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Module seven is a 150 point module in which students are required to write a 500 word essay that demonstrates mastery of one of this course’s Student Learning Outcomes (SLO). Specifically, I am focused on SLO #3, which reads: “Applying the specific knowledge of key events and themes in United States history from 1865-present, students will demonstrate their understanding of the course material using evidence-based (two or more sources) writing.” One example for an SLO #3 essay is: Theme: Racism in U.S. History Sources: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: New Press, 2012) and James Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006). Essay Body and Argument: The essay would introduce examples of racism that we studied in our class. It would balance, weigh, and consider the experiences known to Native Americans, Asians, Mexicans, Japanese, African Americans, and many other marginalized communities. The author would analyze and discuss this topic, via academic and/or primary sources, in both historical and contemporary contexts. A good argument would point out instances of overlaps and divergences in the experiences. Grading cues that I will evaluate: 1. Is the essay the proper length? 500 words or more? 2. Does the students utilize required number/types of sources? 3. Does essay state a clear theme, developed by historical evidence? 4. Is the argument clearly written? 5. Is the argument original? 6. Did student locate/use outside sources…those not used as part of our class? 7. Did the student utilize some academic form of citation? I am happy to look over “draft” copies of your work. Please email them to me if you would like.

Reconstruction of the U.S. after the Civil War, 1865-1877

 

In the words of President Abraham Lincoln, the fighting in the Civil War (1861-65) brought to America “a new birth of freedom.” The most important results of the war dealt directly with this claim: the destruction of slavery and to effort to make former slaves full and equal citizens. It was during the years 1865-77, during a period that historians refer to as the Reconstruction period, that one observes the roots of far-reaching changes in U.S. society. Indeed, studying Reconstruction introduces students to stories of great hope and promise. It was also, however, a violent and repressive time that saw the emergence of dastardly attitudes and acts that lasted for more than a century.

 

The Civil War did not begin as a total war, but it soon became one. It was a struggle that pitted Northern society against Southern society. Never before had mass armies confronted each other on the battlefield with the deadly weapons created by the industrial revolution. The resulting casualties dwarfed anything in the prior American experience. Some 650,000 men died in the war, including 260,000 Confederates — over one-fifth of the South’s adult white male population. At the war’s outset, the Lincoln administration insisted that restoring the Union was its only purpose. But as slaves by the thousands abandoned the plantations and headed for Union lines, and military victory eluded the North, the president made the destruction of slavery a war aim — a decision announced in the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863.

 

Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation, it captured the hearts and imagination of millions of Americans and fundamentally transformed the character of the war. After January 1, 1863, every advance of federal troops expanded the domain of freedom. Moreover, the Proclamation announced the acceptance of black men into the Union Army and Navy, enabling the liberated to become liberators. By the end of the war, almost 200,000 black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union and freedom.

 

As the Civil War raged on, some in U.S. society began to ask the question of how America would look after the war. So-called “rehearsals for Reconstruction,” that showed how blacks and whites would live and work together, took place across the Union-occupied South. Groups of young Northern reformers, who represented a much larger and influential socio-cultural movement known as “Radical Republicanism,” set about the task of educating freed blacks. These “radical Republicans” wanted the U.S. to ban slavery, make slaves full citizens, and ensure that Southern states accepted that their defeat in the Civil War meant the end to harassing blacks.

 

There was, however, no agreement among politicians in Washington D.C. as to how these goals might be achieved. In December 1863, President Lincoln proposed a reconstruction program that would allow Confederate states to establish new state governments after 10 percent of their male population took loyalty oaths and the states recognized the “permanent freedom of slaves.” Several Radical Republicans thought Lincoln’s 10 Percent Plan was too mild. Senator Benjamin F. Wade and Representative Henry Winter Davis proposed a more stringent plan in February 1864. The Wade-Davis Bill required that 50 percent of a state’s white males take a loyalty oath to be readmitted to the Union. In addition, states were required to give blacks the right to vote. There were four millions slaves that stood to be freed after the North defeated the rebel army. Settling this aspect of Reconstruction was vital for the U.S. to ever put its house back together again.

 

In April 1865, shortly after the South accepted its defeat, the issue of what to do about Reconstruction flared up in a tragic manner. After listening to a Lincoln speech that seemed to imply Lincoln’s support for black citizenship, a white supremacist named John Wilkes Booth set about a series of plans designed to remove Lincoln from office. Ultimately, Booth assassinated President Lincoln in a public theatre and his actions shocked the nation. His goal of ending Reconstruction did not come true and radical Republicans passed the 13/14/15 amendments to the U.S. Constitution that banned slavery, offered citizenship to former slaves, and instructed Southern states to follow these new laws.

 

The rapid and radical changes to Southern society of course produced tensions between freed blacks and the whites that had once dominated them. Blacks worked to set up new lives. Immediately after the Civil War, they sought to give meaning to freedom by reuniting families separated under slavery, establishing their own churches and schools, seeking economic autonomy, and demanding equal civil and political rights. Most slaves had lived in family units, although they faced the constant threat of separation from loved ones by sale. Now, freed people made remarkable efforts to locate loved ones – a Northern reporter in 1865 encountered a former slave who had walked more than 600 miles searching for his wife and children, from whom he had been sold away during slavery.

 

White Southerners during the Reconstruction period reacted to defeat and slave emancipation with dismay. Many families had suffered the loss of loved ones and the destruction of property. Some thought of leaving the South altogether, or retreated into nostalgia for the Old South and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. In 1865 and 1866 many white Southerners joined memorial associations that established Confederate cemeteries and monuments throughout the region. Others, unwilling to accept a new relationship to former slaves, resorted to violent opposition to the new world being created around them. The most notable organization formed during the Reconstruction period was the Ku Klux Klan. Created in 1866, this group’s members dressed in white robes to signify the ghosts of Confederate soldiers. Their nighttime rides provoked fear among freed blacks; their violent outbursts only reinforced this terror. Within ten-years, the KKK had spread to every Southern state. Its power as a social and political organization was very significant as members often held positions in law enforcement and local government.

 

How could former slaves and their masters co-exist? Did the Reconstruction period succeed in marrying these two opposite groups? Put simply, the answer is “no.” The most immediate task confronting all Southerners was devising a new system of labor to replace the shattered world of slavery. Planters found it hard to adjust to the end of slavery. Accustomed to absolute control over their labor force, many sought to restore the old discipline, only to meet determined opposition from the freed people, who equated freedom with economic autonomy. Indeed, many former slaves believed that their years of unrequited labor gave them a claim to land; “forty acres and a mule” became their rallying cry. White reluctance to sell to blacks, and the federal government’s decision not to redistribute land in the South, meant that only a small percentage of the freed people became landowners.

 

Instead, most freed slaves rented land or worked for wages on white-owned plantations. This arrangement, known as sharecropping, dominated the cotton and tobacco South. Increasingly, both white and black farmers came to depend on local merchants for credit. A cycle of debt often ensued, and year-by-year the promise of economic independence faded. For the many millions of blacks that remained in the South, unable to move away owing to a lack of money or opportunity elsewhere, sharecropping became slavery by a different name. White men, eager to reassert their power over blacks, used both economic and social devices to ensure that the changes promised by Radical Republicans existed mainly only on paper.

 

Perhaps, the best example of this gap between promises and reality is found in a discussion of the “Jim Crow” system. Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system that operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and Border States, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the status of second-class citizens. Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-black racism.

 

The following Jim Crow etiquette norms show how inclusive and pervasive these norms were:

 

1. A black male could not offer his hand (to shake hands) with a white male because it implied being socially equal. Obviously, a black male could not offer his hand or any other part of his body to a white woman, because he risked being accused of rape.

 

2. Blacks and whites were not supposed to eat together. If they did eat together, whites were to be served first, and some sort of partition was to be placed between them.

 

3. Under no circumstance was a black male to offer to light the cigarette of a white female — that gesture implied intimacy.

 

4. Blacks were not allowed to show public affection toward one another in public, especially kissing, because it offended whites.

 

5. Jim Crow etiquette prescribed that blacks were introduced to whites, never whites to blacks. For example: “Mr. Peters (the white person), this is Charlie (the black person), that I spoke to you about.”

 

6. White motorists had the right-of-way at all intersections.

 

One major reason that Reconstruction failed to help blacks in a significant way was that Lincoln’s successor as president, Andrew Johnson, was a Southerner who had owned slaves. In May 1865, President Andrew Johnson offered a pardon to all white Southerners except Confederate leaders and wealthy planters (although most of these later received individual pardons), and authorized them to create new governments. Blacks were denied any role in the process. Johnson also ordered nearly all the land in the hands of the government returned to its prewar owners — dashing black hope for economic autonomy. The new legislatures passed the Black Codes, severely limiting the former slaves’ legal rights and economic options so as to force them to return to the plantations as dependent laborers. Some states limited the occupations open to blacks. None allowed any blacks to vote, or provided public funds for their education. Added to the “Jim Crow Laws,” Southern whites had directly undermined the 14^th and 15^th amendments designed to help black gain civic equality.

 

Conditions in the South worsened as the 1870s began. During that decade, Northerners began to back away from their commitments to promoting equality. They believed that they had done enough and that ultimately Southerners would have to figure things out on their own. There was some effort to limit the KKK, however, as Northerners saw the outfit as a potential force for allowing former Confederates a chance to try again in their rebellion. In 1871 and 1872, federal marshals, assisted by U. S. Army troops, brought to trial scores of Klansmen, crushing the organization. But the North’s commitment to Reconstruction again soon waned. Reports of Reconstruction corruption led many Northerners to conclude that black suffrage had been a mistake. When anti-Reconstruction violence erupted again in Mississippi and South Carolina, President Grant (who had led the Northern Army to victory in the Civil War) refused to intervene.

