Did you vote for an American Idol?

528

On May 20, 2009, twenty-three-year-old guitar-strumming

Kris Allen captivated the audience of American Idol

with his rendition of Keith Urban’s “Kiss a Girl” and

Bill Withers’s “Ain’t No Sunshine.” By receiving a

majority of the nearly 100 million “votes”—by tele-

phone and text message—Allen became the American

Idol for 2009.

Although pundits had for years grumbled that

Americans cared more about pop stars on American Idol

than about their president, this may not have been true

in 2009. The producers of the show did not release the

exact number of votes for Allen, but they did say the

vote was close; probably he received no more than

55 million. Six months earlier, presidential candidates

Barack Obama and John McCain received more votes

than Allen, with 69 million and 60 million respectively.

The comparison, of course, is unsound. American

Idol fans often cast multiple votes for their favorite;

some spent hundreds of dollars in phone and texting

fees. A better comparison is of voter turnout for presi-

dential elections nowadays and during the late nine-

teenth century. Since 1946, fewer than half of the

eligible voters have on the average voted in presiden-

tial elections. By contrast, over three-fourths of eligible

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20From Smoke-Filled Roomsto Prairie Wildfire: 1877–1896From Smoke-Filled Roomsto Prairie Wildfire: 1877–1896

CO

NT

EN

TS

■ A parade for Grover Cleveland in Chicago in 1892, by John Klir. Music, mirth,real drama—a presidential election was perhaps even better entertainmentthan American Idol.

529

voters did so in presidential campaigns from 1876 to

1896—the highest rates in the nation’s history.

This puzzles scholars, because the issues of that

time seem inconsequential: Civil War soldiers’ pen-

sions, the tariff, paper money vs. gold and silver coins,

and civil service reform. Perhaps the most volatile

issue—the plight of former slaves—never attracted

much notice because most politicians looked the other

way. The other key issue—the minimal role of the fed-

eral government in the nation’s industrial ascent—

went without saying and, being unsaid, generated

little controversy.

Why, then, did so many people vote? Local issues

seem to have loomed large in most people’s thinking.

Public health, municipal services, and corruption all dom-

inated the headlines. Then, during the 1890s, a nation-

wide industrial depression crushed many local

manufacturing firms, just as an agricultural crisis was

sweeping through the midsection of the nation.

Because the nation had become more tightly inte-

grated, these economic upheavals jolted nearly every

community. National policy and local issues converged,

culminating in the extraordinary election of 1896, which

brought over 80 percent of the electorate to the polls.

In Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio (important

farm states) over 95 percent of those eligible to vote did

so. In these years, politics had become the greatest

show around. ■

■ Congress Ascendant

■ Recurrent Issues

■ Party Politics: Sidesteppingthe Issues

■ Lackluster Presidents: FromHayes to Harrison

■ African Americans in theSouth After Reconstruction

■ Booker T. Washington: A“Reasonable” Champion forAfrican Americans

■ City Bosses

■ Crops and Complaints

■ The Populist Movement

■ Showdown on Silver

■ The Depression of 1893

■ The Election of 1896

■ The Meaning of the Election

■ Debating the Past:Populism—Crusade of Cranksor Potent Grass-RootsProtest?

■ Mapping the Past:Agrarian Discontent and thePopulist Challenge

Chapter 20 at www.myhistorylab.comHear the Audio

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530 Chapter 20 From Smoke-Filled Rooms to Prairie Wildfire: 1877–1896

The House of Representatives, on the other hand,was one of the most disorderly and inefficient legislativebodies in the world. “As I make my notes,” a reporterwrote in 1882 while sitting in the House gallery,

I see a dozen men reading newspapers with theirfeet on their desks. . . . “Pig Iron” Kelley ofPennsylvania has dropped his newspaper and isparing his fingernails. . . . The vile odor of . . .tobacco . . . rises from the two-for-five-cents cigarsin the mouths of the so-called gentlemen below. . . .They chew, too! Every desk has a spittoon of pinkand gold china beside it to catch the filth from thestatesman’s mouth.

