidency and both houses of Congress to pass a cluster of significant legislation in 1890: the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, the McKinley Tariff Act, and the admission of Idaho and Wyoming as new states, which followed the admission of North and South Dakota, Montana, and Washington in 1889. The Sherman Antitrust Act, named for Ohio senator John Sherman, prohibited powerful corporations from “conspiring” to establish monopolies or “restrain trade” in their industries. It made the United States the first nation in the world to outlaw monopolistic business practices. Though badly needed, the Sherman Antitrust Act was a toothless hoax intended to make it appear that Congress was clamping down on the gigantic corporations dominating more and more industries. That it passed without any opposition suggested that the bill was mostly for show. Critics called it the “Swiss Cheese Act'' because it had so many holes in its language. As the New York Times recognized in 1890, the “so-called Anti-Trust law” was passed to deceive the people” and prepare the way for a much higher tariff bill. Senator Sherman, the article added, supported this “humbug” of law so that party spokesmen might say ‘Behold! We have attacked the trusts. The Republican Party is the enemy of all such rings.’' The Sherman Antitrust Act was rarely enforced, in large part because of its vague definitions of “trusts” and “monopolies.” From 1890 to 1901, only eighteen lawsuits were instituted, four of which were filed against labor unions rather than corporations, claiming that striking workers were “conspiring” to “restrain trade.” The Sherman Silver Purchase Act (1890), which required the Treasury to purchase 4.5 million ounces of silver each month to convert into dollar coins, was an effort by the Republicans to please the new western states with numerous silver mines. The bill’s sponsor, Senator John Sherman, admitted that he proposed the bill only to defuse cries for the “unlimited coinage” of silver. “I voted for it,” he confessed, “but the day it became law I was ready to repeal it.” The Sherman act helped set the stage for the currency issue to eclipse all others during the financial panic that would sweep the country in 1893. William McKinley, the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 raised duties (taxes) on imported manufactured goods to their highest level ever and added many agricultural products to the tariff list to appease farmers. Its passage encouraged many businesses to raise prices because their European competitors were now effectively shut out of the U.S. market. The Republican efforts to reward Big Business backfired, however. In the November 1890 congressional elections, Democrats won big, regaining control of the House by a three-to-one margin. William McKinley, who had sponsored the tariff bill, lost his seat (although the following year he would be elected Ohio’s governor). In the Senate, the Republican majority was reduced to four. Republicans were “astounded and dazed” by the shellacking in the election. Even more worrisome was the emergence of the Populists, a new political party representing disgruntled farmers and wage laborers. Revolution was in the air.

Farmers and the Money Problem - Agricultural Unrest

• The gilded age was preoccupied with money issues. The 1890 congressional elections revealed deep-seated unrest in the farming communities of the South, on the plains of Kansas and Nebraska, and in the mining towns of the Rocky Mountain region. Over the previous twenty years, corn prices had fallen by a third, wheat by more than half, cotton by two-thirds. The drastic decline in prices was caused by overproduction and growing international competition in world food markets. The vast new lands brought under cultivation in the plains as a result of the extension of rail lines and the use of new farm machinery poured an ever-increasing supply of grains into world markets, driving prices down. Meanwhile, farmers in the South and West had become increasingly indebted to local banks or merchants who loaned them money at high-interest rates to buy seed, fertilizer, tools, and other supplies. As prices for their crops dropped, however, so did the income the farmers received, thus preventing them from paying their debts on time. In response, most farmers had no choice but to grow even more wheat, cotton, or corn, but the increased supply pushed down prices and incomes even further. High tariffs on imported goods also hurt farmers. Besides bankers, merchants, and high tariffs, struggling farmers blamed the railroads, warehouse owners, and food processors—the so-called “middlemen”— who helped get their crops and livestock to market. Farmers especially resented that railroads, most of which had a monopoly over the shipping of grains and animals, charged such high rates to ship their agricultural products. In drought-devastated Kansas in 1890, Populists won five congressional seats from Republicans. In early 1891, the newly elected Populists and Democrats took control of Congress just as an acute economic crisis appeared on the horizon: farmers’ debts were mounting as crop prices continued to fall.