 

The election of 1876 signaled the end to the Reconstruction period. It was a problematic election that hinged on disputed returns from Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. After intense negotiations involving leaders of both parties, the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, became president, while Democrats assumed control of the disputed Southern states. Southern states and their former rebel soldiers were welcomed back into the Union and the Northern presence across the South disappeared. Organizations like the KKK continued to exist, as did the unfair Jim Crow Laws.

From the outset, Reconstruction governments aroused bitter opposition among the majority of white Southerners. Though they disagreed on specific policies, all of Reconstruction’s opponents agreed that the South must be ruled by white supremacy.

 

The reasons for white opposition to Reconstruction were many. To numerous former Confederates, the new governments appeared as living reminders of military defeat. Their ambitious programs of economic development and school construction produced rising taxes and spiraling state debts. In some states, these programs also spawned corruption, in which Democrats as well as Republicans shared, but which served to discredit Republican rule. Many whites deeply resented the absence of the region’s former leaders from positions of power, and planters disliked the tendency of local officials to side with former slaves in labor disputes.

 

The essential reason for the growing opposition to Reconstruction, however, was the fact that most Southern whites could not accept the idea of African Americans voting and holding office, or the egalitarian policies adopted by the new governments. Southern Democrats launched a campaign of vilification against Reconstruction, portraying it as a so-called second Northern invasion of Dixie land. Northerners grew tired of these claims and ultimately decided that Southern whites and blacks would have to figure out a way to co-exist. No additional federal efforts to help black would unfold until the 1950s and 1960s in the modern Civil Rights movement.

 

 

Developing the West

 

In 1860, most Americans considered the Great Plains the “Great American Desert.” Settlement west of Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana averaged just one person per square mile. The only parts of the Far West that were highly settled were California and Texas. Between 1865 and the 1890s, however, Americans settled 430 million acres in the Far West–more land than during the preceding 250 years of American history. By 1893, the Census Bureau was able to claim that the entire western frontier was now occupied.

 

The discovery of gold, silver, and other precious minerals in California in 1849, in Nevada and Colorado in the 1850s, in Idaho and Montana in 1860s, and South Dakota in the 1870s sparked an influx of prospectors and miners. The expansion of railroads and the invention of barbed wire and improvements in windmills and pumps attracted ranchers and farmers to the Great Plains in the 1860s and 1870s. This lecture examines the forces that drove Americans westward; the kinds of lives they established in the Far West; and the rise of the “West of the imagination,” the popular myths that continue to influence the ways that we “see” the Western U.S.

 

Before large numbers of Americans living on the Eastern seaboard could re-settle in the West, the need existed for a new type of transportation. This challenge found its answer in the development of railroad technology. Indeed, the story of how Americans settled the West is very much intertwined with a discussion of railroads, those people who built the tracks, and of course those people whose lives were uprooted as a result.

 

Along with the development of the atomic bomb and landing the first men on the moon, the construction of a transcontinental railroad was one of the United States’ greatest technological achievements. Railroad track had to be laid over 2,000 miles of rugged terrain, including mountains of solid granite. Before the transcontinental railroad was completed, travel overland by stagecoach cost $1,000, took five or six months, and involved crossing rugged mountains and arid desert. The alternatives were to travel by sea around the tip of South America, a distance of 18,000 miles; or to cross the Isthmus of Panama, then travel north by ship to California. Each route took months and was dangerous and expensive. The transcontinental railroad would make it possible to complete the trip in five days at a cost of $150 for a first-class sleeper.

 

The first spikes were driven in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War. Two companies competed to lay as much track as possible. The Central Pacific built east from Sacramento, Calif., while the Union Pacific built west from Omaha, Nebraska. The transcontinental railroad was built in six years almost entirely by hand. Workers drove spikes into mountains, filled the holes with black powder, and blasted through the rock inch by inch. Handcarts moved the drift from cuts to fills. Bridges, including one 700 feet long and 126 feet in the air, had to be constructed to ford streams. Thousands of workers, including Irish and German immigrants, former Union and Confederate soldiers, freed slaves, and especially Chinese immigrants played a part in the construction. Chinese laborers first went to work for the Central Pacific as it began crossing California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1865.

 

At one point, 8,000 of the 10,000 men toiling for the Central Pacific were Chinese. Chinese workers were lowered in hand-woven reed baskets to drill blasting holes in the rock. They placed explosives in each hole, lit the fuses, and were, hopefully, pulled up before the powder was detonated. Explosions, freezing temperatures, and avalanches in the High Sierras killed hundreds. When Chinese workers struck for higher pay, a Central Pacific executive withheld their food supplies until they agreed to go back to work. The mistreatment and exploitation of Asian immigrants is something that all students of U.S. History must study and understand. While the railroads linking the Eastern and Western portions of the country simply would not have been completed without Asian labor, members of the White Anglo Saxon Protestant majority saw Asian competency and toughness as a direct threat to their supremacy. In 1882, tens years after many thousands of Asians had come to the U.S. to work on the railroads, the U.S. government passed the Asian Exclusionary Act that did not allow those people to earn citizenship and banned all additional Asian immigration to the country. It was a clearly racial-based piece of legislation that seemed to contradict in its spirit and intent the very basis of American history. There must have been at least a few Americans living at the time who recognized the hypocrisy ingrained in a nation that both banned Chinese immigrants in 1882 and then unveiled a Statue of Liberty promising help to all people find safety in 1886.

 

Asian immigrants were not the only people unsettled by the larger American expansion from East to West. Indigenous people, namely the so-called Plains Indians, saw their lands and lifestyles scarred by the experience. During the 1860s and 1870s, there were 250,000 Native Americans who lived on the Great Plains. This was not, for many, their original homes but rather was the reservation area to which they had been driven by the U.S. government. Indeed, the middle 1800s had been a rough time for Native Americans as Andrew Jackson in 1832 began the process of Indian removal. The process only got harsher for Native Americans as the country moved into the 1860s/70s. Students of American history must work to understand the consequences that impacted Native Americans as a result of Western expansion.

 

During the 1840s, members of the Sioux Nation thought they had found safety. The tribe flourished in the rich hunting grounds of the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming. Here for a while, the Sioux were free from trouble with the white settlers. However, the steady stream of white settlers signaled a brewing trouble. In 1862, gold was discovered in the Rocky Mountains in Montana. As with all gold rushes, such a find attracted many prospectors to the area. These people needed to be supplied. A supply route was opened up by John Bozeman, the Bozeman Trail, which went from the Oregon Trail to Virginia City, running along the eastern edge of the Big Horn Mountains. The Bozeman Trail ran straight through the hunting grounds of the western Sioux nation. While the Oregon Train was an irritation to the Sioux, the Bozeman Trail was a serious threat to their way of life. For the gold miners, the Bozeman Trail was vital; to the Sioux it was yet another example of the whites affecting their lives in a negative manner.

 

These sorts of tensions increased steadily. To encourage farmers to settle on the Great Plains, Congress passed the Homestead Act in 1862. This act allowed any citizen or any immigrant intending to become a citizen to get title to 160 acres of land by paying a small fee, living on the tract for five years, and making a few improvements. It also allowed settlers to pay $1.25 an acre and own the land immediately. Between 1862 and 1900, the Homestead Act provided farms to more than 400,000 families. These were lands, however, to which Native American also laid claim. Reports of new gold and silver findings in Oregon and Nevada also brought in many more settlers to the West. Take for example the experience in Virginia City, NV. Virginia City was built on top of a large silver lode. Its population soared from 4,000 in 1862 to 25,000 in 1874. The town’s six-story hotel had the only elevator west of Chicago, and downtown had 110 saloons, several opium dens, and 20 theaters and music halls. It was the most important city between Chicago and the Pacific in the 1870s although hardly anyone had lived there ten years earlier.

 

Such stories fueled later problems between white settler and Native Americans. The conflicts were headed for a fateful battle. In 1875, Sioux and Cheyenne Indians defiantly left their reservations and gathered in Montana with the great warrior Sitting Bull to fight for their lands. To force the large Indian army back to the reservations, the U.S. Army dispatched three columns to attack in coordinated fashion, one of which contained Lt. Colonel George Custer and the Seventh Cavalry. Spotting the Sioux village about fifteen miles away along the Rosebud River on June 25, Custer also found a nearby group of about forty warriors. Ignoring orders to wait, he decided to attack before they could alert the main party. He did not realize that the number of warriors in the village numbered three times his strength.

 

As the Indians watched roughly 210 of Custer’s men coming towards them, the trap was ready. Sioux warriors, led by the man known as Crazy Horse, swiftly moved downstream and then doubled back in a sweeping arc, enveloping Custer and his men in a pincer move. They began pouring in gunfire and arrows. As the Indians closed in, a startled Custer ordered his men to shoot their horses and stack the carcasses to form a wall, but they provided little protection against bullets. In less than an hour, Custer and reportedly all of the men in his command were killed in the worst American military disaster ever. After the battle, the Indians came through and stripped the bodies and mutilated all the uniformed soldiers, believing that the soul of a mutilated body would be forced to walk the earth for all eternity and could not ascend to heaven. Inexplicably, they stripped Custer’s body and cleaned it, but did not scalp or mutilate it. He had been wearing buckskins instead of a blue uniform, and some believe that the Indians thought he was not a soldier and so, thinking he was an innocent, left him alone. Because his hair was cut short for battle, others think that he did not have enough hair to allow for a very good scalping. Immediately after the battle, the myth emerged that they left him alone out of respect for his fighting ability, but few participating Indians knew who he was to have been so respectful. To this day, no one knows the real reason.