An infernal din rose from the crowded chamber.Desks slammed; members held private conversations,hailed pages, shuffled from place to place, clamoredfor the attention of the Speaker—and all the whilesome poor orator tried to discuss the question of themoment. Speaking in the House, one writer said, waslike trying to address the crowd on a passingBroadway bus from the curb in front of the AstorHouse in New York. On one occasion in 1878 theadjournment of the House was held up for more than

Congress AscendantA succession of weak presidents occupied the WhiteHouse during the last quarter of the nineteenth cen-tury. Although the impeachment proceedings againstAndrew Johnson had failed, Congress dominated thegovernment. Within Congress, the Senate generallyovershadowed the House of Representatives. In hisnovel Democracy (1880), the cynical Henry Adamswrote that the United States had a “government ofthe people, by the people, for the benefit ofSenators.” Critics called the Senate a “rich man’sclub,” and it did contain many millionaires, amongthem Leland Stanford, founder of the Central PacificRailroad; the mining tycoon James G. “Bonanza”Fair of Nevada; Philetus Sawyer, a self-madeWisconsin lumberman; and Nelson Aldrich of RhodeIsland, whose wealth derived from banking and ahost of corporate connections. However, the truesources of the Senate’s influence lay in the longtenure of many of its members (which enabled themto master the craft of politics), in the fact that it wassmall enough to encourage real debate, and in itslong-established reputation for wisdom, intelligence,and statesmanship.

An 1887 cartoon indicting the Senate for closely attending to the Big (read, fat) Trusts rather than to the needs of the public (whose “entrance”to the Senate is “closed”). Drawn by Joseph Keppler, a caricaturist who was born and trained in Germany, this type of grotesque satire greatlyinfluenced late-nineteenth-century American comic arts.

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Recurrent Issues 531

twelve hours because most of the members of animportant committee were too drunk to prepare avital appropriations bill for final passage.

The great political parties professed undyingenmity to each other, but they seldom took clearlyopposing positions on the questions of the day.Democrats were separated from Republicans more byaccidents of geography, religious affiliation, ethnicbackground, and emotion than by economic issues.Questions of state and local importance, unrelated tonational politics, often determined the outcome ofcongressional elections and thus who controlled thefederal government.

The fundamental division between Democratsand Republicans was sectional, a result of the CivilWar. The South, after the political rights of blackshad been drastically circumscribed, became heavilyDemocratic. Most of New England was solidlyRepublican. Elsewhere the two parties stood in fairbalance, although the Republicans tended to havethe advantage. A preponderance of the well-to-do,cultured Northerners were Republicans. Perhaps inreaction to this concentration, immigrants, Catholics,and other minority groups—except for blacks—tendedto vote Democratic. But the numerous exceptionsweakened the applicability of these generalizations.German and Scandinavian immigrants usually votedRepublican; many powerful business leaders supportedthe Democrats.

The bulk of the people—farmers, laborers, shop-keepers, white-collar workers—distributed their bal-lots fairly evenly between the two parties in mostelections; the balance of political power after 1876was almost perfect. Between 1856 and 1912 theDemocrats elected a president only twice (1884 and1892), but most contests were extremely close.Majorities in both the Senate and the House fluctu-ated continually. Between 1876 and 1896 the “domi-nant” Republican party controlled both houses ofCongress and the presidency at the same time for onlya single two-year period.

Recurrent IssuesFour questions obsessed politicians in these years.One was the “bloody shirt.” The term, whichbecame part of the language after a Massachusettscongressman dramatically displayed to his colleaguesin the House the bloodstained shirt of an Ohio car-petbagger who had been flogged by terrorists inMississippi, referred to the tactic of reminding theelectorate of the northern states that the men whohad precipitated the Civil War had been Democrats.Should Democrats regain power, former rebelswould run the government and undo all the work

accomplished at such sacrifice during the war. “Everyman that endeavored to tear down the old flag,” aRepublican orator proclaimed in 1876, “was aDemocrat. Every man that tried to destroy thisnation was a Democrat. . . . The man that assassi-nated Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat. . . .Soldiers, every scar you have on your heroic bodieswas given you by a Democrat.” And every scoundrelor incompetent who sought office under theRepublican banner waved the bloody shirt in order todivert the attention of northern voters from his ownshortcomings. The technique worked so well thatmany decent candidates could not resist the tempta-tion to employ it in close races. Nothing, of course,so effectively obscured the real issues of the day.