The Granger Movement

• When the Department of Agriculture sent Oliver H. Kelley on a tour of the South in 1866, he was struck by the social isolation of people living on small farms. To address the problem, Kelley helped found the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, better known as the Grange (an old word for places where crops were stored). The Grange grew quickly, reaching a membership of 858,000 men and women by 1875. It started out offering social events and educational programs for farmers and their families, but as it grew, it began to promote “cooperatives'' where farmers could join together to store and sell their crops to avoid the high fees charged by brokers and other middlemen. In five Midwest states, Grange chapters persuade legislators to pass “Granger laws” to regulate the prices charged by railroads and grain warehouses (called “elevators”). Railroad and warehouse owners challenged the laws, but in Munn v. Illinois (1877), the Supreme Court ruled that states had the right to regulate property that operated in the public interest. Nine years later, however, the Court threw out the Munn ruling, finding in Wabash v. Illinois that only Congress could regulate industries involved in interstate commerce.

Farmers’ Alliances

• The Granger movement failed to address the foremost concerns of struggling farmers: declining crop prices and the inadequate amount of money in circulation. As a result, people shifted their allegiance to a new organization called the Farmers’ Alliance. Like the Grange, the Farmers’ Alliances organized social and recreational activities for small farmers and their families while also emphasizing political action and economic cooperation to address the hardships caused by chronic indebtedness, declining crop prices, and droughts. By 1890, the white Alliance movement had about 1.5 million members, and the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance claimed more than 1 million members. The Alliances called for the federal government to take ownership of the railroads and create an income tax on wealthy Americans. They also organized economic “cooperatives.” In 1887, Charles W. Macune, the Southern Alliance president, urged Texas farmers to create their own Alliance Exchange to free themselves from dependence on commercial warehouses, grain elevators, food processors, and banks. Members of the Alliance Exchange would act collectively, pooling their resources to borrow money from banks and purchase their goods and supplies from a new corporation created by the Alliance in Dallas. The exchange would also build warehouses to store and market members’ crops. With these crops as collateral, members would receive cash loans to buy household goods and agricultural supplies. Once the farmers sold their crops, they would pay back the loans provided by the Alliance warehouse. This cooperative scheme collapsed when Texas banks refused to accept paper money. Undaunted, Alliance members then focused on what Macune called a “subtreasury plan,” whereby farmers would store their crops in government-run warehouses and obtain cash loans for up to 80 percent of the crops’ value. This would free them from their traditional dependence on banks that charged high-interest rates. Besides providing immediate credit, the subtreasury plan would allow farmers the option of storing a crop in hopes of getting a better price later. The plan would also promote inflation of the money supply because the loans to farmers would be made in new paper money. Monetary inflation was popular with farmers because it allowed them to repay their debts with cheaper money. Despite the strong support from farmers, however, Congress nixed the subtreasury plan in 1890.

New Third-Parties

• The Alliances called for third-party political action to address their concerns. In 1890, farm activists in Colorado joined with miners and railroad workers to form the Independent Party, and Nebraska farmers formed the People’s Independent Party. Leonidas Polk, a former Confederate general who was the head of the North Carolina Alliance, traveled to Kansas and was so impressed by the size of the open-air farm rallies that he declared that farmers across the nation “have risen up and inaugurated a movement such as a world has never seen.” In the South, the Alliance movement forced Democrats to nominate candidates who supported its farm program and succeeded in electing four of them as governors, forty-four as congressmen, and several as U.S. senators, as well as seven pro-Alliance state legislatures. Among the most respected of the southern Alliance leaders was Thomas E. Watson, a lawyer from Georgia. The son of prosperous slaveholders who had lost everything after the Civil War, Watson took the lead in urging black and white tenant farmers to join forces. In Kansas, Mary Elizabeth Lease emerged as a fiery speaker for the farm protest movement. Born in Pennsylvania to Irish immigrants, Lease migrated to Kansas, taught school, raised a family, and failed at farming in the mid-1880s. She then studied law and became one of the state’s first female attorneys. Like so many Alliance supporters, Lease viewed Eastern financiers as the enemy. “