 

Little Bighorn was the pinnacle of the Indians’ power. They had achieved their greatest victory yet, but soon their tenuous union fell apart in the face of the continued white expansion West. Within a year, the Sioux nation was defeated and broken. “Custer’s Last Stand” was their last stand as well. The American nation would soon draw closer to being one interconnected unit. The railroads, telegraph, as well as rise of newspapers helped people to feel they were citizens of one large country. No longer was a person from only their state, but rather they formed a national identity that might have included traveling from Boston to Denver and visiting any number of new “rail towns” along the way. These so-called rail towns appeared all along the path of the new railways offering travelers a chance to get off the train and sleep in a hotel, get clothes laundered, or send a message to business associates. One of the most notable rail towns to crop up during the 1870s was Colton, CA that was named for a railroad executive named David Colton. As is still the case today, Colton, CA played a large role in shipping of goods along the railroads and as a small town where people can stop along their journey.

 

No region is more shrouded in myth than the area west of the Mississippi River. In popular films and best-selling novels, the late 19th century western frontier was represented as a place where heroic, ruggedly independent pioneers struggled against an unfamiliar environment and brought civilization to a savage wilderness. Throughout much of the 20th century, the cowboy and the western lawman were the classic American heroes. While other episodes from the American past faded, such as the era of the whale-hunting harpooner or the lumberjack, the western frontier remained a staple of American popular culture. While this image represents an important part of U.S. History, it remains vital that college students understand that even though Western expansion helped make the U.S. the modern power it is today there were more complicated (and tragic) aspects to the process that must not be forgotten.

 

American Industrialization and the Machine Age, 1877-1920

 

Between the Civil War and World War I, the modern American economy emerged. This is the period known as the Machine Age of American history. What are some of the features of this Machine Age? Historians teach their students a few basic things about this period: a national transportation and communication network was created; the corporation became the dominant form of business organization; and a managerial revolution transformed business operations making them more efficient and productive. These developments paid clear and positive dividends: By the beginning of the 20th century, per capita income and industrial production in the United States exceeded that of any other country except Britain.

 

Unlike the pre-Civil War economy, the Machine Age economy was dependent on raw materials from around the world and it sold goods in global markets. Business organization expanded greatly in size and scale. There was an unparalleled increase in factory production, mechanization, and business consolidation. By the beginning of the 20th century, the major sectors of the nation’s economy–banking, manufacturing, meatpacking, oil refining, railroads, and steel–were all dominated by a small number of giant corporations.

 

Such monopolization of wealth by a few elite men (the common term used to describe these men was “robber barons”) meant that only a few privileged Americans were capable of influencing events. Their power in the U.S. was staggering. The American writer Mark Twain called the late 19^th century industrial period the “Gilded Age.” By this, he meant that the period was glittering on the surface but corrupt underneath. In this popular view, the late 19th century was a period of greed and guile: of robber baron businessmen, unscrupulous speculators, shady ethical practices, scandal-plagued politics, and vulgar displays of both wealth and poverty. Many people rightly caricature the Gilded Age as an era of corruption. However, college students should consider a larger point that the Machine Age was also modern America’s formative period. During the Machine Age, the U.S. changed from an agrarian society of small producers into an urban society dominated by industrial corporations. This dynamic has never changed back, and in fact the current economic challenges Americans face in the current economy closely resemble issues from the Gilded Age.

 

Industrialism brought millions of new workers into cities such as New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Detroit. During the Machine Age, women and children entered the industrial labor force as never had happened before. Robber Barons, in fact, sought out women and children for employ. Most women went into low-paying clerical jobs, and sex discrimination was commonplace. Children, particularly teens, could perform many factory tasks and could be paid significantly less than a full-grown man. Although a few states passed child-labor laws, such laws were difficult to enforce and employers generally opposed state interference in their hiring practices.

Tension as a result of this arrangement was inevitable. Workers began to protest low wages, the attitude of employers, the hazards of the workplace, and the absence of disability insurance and pensions. The effectiveness of legislation designed to redress these grievances was usually limited by conservative Supreme Court rulings. Out of frustration, some workers began to participate in unions and in organized resistance. Unionization efforts took various directions. The Knights of Labor tried to ally all workers by creating producer and consumer cooperatives; the American Federation of Labor strove to organize skilled workers to achieve pragmatic objectives; and the Industrial Workers of the World attempted to overthrow capitalist society. One person that historians examine when discussing labor rights during the Machine Age was Eugene V. Debs. In 1893, Debs became president of the American Railway Union, the first effective industrial union in the United States. He would lead union opposition against robber barons for the next twenty years.

 

Debs and his colleagues backed up their protests against the robber barons by using the potent strike tactic. There were the railroad strikes of 1877 that shut down American travel and commerce; the Haymarket riots that saw public street murders committed both by the police and also the striking workers; and the violent Pullman strikes that eventually compelled President Cleveland to send in the U.S. Army to open up the rails. Railroad and steel magnates such as John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Andrew Mellon had a lot of power in the U.S. Their fortunes greatly exceeded the wealth of the U.S. government, and their businesses were vital to the larger progress of the American economy. They didn’t want union pressure, and hated men like Eugene V. Debs. While they had a lot of sway in making sure that Debs and his followers faced harassment, arrest, and sometime murder, the basic idea that wealthy men needed to share their money with those people who helped them to make the fortune became a constant claim in the U.S. during the Machine Age.

 

What changes did the new productivity that resulted from the Machine Age cause? For one, the increased availability of goods and services to a greater number of people was one reason that U.S. citizens of all economic levels saw a general improvement in living standards during this period. The era also witnessed advances in medical care, better diets, and improved living conditions. Furthermore, education, more than ever a means to upward mobility, became more readily available through the spread of public education. Robber Barons played a noble role in expanding education as men such as California governor Leland Stanford (a one-time railroad magnate) and the robber baron Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon spent some of their fortunes to develop new engineers at their self-named university in Pennsylvania.

 

The Machine Age also made life a lot more convenient for U.S. citizens. The indoor toilet and private bathtub became common during the period. At the same time, the tin can and the icebox altered lifestyles and diet, the sewing machine created a clothing revolution, and department stores and chain stores emerged that both created and served the new consumerism. Now common things such as drinking Coca-Cola (invented 1886), wearing Levi blue jeans (1873) and eating Cracker Jacks (1893) are all things that came to be in the U.S. during the Machine Age.

 

In the political sphere, the Machine Age featured some fascinating stories. The presidential campaign of 1884 was one of the most memorable in American history. The Republican nominee, James G. Blaine of Maine, was nicknamed the “plumed knight,” but disgruntled citizens regarded him as a symbol of corruption. Nasty slogans uttered by Democrats appeared across the country. One common chant stated “Blaine! Blaine! James G. Blaine! The Continental Liar from the State of Maine!” For their part the Democrats nominated Grover Cleveland whose main appeal was that, contrasted to Blaine, he was seen as a decent and honorable man. Trouble for Cleveland unfolded when a Buffalo, NY newspaper published a story called “A Terrible Tale.” Indeed, the newspaper revealed that the Democratic candidate had a child out of wedlock. Even worse, Republicans charged, Cleveland had placed the child in an orphanage and the mother in an insane asylum. To balance off the nasty slogans directed against James Blaine, the Republicans devised a chant that stated “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?” Some Cleveland supporters soon added on another line that quipped “he’s gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha.” Indeed, Cleveland won the 1884 election and was again elected to the White House in 1892.

 

Viewed in its totality, the Machine Age was a period of great change in the United States. Many knew great wealth, but this rising fortune also provoked feelings of tension and jealousy. Robber Barons controlled U.S. society and their power seemed limitless. Workers did what they could to gain some degree of control, but the period was not really known as one in which most immigrant workers could gain true fortune. Absent a governmental control of business, through taxes and regulations, the Machine Age powered on mainly driven by the labor and sweat of people who remain unknown to history.

 

 

Urban Life During Late 19^th Century U.S. History

 

Urbanization is the word that describes a process in which people begin to live together in cities. By the later 19^th century, more Americans lived in urban centers than on rural farms. This was the first time such a trend had appeared in U.S. History and it has, in fact, never been reversed. New York, Chicago, San Francisco, St. Louis, Youngstown, Cincinnati, Atlanta, and Pittsburgh are just a handful of cities that boomed with energy and money during the late 19^th century. The movement away from the farms was not lost on leading social observers. In 1893, speaking at the Chicago World’s Fair, historian Frederick Jackson Turner boldly claimed that the American West–the so-called frontier–was now closed as a result of the railroads and telegraphs that connected the nation together. There was no place that a person could go to “get away.” People now lived in (or around) cities, in urban centers dominated by factory life, the promise of fast money, and the reality of crime and poverty.

 

Cities grow in three ways: through physical expansion, by natural increase, and through migration and immigration. In the late nineteenth century, immigration from domestic and foreign sources was the most important cause of urban growth, with native whites, foreigners, and African Americans being the three major migrant groups of the period. Even more than today, American society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was transient. There was constant movement to and from geographic areas and constant movement within urban areas. Migration, in fact, provided one of the two paths to improved opportunity, with occupational change being the second path. Urban life appealed to so-called farm boys who wanted an easier life, sharecropping blacks trying to escape Jim Crow, and immigrants that did not have much opportunity in their homelands.