Waving the bloody shirt was related intimately tothe issue of the rights of African Americans. Throughoutthis period Republicans vacillated between trying tobuild up their organization in the South by appealing toblack voters—which required them to make sure thatblacks in the South could vote—and trying to win

The 1860 dollar, minted in gold, front and back.

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Republicans. Many Republicans endorsed tariffreform in principle, but when particular schedulescame up for discussion, most of them demanded thehighest rates for industries in their own districtsand traded votes shamelessly with colleagues repre-senting other interests in order to get what theywanted. Every new tariff bill became an occasionfor logrolling, lobbying, and outrageous politickingrather than for sane discussion and careful evalua-tion of the public interest.

A third political question in this period was cur-rency reform. During the Civil War, the government,faced with obligations it could not meet by taxing orborrowing, suspended specie payments and issuedabout $450 million in paper money, originally printedin green ink. This currency, called greenbacks, did notcommand the full confidence of a people accustomedto money readily convertible into gold or silver.Greenbacks seemed to encourage inflation, for howcould one trust the government not to print them inwholesale lots to avoid passing unpopular tax laws?Thus, when the war ended, strong sentiment devel-oped for withdrawing the greenbacks from circulationand returning to a bullion standard—to coiningmoney from silver and gold.

In fact, beginning during Reconstruction, pricesdeclined sharply. The deflation increased the real

conservative white support by stressingeconomic issues such as the tariff. Whenthe former strategy seemed wise, theywaved the bloody shirt with vigor; in thelatter case, they piously announced thatthe blacks’ future was “as safe in the handsof one party as it is in the other.”

The question of veterans’ pensions alsobore a close relationship to the bloodyshirt. Following the Civil War, Union sol-diers founded the Grand Army of theRepublic (GAR). By 1890 the organizationhad a membership of 409,000. The GARput immense pressure on Congress, firstfor aid to veterans with service-connecteddisabilities, then for those with any disabil-ity, and eventually for all former Union sol-diers. Republican politicians played on theemotions of the former soldiers by wavingthe bloody shirt, but the tough-mindedleaders of the GAR demanded that theyprove their sincerity by treating in open-handed fashion the warriors whose bloodhad stained the shirt.

The tariff was another perennial issuein post-Civil War politics. Despite con-siderable loose talk about free trade,almost no one in the United States except for ahandful of professional economists, most of themcollege professors, believed in eliminating duties onimports. Manufacturers desired protective tariffs tokeep out competing products, and a majority oftheir workers were convinced that wage levelswould fall if goods produced by cheap foreign laborentered the United States untaxed. Many farmerssupported protection, although almost no compet-ing agricultural products were being imported.Congressman William McKinley of Ohio, whoreputedly could make reciting a tariff schedulesound like poetry, stated the majority opinion inthe clearest terms: high tariffs foster the growth ofindustry and thus create jobs. “Reduce the tariffand labor is the first to suffer,” he said.

The tariff could have been a real political issuebecause American technology was advancing sorapidly that many industries no longer required pro-tection from foreign competitors. A powerful argu-ment could have been made for scientific ratemaking that would adjust duties to actual condi-tions and avoid overprotection. The Democratsprofessed to believe in moderation, yet wheneverparty leaders tried to revise the tariff downward,Democratic congressmen from Pennsylvania, NewYork, and other industrial states sided with the

When the supply of gold became perilously low during the Civil War, the U.S. Treasuryprinted Demand Notes, usually in green ink. These “greenbacks” were withdrawnafter the Civil War and the “gold standard” was restored. But not enough gold dollarswere minted to keep up with the growth of the economy.