The Election of 1892

• In 1892, Alliance leaders organized a convention in Omaha, Nebraska, at which they formed the People’s Party (Populists). The delegates approved a platform that called for the unlimited coinage of silver, a “progressive” income tax whose rates would rise with income levels, and federal ownership of the railroads. They also endorsed the eight-hour workday and new laws restricting immigration, for fear that foreigners were taking Americans’ jobs. The Populist party’s platform turned out to be more exciting than its presidential candidate: Iowa’s James B. Weaver, a former Union army officer who had headed the Greenback party ticket twelve years earlier. The major parties renominated the same candidates who had run in 1888: Democrat Grover Cleveland and Republican president Benjamin Harrison. Each major candidate received more than 5 million votes, but Cleveland won a majority of the electoral college. Weaver received more than 1 million votes and carried Colorado, Kansas, Nevada, and Idaho. Alabama was the banner Populist state of the South, with 37 percent of its vote going to Weaver.

The Depression of 1893 and the Free Silver Crusade

• While farmers were funneling their discontent into politics, a fundamental weakness in the economy was about to cause a major collapse and a social rebellion. Just ten days before Grover Cleveland was inaugurated in the winter of 1893, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad declared bankruptcy, setting off a national financial crisis, now called the Panic of 1893. It grew into the worst depression the nation had ever experienced. Other overextended railroads collapsed, taking many banks with them. European investors withdrew their funds from America. A quarter of unskilled urban workers lost their jobs, many others had their wages cut, and by the fall of 1893, more than 600 banks had closed and 15,000 businesses had failed. Farm foreclosures soared in the South and West, and by 1900, a third of all American farmers rented their land rather than owned it. By 1894, the nation’s economy had reached the bottom. But the depression lasted another four years, with unemployment hovering at 20 percent. In New York City, the rate was close to 35 percent. President Cleveland’s response was recklessly conservative: he convinced Congress to return the nation’s money supply to a gold standard by repealing the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, a move that made the depression worse. The weak economy needed more money in circulation, not less. Investors rushed to exchange their silver dollars for gold, further constricting the money supply. Hard times triggered a wave of labor unrest. One protest group, called Coxey’s Army, was led by “General” Jacob S. Coxey, a wealthy Ohio quarry owner turned Populist who demanded that the federal government provide the unemployed with meaningful work. Coxey, his wife, and their son, Legal Tender Coxey, rode in a carriage ahead of some 400 protesters who marched hundreds of miles to Washington, D.C., where police arrested Coxey for walking on the grass. Although his ragtag army dispersed peacefully, the march, as well as the growing strength of Populism, struck fear into the hearts of many conservatives. Republicans portrayed Populists as “tramps” and “hayseed socialists” whose election would endanger the capitalist system. The Populists responded by charging that Americans were divided into “tramps and millionaires.” In this climate of class warfare and social anxiety, the 1894 congressional elections devastated President Cleveland and the Democrats, who were blamed for the economic crisis.

Silverites v.s Goldbugs

• Cleveland’s decision to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act created an irreparable division in his party. One pro-silver Democrat labeled the president a traitor. Politicians from western states with large silver mines increased their demands for the “unlimited” coinage of silver, presenting a strategic dilemma for Populists: should the party promote the long list of reforms it had originally advocated, or should it try to ride the silver issue into power? Although flooding the economy with silver currency would probably not have provided the benefits its advocates claimed, the “free silver” crusade had taken on powerful symbolic overtones. Over the protests of more radical members, Populist leaders decided to hold their 1896 nominating convention after the two major-party conventions, confident that the Republicans and Democrats would at best straddle the silver issue and enable the Populists to lure away pro-silver advocates from both. The major parties, however, took opposite positions on the currency issue. The Republicans, as expected, nominated William McKinley, a former congressman and governor of Ohio, on a platform committed to gold coins as the only form of currency. A small but vocal group of “Silver Republicans” from western states, led by Senator Henry Teller of Colorado, were so upset that they stormed out of the convention. After the convention, a friend told McKinley that the “money question” would determine the election. He was right. The Democratic convention, held in Chicago, was one of the great turning points in political history. The prosilver, largely rural delegates surprised the party leadership and the “Gold Democrats,” or “goldbugs,” by capturing control of the convention.