 

European immigration to the United States was the primary source of urban growth. It increased greatly after the Civil War, reaching 5.2 million in the 1880s then surging to 8.2 million in the first decade of the 20th century. Between 1882 and 1914, approximately 20 million immigrants came to the United States. In 1907 alone, 1.285 million arrived. By 1900, New York City had as many Irish residents as Dublin. It had more Italians than any city outside Rome and more Poles than any city except Warsaw. It had more Jews than any other city in the world, as well as sizeable numbers of Slavs, Lithuanians, Chinese, and Scandinavians.

 

Unlike earlier immigrants, who mainly came from northern and western Europe, the “new immigrants” came largely from southern and eastern Europe. Largely Catholic and Jewish in religion, the new immigrants came from the Balkans, Italy, Poland, and Russia. Many of the millions of immigrants who arrived into the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries did so with the intention of returning to their villages in the Old World. Known as “birds of passage,” many of these eastern and southern European migrants were peasants who had lost their property as a result of the commercialization of agriculture. They came to America to earn enough money to allow them to return home and purchase a piece of land. As one Slavic steelworker put it: “A good job, save money, work all time, go home, sleep, no spend.”

 

Many of these immigrants came to America alone, expecting to rejoin their families in Europe within a few years. From 1907 to 1911, of every hundred Italians who arrived in the United States, 73 returned to the Old Country. For Southern and Eastern Europe as a whole, approximately 44 of every 100 who arrived in the U.S. ultimately decided to return back their birth homes. Some immigrants, however, did not come as “sojourners.” In particular, Jewish immigrants from Russia, fleeing religious persecution, came in family groups and intended to stay in the United States from the beginning.

 

Western territories and states also experienced greater levels of immigration. It was not simply an east coast phenomenon. Called the “Ellis Island of the West,” San Francisco’s Angel Island was also a checkpoint for immigrants in the early years of the 20th century. But only a small proportion of the 175,000 people who arrived at Angel Island were allowed to remain in the United States. Angel Island was a detention center for Chinese immigrants. It was surrounded by barbed wire and was a consequence of the Chinese Exclusionary Act passed in the early 1880s. The stories associated with the practice are saddening. Thirteen-year-old Jack Moy and his mother sailed to the United States in 1927. The two spent a month in the detention center separated from one another. Immigration officials asked insulting personal questions, such as whether their mother had bound feet or how many water buffalo a village had or “who occupies the house on the fifth lot of your row in your native village.” Discrepancies in an answer could mean deportation to China. Immigration officials marked down every identifying mark, including scars, boils, and moles.

 

To join her husband in the United States, Suey Ting Gee had to pretend that she was the wife of another man. Under a U.S. law in effect from 1882 to 1943, the Chinese wives of resident alien laborers could not join them in this country. Overpopulation and rural poverty led many Japanese to emigrate to the United States, where they confronted intense racial prejudice. In California, the legislature imposed limits on Japanese land ownership, and the Hearst newspaper ran headlines such as ‘The Yellow Peril: How Japanese Crowd out the White Race.’ The San Francisco School Board stirred an international incident in 1906 when it segregated Japanese students in an ‘Oriental School.’

 

Other ethnic groups, most notably African Americans, and Mexicans, also met with prejudicial attitudes and discrimination. Overall, however, the city of the late nineteenth century nurtured the cultural diversity that so strongly characterizes modern America. Rapid urban growth created and intensified urban problems such as inadequate housing, overcrowding, and intolerable living conditions. Men such as the photographer Jacob Riis helped raise levels of awareness about the urban poverty the co-existed with the riches of the Gilded Age. His book, How The Other Half Lives (1892) led people to demand some sort of aid be given to the less fortunate. Political reforms strengthened the hand of local government in regulating the construction of housing, but American attitudes toward the profit motive and toward private enterprise placed limits on the reforms enacted.

 

Although scientific and technological breakthroughs improved urban life, the burden of urban poverty remained. While some reformers began to look to environmental factors to explain poverty, traditional attitudes toward poverty—attitudes that blamed the victim—restricted what most Americans were willing to do to alleviate poverty. The theory known as Social Darwinism took hold across the U.S. Proponents of these claims stated that different groups of people, who they arranged in something called races, had certain tendencies in their behaviors. Irish people, the argument went, drank too much alcohol. This was just the “way there were” and nothing could be done really to help them. Jews, the common beliefs held, were untrustworthy and greedy by nature so it was best not to lend them much aid. Even private agencies insisted on extending aid only to the “worthy poor” and on teaching the moral virtues of thrift and sobriety.

 

People living in urban areas also had to contend with crime and violence. Whether crime actually increased or was merely more conspicuous can be debated, but in many cases native whites blamed crime on those they considered to be “outsiders” in American society—foreigners and blacks. The ethnic diversity of the cities, combined with urban overcrowding and uncertain economic conditions, hardened anti-foreign and white-racist attitudes and violent incidences were common in urban areas. Uneven, sometimes prejudicial, application of laws by law enforcement officials raised questions about the nature of justice, equality, and individual freedom in the U.S.

 

Despite these limiting attitudes, there were technical accomplishments in solving problems relating to sanitation, garbage disposal, the building and lighting of streets, and the construction of bridges. City engineers who applied their technical expertise to urban problems became very important to city governments while at the same time also having a tremendous impact on the home life of Americans. The single unit nuclear family flourished in urban American society. Many different types of changes in society changed altered family responsibilities and also individual lifestyles. Reduction in family size freed adults from the responsibilities of parenthood at an earlier age. Longer life expectancy increased the number of older adults. Childhood and adolescence became more distinct stages of life. People’s roles in school, in the family, on the job, and in the community came to be determined by age more than any other characteristic.” The leisure-time revolution brought about by labor-saving devices and by a shortened workweek changed the American way of life. As the average workweek decreased to forty-seven hours by 1920, individuals turned to croquet and bicycling as favorite leisure activities. Entertaining the public through spectator sports, the circus, show business, and motion pictures became a profitable business endeavor. It was in the cities that a person could see the best entertainment and have new foods and drinks and meet with all sorts of interesting other city goers etc.

 

Moreover, the mass production of sound and images made possible by the phonograph and the still camera dissolved the uniqueness of experience. Even news was transformed into big business and a mass commodity by the “yellow journalism” tactics of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. People realy enjoyed reading the city newspaper and it was common for a person to read more than one each day. City papers and well as city athletic teams began to give regional areas their own identities.  Mass entertainment and mass culture also produced a larger nationalizing effect. However, even though show business provided new opportunities for women, blacks, and immigrants, it often reinforced prejudicial stereotypes, especially concerning African Americans. Furthermore, in an America that was becoming more culturally diverse, different groups pursued their own forms of leisure. This often caused concern on the part of some reformers who tended to label individuals as un-American if their activities did not conform to the Puritan traditions of the nation’s past.

 

Exploring the efforts taken to keep the U.S. from changing too much as it urbanized is best seen by examining some of the efforts to limit the rise of new attitudes. During the Gilded Age there were repeated attempts to enforce moral purity. In 1880, Massachusetts became the first state to reenact “Blue Laws” that prohibited most forms of business on Sunday. Lotteries, which had been widely used by government in the early 19th century to raise revenue, were outlawed, by 1890, in 43 of the 44 states. A number of states enacted laws forbidding horse racing, boxing, and even the manufacture of cigarettes. The earliest attempts to suppress narcotics were made. In 1877, Utah became the first state to forbid the sale of opiates for non-medical purposes.

 

The largest movement to enforce morality was the movement to prohibit the manufacture and sale of alcohol. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which was founded in 1874, lobbied for a constitutional amendment to prohibit alcohol. Perhaps the most striking example of the politics of piety was the crusade to enforce sexual prudery. In 1872, Congress enacted the Comstock Act, which banned obscene literature from the mails. The law was interpreted broadly and was used to prevent the distribution of birth control information and contraceptive devices through the mails. The law was named for Anthony Comstock, head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who became the government agent responsible for enforcing the statute. Comstock had 3,000 persons arrested for obscenity and took credit for hounding 16 people to their deaths. Among the books he successfully banned were Fanny Hill and A Peep Behind the Curtains of a Female Seminary. He also convinced the Department of Interior to ban Walt Whitman for writing poetry that he considered obscene.

 

The attempts to maintain Victorian attitudes in a rapidly changing modern, urban society led to questions concerning the role of government in society and in the life of the individual: these are questions that seem as relevant today as they were in the late nineteenth century. Many of the issues that we think of as uniquely modern were hotly debated during the late 19th century: corruption in business and government, ostentatious displays of wealth, the ruthless exploitation of natural resources, immigration challenges, how to narrow the gulf between the rich and the poor, and determining what it obscene versus trendy. All of these topics were on the minds of people in the late 19^th century as the nation became more urbanized and interconnected. Urbanization was, in fact, the spark that would produce a host of long-lasting developments in the way that people lived and interacted with others.

 

 

 

Gilded Age Politics 1877-1900

 

American politics during the Gilded Age reflected, to a large degree, the dynamics unfolding in the larger society. Just as a class of super elite robber barons expanded their wealth and status on the backs on newly arrived immigrants, so, too did organizations know as “political machines.” The term used to describe the leaders of these “machines” was “boss.” Machine politics was a byproduct of the urbanization process we studied last week. Particularly as it applied to using immigrant voters to support political candidates, the new urban centers were well known for their “bosses” and “machines.”