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Party Politics: Sidestepping the Issues 533

income of bondholders and other creditors butinjured debtors. Farmers were particularly hard-hit,for many of them had borrowed heavily during thewartime boom to finance expansion.

Here was a question of real significance. Manygroups supported some kind of currency inflation. ANational Greenback party nominated Peter Cooper,an iron manufacturer, for president in 1876. Cooperreceived only 81,000 votes, but a new GreenbackLabor party polled over a million in 1878, electingfourteen congressmen. However, the major partiesrefused to confront each other over the currencyquestion. While Republicans professed to be the partyof sound money, most western Republicans favoredexpansion of the currency. And while one wing of theDemocrats flirted with the Greenbackers, the conser-vative, or “Bourbon,” Democrats favored deflation asmuch as Republicans did. Under various administra-tions steps were taken to increase or decrease theamount of money in circulation, but the net effect onthe economy was not significant.

The final major political issue of these years wascivil service reform. That the federal bureaucracyneeded overhauling nearly everyone agreed. AsAmerican society grew larger and more complex,the government necessarily took on more functions.The need for professional administration increased.The number of federal employees rose from 53,000in 1871 to 256,000 at the end of the century.Corruption flourished; waste and inefficiency werethe normal state of affairs. The collection of tariffduties offered perhaps the greatest opportunity forvenality. The New York Custom House, oneobserver wrote in 1872, teemed with “corruptingmerchants and their clerks and runners, who thinkthat all men can be bought, and . . . corrupt swarms[of clerks], who shamelessly seek their price.”

With a succession of relatively ineffective presi-dents and a Congress that squandered its energieson private bills, pork-barrel projects, and othertrivia, the administration of the government wasstrikingly inefficient.

Every honest observer could see the need forreform, but the politicians refused to surrender thepower of dispensing government jobs to their lieu-tenants without regard for their qualifications. Theyargued that patronage was the lifeblood of politics,that parties could not function without armies ofloyal political workers, and that the workers expectedand deserved the rewards of office when their effortswere crowned with victory at the polls. Typical wasthe attitude of the New York assemblyman who,according to Theodore Roosevelt, had “the same ideaabout Public Life and the Civil Service that a vulture

has of a dead sheep.” When reformers suggestedestablishing the most modest kind of professional,nonpartisan civil service, politicians of both partiessubjected them to every kind of insult and ridiculeeven though both the Democratic and Republicanparties regularly wrote civil service reform planks intotheir platforms.

Party Politics: Sidestepping the IssuesWith the Democrats invincible in the South and theRepublicans predominant in New England andmost of the states beyond the Mississippi, the out-come of presidential elections was usually deter-mined in a handful of populous states: New York(together with its satellites, New Jersey andConnecticut), Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The factthat opinion in these states on important questionssuch as the tariff and monetary policy was dividedand that every imaginable religious and ethnic inter-est was represented in the electorate goes far toexplain why the parties hesitated to commit them-selves on issues. In every presidential election,Democrats and Republicans concentrated theirheaviest guns on these states. Of the eighteenDemocrats and Republicans nominated for presi-dent in the nine elections between 1868 and 1900,only three were not from New York, Ohio, Indiana,or Illinois, and all three lost.

Partisanship was intense in these states.Campaigns were conducted in a carnival atmos-phere, entertainment being substituted for seriousdebate. Large sums were spent on brass bands, bar-becues, uniforms, and banners. Speakers of nationalreputation were imported to attract crowds, andspellbinders noted for their leather lungs—this wasbefore the day of the loudspeaker—and their abilityto rouse popular emotions were brought in toaddress mass meetings.