William Jennings Bryan

• Thirty-six-year-old William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska gave the final speech before the balloting began. A fiery evangelical moralist, Bryan was a two-term congressman who had lost a race for the Senate in 1894, when Democrats by the dozens were swept out of office. In the months before the convention, he had traveled throughout the South and West, speaking passionately for the unlimited coinage of silver, attacking Cleveland’s “do-nothing” response to the depression, and endorsing both Democrats and Populists who embraced the cause of “free silver.” Bryan was a compelling speaker, a crusading preacher in the role of a populist politician. In his carefully crafted and well-rehearsed speech, he claimed that two ideas about the role of government were competing for the American voter. The Republicans, he said, believed “that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below.” The Democrats, by contrast, believed “that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.” For his part, Bryan spoke for the “producing masses of this nation” against the eastern “financial magnates' ' who had “enslaved” them by manipulating the money supply to ensure high-interest rates. As Bryan brought his electrifying twenty-minute speech to a climax, he fused Christian imagery with Populist anger. Bryan then identified himself with Jesus Christ. t in the process the Democratic party was fractured. Disappointed Democrats who had supported Grover Cleveland dismissed Bryan as a fanatic and a socialist. They were so alienated by his positions and his rhetoric that they walked out of the convention and nominated their own candidate, Senator John M. Palmer of Illinois. “Fellow Democrats,” Palmer announced, “I will not consider it any great fault if you decide to cast your vote for William McKinley.” When the Populists gathered in St. Louis for their nominating convention two weeks later, they faced an impossible choice. They could name their own candidate and divide the pro-silver vote with the Democrats, or they could endorse Bryan and probably lose their identity. In the end, they backed Bryan but chose their own vice-presidential candidate, Thomas E. Watson, and invited the Democrats to drop their vice-presidential nominee. Bryan refused the offer.

The Election of 1896

• The election of 1896 was one of the most dramatic in history, in part because of the striking contrast between the candidates and in part because the terrible depression made the stakes so high. Bryan was the first major candidate since Andrew Jackson to champion the poor, the discontented, and the oppressed. He excited struggling farmers, miners, and union members. And he was the first leader of a major party to call for the expansion of the federal government to help the working class. No one loved campaigning more than Bryan. His populist crusade was for whites only, however. Like so many otherwise progressive Democratic leaders, Bryan never challenged the practices of racial segregation and violence against blacks in the solidly Democratic South. And he alienated many working-class Catholics in northern states by supporting the prohibition of alcoholic beverages. McKinley, meanwhile, stayed at home and kept his mouth shut, letting other Republicans speak for him. He knew he could not compete with Bryan as a speaker, so he conducted a “front-porch campaign,” welcoming supporters at his home in Canton, Ohio, and giving only prepared statements to the press. McKinley’s brilliant campaign manager, Marcus “Mark” Hanna, shrewdly portrayed Bryan as a “Popocrat,” a radical whose “communistic spirit” would ruin the capitalist system and stir up a class war. In the end, Bryan won the most votes of any candidate in history— 6.5 million—but McKinley won even more: 7.1 million. The better-organized and better-financed Republicans won the electoral college vote by 271 to 176. Bryan carried most of the West and all of the South but found little support in the North and East. In the critical Midwest, from Minnesota and Iowa eastward to Ohio, he did not win a state. His evangelical Protestantism repelled many Roman Catholic voters, who were normally drawn to the Democrats. Farmers in the Northeast, moreover, were less attracted to radical reform than were farmers in the West and South. Workers in the cities found it easier to identify with McKinley’s focus on reviving the industrial economy than with Bryan’s farm-based, free-silver evangelism. Of the nation’s twenty largest cities, Bryan carried only New Orleans. Although Bryan lost, he launched the Democratic party’s shift from pro-business conservatism to its eventual twentieth-century role as a party of liberal reform. The Populist party, however, virtually disintegrated. By 1897, when McKinley was inaugurated, economic prosperity was returning. Part of the reason was inflation of the currency, which bore out the arguments of the Greenbackers and silverites that the nation’s money supply had been inadequate during the Gilded Age. But inflation came, in one of history’s many ironies, not from more greenbacks or silver dollars but from a flood of gold discovered in South Africa, northwest Canada, and Alaska.