 

In recent years, it has become commonplace to characterize politics in the Gilded Age as corrupt and issueless. The major parties, this view holds, “divided over spoils, not issues” and over “patronage, not principle.” This view is quite misleading. Gilded Age politics were exciting and transformational. Perhaps owing to the power of “machines,” the period witnessed a higher level of voter turnout than at any other time in American history. The federal government, during this period, assumed greater authority and power over banking and currencies, taxes and tariffs, land and immigration. Elected officials were slowly gearing up to take on the robber barons’ power. Gilded Age politics were also principled in clear ways. This was the period that welcomed in the temperance and saw the women’s rights crusades take on a greater importance.

 

Nevertheless, the power of the bosses, and control of what was know as the “spoils system” that allowed machines to reward supporters with jobs and contracts, is an unavoidable part of Gilded Age discussions. George Plunkitt, a local leader of New York City’s Democratic Party, defended the spoils system. “You can’t keep an organization together without patronage,” he declared. “Men ain’t in politics for nothin’. They want to get somethin’ out of it.”

 

This idea was well established in American political history. During the 1830s, Andrew Jackson had first introduced the spoils system to the federal government. The practice, epitomized by the saying “to the victory belong the spoils,” involved placing party supporters into government positions. An incoming president would dismiss thousands of government workers and replace them with members of his own party. This practice certainly ensured that officials would be loyal to their leader, but it also meant that bureaucrats might not be of the highest caliber and possibly also that corruption could ensue. The Credit Mobilier scandal under the Grant administration was a “last straw” as citizens of the Gilded Age soon began mounting demand for reform.

 

Ironically, the president who led the successful campaign for civil service, Chester Arthur, a Republican, was linked to a party faction from New York that was known for its abuse of the spoils of office. In fact, in 1878, Arthur had been fired from his post at New York Federal Custom’s Collection for giving away too many patronage jobs. As president, however, Arthur became an ardent reformer. He insisted that high-ranking members of his own party be prosecuted for their part in a Post Office scandal. He vetoed a law to improve rivers and harbors. In 1883, he helped push through the Pendleton Act. Failing to please either machine politicians or reformers, Arthur was the last incumbent president to be denied renomination for a second term by his own party.

 

The Pendleton Act stipulated that government jobs should be awarded on the basis of merit. It provided for selection of government employees through competitive examinations. It also made it unlawful to fire or demote covered employees for political reasons or to require them to give political service or payment, and it set up a Civil Service Commission to enforce the law. When the Pendleton Act went into effect, only 10 percent of the government’s 132,000 civilian employees were placed under civil service. The rest remained at the disposal of the party power, which could distribute for patronage, payoffs, or purchase. Today, more than 90 percent of the 2.7 million federal civilian employees are covered by merit systems. In 1884, New York became the first state to adopt a civil service system for state workers. Massachusetts became the second state when it started a merit system in 1885.

 

During the 1870s and 1880s, the Democratic and Republican Parties were of almost exactly equal strength. In the elections between 1876 and 1892, no more than 3.1 percentage points separated the two parties. The two parties differed enormously in their principles, programs, and ethno-cultural composition. In the late 19th century, it was sometimes said that there wasn’t a dime’s difference between the two parties, that the difference between the two parties was the difference between tweedledum and tweedledee. This wasn’t true.

 

The Republican Party tended to emphasize national unity, economic modernization, and moral reform. Regarding the Democrats as the party of treason for opposing the Civil War, the Republicans ran Union veterans in eight of nine presidential elections between 1868 and 1900. The sole exception, James G. Blaine, lost his presidential bid in 1884. The party urged the faithful to “vote as you shot.” They portrayed Democrats as “the old slave-owner and slave driver, the saloon-keeper, the ballot-box-stuffer, KKK members, the criminal class of the great cities, the men who cannot read or write.”

 

The Republicans were committed to rapidly modernizing the economy through such measures as protective tariffs to assist industry and land grants to encourage railroad construction. The Republican Party was also committed to using the 14th Amendment to protect corporations’ ability to operate free from excessive state regulation. The Democrats were split on this program of economic modernization. Grover Cleveland supported big business and the gold standard but in 1887 came out strongly against the tariff, which he viewed as a tax on consumers for the benefit of rich industrialists.

 

Who were some of the period’s most famous bosses who influenced the ways that people voted? William Tweed was the New York City boss. Tweed was a New York City politician who led a group of corrupt politicians who gained power in the Democratic Party in 1863. Their machine came to known as Tammany Hall. Although he held minor elective offices, Tweed primarily exercised power through his control of patronage, the ability to appoint supporters to jobs in New York City government. For instance, after he was appointed commissioner of public works, Tweed enlarged the street maintenance crew to include twelve jobs as “manure inspectors.”

 

Not only did Tweed maintain and increase his power by rewarding his supporters, he also profited personally from business conducted by the city of New York. For a company to receive business contracts with the city, it had to inflate its prices and kick back a portion of its income to Tweed and his closest associates in local government. This coterie of corrupt politicians enriching themselves at the public’s expense was known at the time as the Tweed Ring.

 

The Tweed Ring was successful in part because it was popular among many voters, especially the Irish immigrants who had flooded the city in search of a better livelihood. Tweed and his friends ensured that Irish-American supporters received jobs and other assistance from the city government and from companies doing business with the city. For example, the construction cost of the New York County Courthouse, begun in 1861, grew to nearly $13 million, about $178 million in today’s dollars, and nearly twice the cost of the Alaska Purchase in 1867. “A carpenter was paid $360,751 (roughly $4.9 million today) for one month’s labor in a building with very little woodwork … a plasterer got $133,187 ($1.82 million) for two days’ work”. Tweed and his friends garnered huge profits from the city’s urban development. This greed, however, also proved to be Tweed’s undoing. Convicted in 1877 for stealing as much as $200 million from the city’s tax revenues, Tweed died in a jail cell far removed from his once-great base of power.

 

Tweed’s downfall did not signal an end to political machines in the Gilded Age. However, there emerged another phenomenon, one that saw non-immigrant Americans trying to use politics for social causes such as the banning of alcohol in the U.S. Perhaps the most notable of these “single issue interest groups” was the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. In many towns in Ohio and New York in the fall of 1873 women concerned about the destructive power of alcohol met in churches to pray and then marched to the saloons to ask the owners to close their establishments. They met with success but it was only temporary so by the next summer the women concluded that they must become organized nationally. This led to the founding of the WCTU-the oldest continuing non-sectarian woman’s organization in the world.

 

What was behind this movement’s agenda? National Prohibition has been interpreted as a cultural war between Protestants who were already well established in North American and the newer Catholic and Jewish immigrants, who typically drank alcohol beverages as part of their cultures. In addition, Protestants tended to live in rural areas and towns whereas the newer immigrants tended to settle in large cities, thus creating another division. The WCTU was anxious to “Americanize” new immigrants, which meant to them, to persuade them to abstain from alcohol beverages. In the first two decades of the twentieth century much of its budget was spent on its center on Ellis Island in order to begin this “Americanization” process. The WCTU was especially concerned about the immigration of Irish and Germans and what it believed was the threat they posed to the promotion of prohibition.

 

According to the Ohio Historical Society, “From the mid 1870s to the early 1890s, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was the major organization within the United States seeking Prohibition. Its members utilized rather extreme tactics to convince Americans to abstain from alcohol. Members picketed bars and saloons. They prayed for the souls of the bar patrons. They also tried to block the entryways of establishments that sold liquor. Although the WCTU is most closely associated with the prohibition of alcohol, it is not simply a “one-issue organization.” It has addressed a number of other social reform issues, including “lust-free” marriage, sanitation, abstinence from tobacco, public health, abortion, homosexuality, labor rights, premarital chastity, eugenics, prostitution, gambling, pornography, international peace, dress reform, illicit drugs, suffrage, same-sex marriage, women’s rights, the “War on Christmas,” the display of Scripture in public places, and maintaining Blue laws prohibiting golf and other leisure activities on Sundays.

 

What can me conclude about Gilded Age politics? The Gilded Age will be remembered for the accomplishments of thousands of American thinkers, inventors, entrepreneurs, writers, and promoters of social justice. Although politicians had limited impact on the tremendous change transforming America, there is still much we can learn by examining the so-called forgettable presidents and the issues with which they grappled. Of course, we must also study the power of bosses and machines all as a precursor to understanding the nature and scope of reforms that will emerge once the Gilded Age lost its luster.

 

 

The American Age of Progress: The Progressive Era

 

As its name implies, the Progressive period was rooted in the dual claims that (a) humans could make “progress” in their society and (b) governmental structures were the best tools for achieving desired social progress. The period took place from roughly 1890-1920. It reflected many of the issues, ideas, and voters’ concerns that took center stage during the Gilded Age. A growing number of native-born Americans feared that the country’s republican traditions were being steadily eroded by the growth of business monopolies, machine corruption, and the violent struggle between capital and labor.

 

Few periods in American history witnessed more ferment than the years that spanned the Progressive Era. This movement touched every aspect of American life. It transformed government into an active, interventionist entity at the national level, most notably under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, but also at the state and local levels. For the first time Americans were prepared to use government, including the federal government, as an instrument of reform.

 

Progressive reformers secured a federal income tax based on the ability to pay; formulated inheritance taxes; devised a modern national banking system; and developed government regulatory commissions to oversee banking, insurance, railroads, gas, electricity, telephones, transportation, and manufacturing. Education also became a self-conscious instrument of social change. The ideas of the educator and philosopher John Dewey influenced the reformers. Progressive educational reformers broadened school curricula to include teaching about health and community life; called for active learning that would engage students’ minds and draw out their talents; applied new scientific discoveries about learning; and tailored teaching techniques to students’ needs. Progressive educators promoted compulsory education laws, kindergartens, and high schools. They raised the literacy rate of African Americans from 43 percent to 77 percent.

 

During the Progressive Era, public health officers launched successful campaigns against hookworm, malaria, and pellagra, and reduced the incidence of tuberculosis, typhoid, and diphtheria. Pure milk campaigns also slashed rates of infant and child mortality. Urban Progressives also created public parks, libraries, hospitals, and museums. They constructed new water and sewer systems and eliminated “red-light” districts, such as New Orleans’ Storyville, in most major cities.

 

To bridge the gap between capital and labor, Progressives called for arbitration and mediation of labor disputes. Meanwhile, many Progressive businessmen called for a new-style “welfare capitalism” that provided workers with higher wages and pensions.

The Progressive era was one of the most creative in the realm of culture and the arts. In the hands of Alfred Stieglitz, photography became an art form for the first time. Architects like Frank Lloyd Wright helped create modern architecture. The first exhibition of modern art, the Armory Show in New York in 1913, was held in the United States.

 

A new vocabulary characterized this era. Americans would speak about a “public interest” that was opposed by “special interests.” They would also speak about “efficiency” and “expertise” in government and “morality” in foreign affairs. For the first time, Americans spoke of “social workers,” “muckrakers,” “trustbusters,” “feminists,” “social scientists,” and “conservation.” To increase popular control over government, Progressive reformers lobbied successfully for direct primaries; the elimination of boss rule; the direct election of Senators; woman’s suffrage; and in many state legislatures, adoption of the referendum, the initiative, and the recall. Reformers also saw adoption of the first restrictions on political lobbyists and the first regulations on campaign finances.

 

To modernize government finances, Progressives successfully instituted the income tax and established the Federal Reserve System to oversee the nation’s economy. To regulate corporate behavior, Progressives enforced new anti-trust laws and established the country’s first effective regulatory commissions. They also established licenses for such professionals as pharmacists, veterinarians, and undertakers. To improve social welfare, they lobbied for workmen’s compensation laws, minimum wage laws for women workers, and old-age and widow’s pensions. To improve public health, Progressive reformers successfully lobbied for water standards, state and local departments of health, sanitary codes for schools, and laws prohibiting the sale of adulterated foods and drugs.

 

The Progressive era also had a much more negative side. It saw the spread of disfranchisement and segregation of African Americans in the South and even in the federal government. This era also saw the enactment of reforms, such as at-large voting, that lessened the political influence of immigrant groups at a time when city budgets were increasing. Critics frequently condemned Progressives as moralistic, undemocratic, and elitist. In fact, Progressives did not agree on a single agenda. They disagreed vehemently in their attitudes toward such subjects as immigration restriction and prohibition of alcohol. They were a diverse lot that included Republicans and Democrats, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, and urban and rural reformers. Women’s organizations stood at the forefront of the social reforms and policy innovations during the Progressive era. Women activists were especially active in efforts to end child labor and to protest companies that had unsafe working conditions or produced unsafe products. For the most part, Progressives were urban and college-educated, including journalists, academics, teachers, doctors, and nurses, as well as many business people.

 

Uniting these various reform movements stemmed from a preoccupation with the elimination of corruption and waste and an emphasis on efficiency, science, and professional expertise as the best ways to solve social problems. A book published in 1913, Benjamin Parker De Witt’s The Progressive Movement, argued that three tendencies underlay progressive reforms: the desire to eliminate political corruption, the impulse to make government more efficient and effective, and a belief that government should “relieve social and economic distress.” Progressives wanted to apply the techniques of systematization, rationalization, and bureaucratic administrative control developed by business to problems posed by the city and industry.

 

For all its flaws and limitations, the Progressive era was instrumental in formulating the rationale for much of the welfare state, including Social Security, unemployment insurance, and aid to single parent families. Here are just a few of the areas where Progressives left a meaningful impact on the larger society.

 

In 1916, Margaret Sanger, a former nurse, opened the country’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn. Police shut it down ten days later. “No woman can call herself free,” she insisted, “until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.” Margaret Sanger coined the phrase “birth control” and eventually convinced the courts that the Comstock Act did not prohibit doctors from distributing birth control information and devices. As founder of Planned Parenthood, she aided in the development of the birth control pill, which appeared in 1960. This was a massive achievement, standing alongside women receiving the voting rights (also a Progressive era gain) in the history of American behaviors.

 

There was also government reform. This was an effort to lock down the bosses and machines and also to make the government capable of limiting robber baron abusiveness toward the common man. It started first in Wisconsin. Republican governor Robert LaFollette put into effect the “Wisconsin idea,” which provided a model for reformers across the nation. It provided for direct primaries to select party nominees for public office and for a railroad commission to regulate railroad rates. The model also presented tax reform, opposition to political bosses, and the initiative and recall, devices to give the people more direct control over government. Another figure using government to help limit elite power was Theodore Roosevelt. As president between 1901-1908, he instructed his attorney general to file suit against Northern Securities, a railroad holding company, and the Beef Trust in Chicago, for illegal constraint of trade. He wanted to use his power as an elected leader to help the little guy, to give him a “square deal” that showed rich people would now have to answer to the president. Unlike in earlier periods, the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled to support the rights of labor that meant they had finally shifted views and voted against the robber baron types.

 

People found out about this sort of stuff by reading the newspapers. And specifically by reading stories published by so-called muckrakers. Muckraking reporters, exploiting mass circulation journalism, attacked malfeasance in American politics and business. President Theodore Roosevelt gave them the name “muckrakers” after a character in the book Pilgrim’s Progress, “the Man with the Muckrake,” who was more preoccupied with filth than with Heaven above.

 

Popular magazines such as McClure’s, Everybody’s, Pearson’s, Cosmopolitan, and Collier’s published articles exposing the evils of American society–political corruption, stock market manipulation, fake advertising, vices, impure food and drugs, racial discrimination, and lynching. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle exposed unsanitary conditions in the meat packing industry. John Spargo’s Bitter Cry of the Children disclosed the abuse of child laborers in the nation’s coal mines. Lincoln Steffin’s The Shame of the Cities uncovered corruption in city government.

 

The basic challenge confronting early 20th century America was to respond to the problems that had accompanied the transformation of American society from a rural, agricultural culture into an urban, industrial society. Filled with faith in the power of government, Progressives launched reform in the areas of public health, housing, urban planning and design, parks and recreation, workplace safety, workers’ compensation, pensions, insurance, poor relief, and health care. Their effort has a massive impact on the 1890s-1920s and would continue to shape later epochs in American history. It is almost impossible not to recognize the ways in which claims the progressives made about government having a responsibility to try and improve the society still ring loudly in modern debates etc.

 

 

The American Quest For Empire

 

By 1890, the United States had by far the world’s most productive economy. However, this aside, the United States was not a great military or diplomatic power. Its army numbered less than 30,000 troops, and its navy had only about 10,000 seamen. Britain’s army was five times the size of its American counterpart, and its navy was ten times bigger. The United States’ military was small because the country was situated between two large oceans and was surrounded by weak or friendly nations. It faced no serious military threats and had little interest in asserting military power overseas.

 

From the Civil War until the 1890s, most Americans had little interest in territorial expansion. William Seward, the secretary of state under presidents Lincoln and Johnson, did envision American expansion into Alaska, Canada, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Iceland, Greenland, Hawaii, and other Pacific islands. But he realized only two small parts of this vision. In 1867, the United States purchased Alaska from Russia for $72 million and occupied the Midway Islands in the Pacific.

 

Americans resisted expansion for two major reasons. One was that imperial rule seemed inconsistent with America’s republican principles. George Washington had specifically warned the country against becoming involved with other nations’ business. This was the inherited tradition in the U.S. since the 1790s. A second reason was that the United States was uninterested in acquiring people with different cultures, languages, and religions. This fact of life in the U.S., as urbanization took root, was something with which native-born Americans struggled mightily. Nevertheless, the Progressive spirit of the time led some citizens to argue that the United States had a duty to uplift backward societies. Just as they (running government agencies) could help the U.S. to progress, so, too, the period’s mainstream wisdom held, could they help the world.

 

By the mid-1890s, a shift had taken place in American attitudes toward expansion that was sparked partly by a European scramble for empire. Between 1870 and 1900, the European powers seized 10 million square miles of territory in Africa and Asia, a fifth of the world’s land mass. About 150 million people were subjected to colonial rule. In the United States, a growing number of policy makers, bankers, manufacturers, and trade unions grew fearful that the country might be closed out in the struggle for global markets and raw materials. Tied to this concern was a Eugenics-based claim that the world’s nations were engaged in a Darwinian struggle for survival. The U.S. had a responsibility to its White, Anglo Saxon heritage to compete. Whatever the reason, there is little question that a new assertiveness on the part of the United States was taking hold. The best way to channel this energy, however, was yet undecided.

 

One man who had an idea was Alfred Thayer Mahan. He was a naval strategist and the author of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. His research argued that national prosperity and power depended on control of the world’s sea-lanes. “Whoever rules the waves rules the world,” Mahan wrote. To become a major naval power, the United States began to replace its wooden sailing ships with steel vessels powered by coal or oil in 1883. But control of the seas would also require the acquisition of naval bases and coaling stations. Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm had copies of Mahan’s books placed on every ship in the German High Seas Fleet and the Japanese government put translations in its imperial bureaus. This indicated that, during the 1890s and early 1900s, whoever was to prosper in their quest for empire would have to be prepared for military struggle.

 

American foreign policy makers took up this challenge. The United States came close to declaring war against Germany over Samoa in 1889; against Chile in 1891, over the treatment of U.S. sailors; and against Britain in 1895, over a territorial dispute between Venezuela and Britain. American involvement in the overthrow of Hawaii’s monarchy in 1893 precipitated a momentous debate over the United States’ global role. They debated whether the U.S. should behave like a great power and seize colonies or whether it should remain something different and more uplifting.

 

The debate over America’s global role intensified when Cubans began to fight for their independence from Spain in 1895. Americans were sympathetic to Cuba’s struggle for independence, but were divided about how to help. The Republican speaker of the House did not want “to spill American blood,” unless American interests were directly threatened, whereas Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican assistant secretary of the Navy, pushed for war against Spain.

 

President William McKinley was deeply ambivalent about war against Spain. The last president to have served in the Civil War, McKinley said he had seen too much carnage at battles like Antietam to be enthusiastic about war with Spain. “I’ve been through one war. I have seen the dead piled up, and I do not want to see another.” Ultimately, however, the pressure of public opinion forced McKinley into the war that made the United States an international power. Newspaper publishers like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer worked up war fever among the public with reports of Spanish atrocities against Cuban rebels. This process, known as yellow journalism, remains a clear part of U.S. foreign policy. Please recall that prior to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, newspapers and media outlets declared loudly that Iraq’s leader was committing atrocities against his people and possessed weapons of mass destruction as well.

 

In late 1898, an explosion sank the U.S.S. Maine in Cuban’s Havana harbor. A naval court of inquiry blamed the explosion on a mine, further inflaming public sentiment against Spain. It is notable that modern historians roundly agree that possible blame for the explosion might be owed to the American sailor reported to have been smoking next to the ship’s gunpowder cache. Not all the sailors died form the Maine’s explosion; many told of card game (with smoking) taking place in the ammunition well.

 

It ultimately did not matter who destroyed the warship. After ten days of debate, Congress declared war, but only after adopting the Teller Amendment. The amendment made it clear that the United States did not harbor imperialist ambitions, and it announced that the United States would not acquire Cuba. European leaders were shocked by this declaration. Britain’s Queen Victoria called on the European power to “unite…against such unheard [of] conduct,” since the United States might in the future declare Ireland and other colonies independent.

 

But after the United States defeated Spain, it set up a military government on Cuba and made the soldiers’ withdrawal contingent on the Cubans accepting the Platt Amendment. This amendment was quite different that the Teller Amendment. The Platt Amendment gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuba to protect “life, property, and individual liberties.” It also established a permanent U.S. naval station on the island of Cuba that is still open today.

 

All in all, President McKinley characterized the Spanish-American War as “splendid.” The 144-day war also resulted in the United States taking control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. The U.S. had acquired a global empire from the Spanish. It also, however, had begun a bloody (and quite new) chapter in American history. Indeed, the United States started the 20^th Century engaged in a bloody, but largely forgotten war. The Philippine American War, fought from February 1899 to July 1902, claimed 250,000 (mostly Pilipino) lives and helped establish the United States as a power in the Pacific. The conflict was a sequel to the Spanish American War of 1898, which had been waged, in part, in support of Cubans fighting for independence from Spain. But it was also fueled by American desire to become a world power.

 

On February 4, 1899, fighting erupted between American and Filipino soldiers, leaving 59 Americans and approximately 3,000 Filipinos dead. With the vice president casting a tie-breaking vote, a congressional resolution declaring the Philippines independent was defeated. American commanders hoped for a short conflict, but in the end, more than 70,000 would fight in the archipelago. Unable to defeat the United States in conventional warfare, the Filipinos and their leader, General Emilio Aguinaldo, adopted guerrilla tactics. To suppress the insurgency, villages were forcibly relocated or burned. Non-combatant civilians were imprisoned or killed. Americans employed vicious torture techniques on suspected insurrects, such as the water cure, in which a suspect was made to lie face up while water was poured onto his face. Aspects of this technique, of course, reappeared in the American invasion of Iraq under the name water boarding. American general in the Philippines did not see any other solution better than treating the local population harshly.

One general declared:

 

“It may be necessary to kill half of the Filipinos in order that the remaining half of the population may be advanced to a higher plane of life than their present semi-barbarous state affords.”

 

The most notorious incident of the war took place on Samar Island. In retaliation for a Filipino raid on an American garrison, in which American troops had been massacred, General Jacob W. Smith told his men to turn the island into a “howling wilderness” so that “even birds could not live there.” He directed a marine major to kill “all persons…capable of bearing arms.” He meant everyone over the age of 10. Smith was court-martialed and “admonished” for violating military discipline.

 

In truth, U.S. leaders tried to transform the country into a showcase of American-style democracy in Asia. But there was a strong undercurrent of condescension and racism. U.S. President William Howard Taft, who had served as governor-general of the Philippines, called the Filipinos “our little brown brothers.” Current observers could not help but remember that U.S. lawmakers had banned Chinese immigration, capturing the levels of anti-Asian attitudes common among many U.S. policy makers, the prior decade.

No discussion of the American quest for empire during the early 20^th century would be complete without examining Theodore Roosevelt, who had become president after William McKinley’s assassination. The well-known Progressive leader believed the U.S. had an obligation to help the world “elect decent men” and he set about flexing U.S. power. He announced the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine:

 

“Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the western hemisphere, the adherence of the U.S. to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of international police power.”

 

This assertion was remarkable at the time, but it was extremely powerful in its impact. I will leave it to you to think about whether or not you think that modern U.S. presidents use the Roosevelt Corollary in their own foreign policies!

 

To enforce order, forestall foreign intervention, and protect U.S. economic interests, the United States intervened in the Caribbean and Central America some 20 times over the next quarter century–namely, in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama. Each intervention followed a common pattern: after intervening to restore order, U.S. forces became embroiled in the countries’ internal political disputes. Before exiting, the United States would train and fund a police force and military to maintain order and would sponsor an election intended to put into power a strong leader supportive of American interests. Unfortunately, the men who took power in many of these countries, such as Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and Francois Duvalier in Haiti, established despotic rule.

 

Of course, the most notable part of Roosevelt’s foreign policy as it related to U.S. empire was the Panama Canal. Prior to the development of the atomic bomb and the landing of astronauts on the moon, the Panama Canal was perhaps this country’s signal engineering achievement. Fifty-one miles long, with about $3.5 billion in bases and infrastructure, the canal links the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

 

The story of how the U.S. came to own land in South America, however, points to the growing American Empire. The Isthmus of Panama was located in Colombia, which had rejected a U.S. proposal to build a canal. “You could no more make an agreement with them than you could nail currant jelly to a wall,” President Theodore Roosevelt said in response to the rejection. Years later, President Roosevelt said that the people of Panama rebelled against Colombia “literally as one man.” A senator quipped, “Yes, and the one man was Roosevelt.” In 1911, Roosevelt said bluntly, “I took the Isthmus, started the canal and then left Congress not to debate the canal but to debate me.” In 1906, eager to see the greatest accomplishment of his presidency, he became the first president to travel overseas. He went to Panama at the height of the rainy season and took the controls of a 95-ton steam shovel. Built at a cost of $387 million over a period of 10 years, the Panama Canal was a declaration of America’s coming of age in the world.

 

The American quest for empire had various motivating factors. One overriding idea was the U.S. needed to compete in order to survive globally as other nations were also becoming more powerful. Another common belief was the U.S. was helping the world. This claim mirrored Progressive claims made domestically, and offered Americans a welcoming platform upon which to stand as their cheered their country’s successes.

 

 

America and the First World War, 1914-18

 

World War I killed more people (more than 9 million military and another 5 million noncombatants), involved more countries (28 nations), and cost more money ($186 billion/direct costs; $151 billion/ indirect costs), than any previous war in history. It was the first war to use airplanes, tanks, long-range artillery, submarines, and poison gas. It left at least 7 million men permanently disabled.

 

World War I probably had more far-reaching consequences than any other preceding war. Four years of war killed a million troops from the British Empire; 1.5 million troops from the Hapsburg Empire; 1.7 million French troops; 1.7 million Russians; and 2 million German troops. Politically, it resulted in the downfall of four monarchies–in Russia in 1917, in Austria-Hungary and Germany in 1918, and in Turkey in 1922. It contributed to the Bolshevik rise to power in Russia in 1917 and the triumph of fascism in Italy in 1922. It ignited colonial revolts in the Middle East and in Southeast Asia. Economically, the war severely disrupted the European economies and allowed the United States to become the world’s business power. American bankers and robber barons ruled the world. The war also brought vast social consequences, including the mass murder of Armenians in Turkey and an influenza epidemic that killed over 25 million people worldwide. The Great Flu of 1918 is, for many, a forgotten piece of history. My feelings are, however, that educated Americans should know about this episode in the nation’s history.

 

No one expected much of World War I. At first, the armies relied on outdated methods of communication, such as carrier pigeons. However, by the time the conflict was over, tanks, submarines, airplane-dropped bombs, machine guns, and poison gas had transformed the nature of modern warfare.  In a single day at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, some 100,000 British troops plodded into steady machine gunfire from Germans. Some 60,000 soldiers were killed or wounded. Those who witnessed the fighting endured new disorders such as “battle fatigue,” “shell shock,” and something the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud termed as “nervosa.” The newspapers claimed that WW I would be the “war to end all wars.” It really just set the stage for WW II two decades later.

 

How did this all happen? The answer is, unfortunately, not easy to explain or understand. On June 28, 1914, a car carrying Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the imperial Hapsburg throne, made a wrong turn in the city of Sarajevo. This city rests in the nation today known as Serbia, geographically close to places such as Greece and Romania. In 1914, the area was controlled by Austria and this is why their archduke was riding around the city in the first place. As the car tried to turn around, someone approached, pulled out a revolver, and shot twice. Within an hour, the Archduke and his wife were dead. The man who killed him, Gavrilo Princip, was a 19-year-old Bosnian nationalist who worked with a group called the “Black Hand.” This group, and ostensibly also Princip, wanted Austria to give up control of the Balkans and let Serbia and Bosnia become free.

 

This really wasn’t on the minds of the Austrians, however. Their archduke and his wife were assassinated in open daylight. The emperor of the Austria-Hungary wanted to punish Serbia. Austria was, however, weak internationally and they asked for Germany (a more powerful nation) to lend some diplomatic and military support to punishing Serbia. Meanwhile, Russia, fearful of Austrian and German expansion into the Balkans, strongly supported the Serbs and began to mobilize its army. This move made Germany’s leadership fear encirclement by Russia and France. Germany sent an ultimatum to France asking it to declare its neutrality in the event of a conflict between Russia and Germany. The French refused. They were obligated by treaty to support Russia and were still bitter over their defeat by Prussia in 1871. When Russia failed to demobilize its forces, the German Kaiser agreed to war.

 

World War I caught most people by surprise. Lulled by a century of peace–Europeans had not seen a large-scale war since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815–many observers had come to regard armed conflict as a relic of the past, rendered unthinkable by human progress. World War I shattered these dreams. The war demonstrated that death and destruction had not yet been banished from human affairs.

 

Faced by Russia to its east and France to its west, Germany believed that its only hope for victory was to strike first. The German military had formulated a blueprint (known as the Schlieffen Plan) for victory in Western Europe in 42 days. The attack would occur before the Russians would have time to advance from the east. The plan called for a preemptive strike at France through Belgium.

 

Germany’s plan involved a violation of international law. Belgium was a neutral country and Britain was committed to its defense. Thus, a German invasion was certain to bring Britain into the war. Germany asked for permission to move its troops through Belgium. But King Albert, the country’s monarch, refused by saying, “Belgium is a nation, not a road.” Germany decided to press ahead anyway; its forces invaded Belgium on August 3.

 

The German military strategy worked better on paper than it did in practice. While fierce resistance by 200,000 Belgian soldiers did not stop the German advance, it did give Britain and France time to mobilize their forces. Meanwhile, Russia mobilized faster than expected, forcing Germany to divert 100,000 troops to the eastern front. German hopes for a quick victory were dashed at the first battle of the Marne in September 1914, when a retreating French army launched a powerful counter-attack, assisted by 6,000 troops transported to the front by 1,200 Parisian taxicabs.

 

After the Allies halted Germany’s massive offensive through France and Belgium at the Marne River, the Great War bogged down into trench warfare and a ghastly stalemate ensued. Lines of men, stretching from the English Channel to the Swiss border, formed an unmovable battlefront across northern France. Four million troops burrowed into trenches that were 6-to-8 feet deep and wide enough for two men to pass each other. The trenches stretched for 450 miles. The soldiers were ravaged by tuberculosis and plagued with lice and rats. They stared at each other across barren expanses called “no-man’s land” and fought pitched battles over narrow strips of blood-soaked earth.

 

To end the stalemate, Germany introduced several military innovations in 1915. But none proved decisive. Germany dispatched submarines to prevent merchant ships from reaching Britain; it added poison chlorine gas to its military arsenal at the second battle of Ypres in northern France; and it dropped incendiary bombs over London from a zeppelin. Airplanes, tanks, and hand grenades were other innovations that distinguished World War I from previous conflicts. But the machine gun did most of the killing, firing eight bullets per second.

 

In a fateful attempt to break the deadlock, German forces adopted a new objective in 1916: to kill so many French soldiers that France would be forced to sue for peace. The German plan was to attack the French city of Verdun, a psychologically important town in northeastern France, and to bleed the French dry. The battle–the war’s longest–lasted from February 21, 1916 through July. The battle also engaged two million soldiers. When it ended, Verdun had become a symbol of wartime futility. France had suffered 315,000 casualties, Germany 280,000. The town was destroyed; however, the front had not moved. In 1917, after two-and-a-half years of fighting, 5 million troops were dead and the western front remained deadlocked.

 

Germany was desperate to break the stalemate. In January 1917, they launched unrestricted submarine warfare, hoping to cripple the British economy. German subs sank a half million tons of Allied shipping each month, leaving Britain with only a six week supply of grain. But these German U-boats risked bringing the United States into the war. One episode captured this risk for Germany wholly. On May 7, 1915, a German torpedo sank the Lusitania, a ship carrying many British and American citizens.  A total of 1,198 passengers and crewmembers lost their lives. The Lusitania had previously made a half dozen Atlantic round trips without incident. Few believed that a civilian passenger ship would be deliberately targeted.

 

Following the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, Germany would institute a moratorium on unrestricted submarine warfare. However, pressure on the German high command to resume unrestricted submarine warfare was great. It was viewed as the only way to starve Britain and France into submission. This resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare would ultimately bring the United States into the war.

 

Please understand that American President Wilson was reluctant to enter World War I. When the War began, he declared U.S. neutrality and demanded that the belligerents respect American rights as a neutral party. He hesitated to embroil the United States in the conflict with good reason. Americans were deeply divided about the European war; involvement in the conflict would certainly disrupt Progressive reforms. In 1914, he had warned that entry into the conflict would bring an end to Progressive reform. “Every reform we have won will be lost if we go into this war,” he said. A popular song in 1915 was “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.”

 

President Wilson called on Americans to be “neutral in thought as well as deed.” The United States, however, quickly began to lean toward Britain and France. Convinced that wartime trade was necessary to fuel the growth of American trade, President Wilson refused to impose an embargo on trade with the belligerents. During the early years of the war, trade with the allies tripled. This volume of trade quickly exhausted the allies’ cash reserves, forcing them to ask the United States for credit. In October 1915, President Wilson permitted loans to belligerents, a decision that greatly favored Britain and France. By 1917, American loans to the allies had soared to $2.25 billion; loans to Germany stood at a paltry $27 million.

 

In March 1917, events turned the U.S. ever closer to the fighting. Americans newspapers published the Zimmerman Note, an intercepted telegram from the German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmerman to the German ambassador to Mexico. The telegram said that if Germany went to war with the United States, Germany promised to help Mexico recover the territory it had lost during the 1840s, including Texas, New Mexico, California, and Arizona. The Zimmerman telegram and German attacks on three U.S. ships in mid-March led Wilson to ask Congress for a declaration of war. Wilson decided viewed the war as an opportunity to destroy German militarism. “The world must be made safe for democracy,” he told a joint session of Congress. Most lawmakers agreed with the president’s Progressive claim that the U.S. could win through battle a more peaceful world and only six Senators and 50 Representatives voted against the war declaration.

 

The U.S. Army was not, however, actually ready to go to war. In 1917, they had only 107,641 men conscripted and these soldiers were unprepared for the type of warfare unfolding in Europe. Within a year, in the last year of the four-year conflict, the United States raised a five million-man army. Although much shorter than the other nations’ engagements, the American armed forces were a decisive factor in blunting a German offensive and ending the bloody stalemate.

 

Initially, President Wilson hoped to limit America’s contribution to supplies, financial credits, and moral support. But by early 1917, the allied forces were on the brink of collapse. The United States was forced to quickly assume an active role in the conflict. As a preliminary step, American ships relieved the British of responsibility for patrolling the Western Hemisphere, while another portion of the U.S. fleet steamed to the north Atlantic to combat German submarines. To raise troops, President Wilson insisted on a military draft. Tens of millions of men responded to the call. This included more than 100,000 African American troops, many of whom were placed under Gen. Jack Sherman’s command.

 

In March 1918, the Germans launched a massive offensive on the western front in France’s Somme River valley. With German troops barely 50 miles from Paris, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the leader of the French army, assumed command of the allied forces. Foch’s troops, aided by 85,000 American soldiers, launched a furious counteroffensive. By the end of October, the counterattack pushed the German army back to the Belgian border. In June 1918, some 279,000 American soldiers crossed the Atlantic; in July over 300,000; in August, 286,000 more. All told, 1.5 million American troops arrived in Europe during the last six months of the war. By the end of the conflict, the allies could field 600,000 more men than the Germans.

 

At 11:00 a.m., November 11, 1918, the guns stopped. The German Army, never defeated in battle, surrendered and was allowed to retreat with honor. The struggles that WW I would produce for Germany, however, had really only just begun. Europe on a whole was in tatters; communist revolutionaries now controlled Russia. World War I found the U.S. among the victors, but there was nothing really gained. It was a rough time for many. The war of course changed the U.S., in many ways, the least of which the once-isolationist country was moving closer and closer to becoming a global power. This is another step, following the Spanish American, which shows the U.S. moving in a direction of active militarism in foreign policy. With WW I, the U.S. became enmeshed in the very entangling alliances that President Washington had warned against in the late 1790s. And the trend would prove irrevocable.