With so much depending on so few, the level ofpolitical morality was abysmal. Mudslinging, charac-ter assassination, and plain lying were standard prac-tice; bribery was routine. Drifters and other dissolutecitizens were paid in cash—or more often in freedrinks—to vote the party ticket. The names of per-sons long dead were solemnly inscribed in votingregisters, their suffrages exercised by impostors.During the 1880 campaign the Democratic nationalchairman, hearing that the Republicans were plan-ning to transport Kentuckians into Indiana to voteillegally in that crucial state, urged IndianaDemocrats to “check this outrageous fraud.” Then,perhaps seeking an easier solution to the problem, headded, “If necessary . . . keep even with them.”

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Lackluster Presidents: From Hayesto HarrisonThe leading statesmen of the period were disinter-ested in important contemporary questions, power-less to influence them, or content with things the waythey were. Consider the presidents.

Rutherford B. Hayes, president from 1877 to1881, came to office with a distinguished record. Heattended Kenyon College and Harvard Law Schoolbefore settling down to practice in Cincinnati.Although he had a family to support, he volunteeredfor service in the Union army within weeks after thefirst shell fell on Fort Sumter. “A just and necessarywar,” he called it in his diary. “I would prefer to gointo it if I knew I was to die . . . than to live throughand after it without taking any part.”

Hayes was wounded at South Mountain on theeve of Antietam and later served under Sheridan inthe Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1864. Enteringthe army as a major, he emerged a major general. In1864 he was elected to Congress; four years later hebecame governor of Ohio, serving three terms alto-gether. The Republicans nominated him for president

in 1876 because of his reputation for honesty andmoderation, and his election, made possible by theCompromise of 1877, seemed to presage an era ofsectional harmony and political probity.

Outwardly Hayes had a sunny disposition;inwardly, in his own words, he was sometimes “ner-vous to the point of disaster.” Despite his geniality, hewas utterly without political glamour. He playeddown the tariff issue. On the money question he wasconservative. He cheerfully approved the resumptionof gold payments in 1879 and vetoed bills to expandthe currency. He accounted himself a civil servicereformer, being opposed to the collection of politicalcontributions from federal officeholders.

Hayes complained about the South’s failure totreat blacks decently after the withdrawal of federaltroops, but he took no action. He worked harder forcivil service reform, yet failed to achieve the “thor-ough, rapid, and complete” change he had promised.In most matters, he was content to “let the recordshow that he had made the requests.”

Hayes’s successor, James A. Garfield, fought atShiloh and later at Chickamauga. In two years he rosefrom lieutenant colonel to major general. In 1863 hewon a seat in Congress, where his oratorical and man-agerial skills brought him to prominence in the affairsof the Republican party.

Garfield had been a compromise choice at the1880 Republican convention. His election precipi-tated a great battle over patronage, the new presidentstanding in a sort of no-man’s land between contend-ing factions within the party. In July 1881 an unbal-anced office-seeker named Charles J. Guiteau shotGarfield in the Washington railroad station. After lin-gering for weeks, the president died on September 19.

The assassination of Garfield elevated Chester A.Arthur to the presidency. A New York lawyer andabolitionist, Arthur became an early convert to theRepublican party and rose rapidly in its local councils.In 1871 Grant gave him the juiciest political plum inthe country, the collectorship of the Port of NewYork, which he held until removed by Hayes in 1878for refusing to keep his hands out of party politics.

The vice presidency was the only elective positionthat Arthur had ever held. Before Garfield’s death, hehad paid little attention to questions like the tariff andmonetary policy, being content to take in fees rangingupward of $50,000 a year as collector of the port and tooversee the operations of the New York customs office,with its hordes of clerks and laborers. (During Arthur’stenure, the novelist Herman Melville was employed asan “outdoor inspector” by the customhouse.) Ofcourse, Arthur was an unblushing defender of the spoilssystem, though in fairness it must be said that he waspersonally honest and an excellent administrator.

In this 1880 campaign lithograph by Currier & Ives, “Farmer Garfield”uses a scythe made of honesty, ability, and patriotism to cut a swathto the White House through brush infested by snakes like Falsehoodand Malice. One snake bears the countenance of Garfield’spredecessor, Hayes.

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Lackluster Presidents: From Hayes to Harrison 535

The tragic circumstances of his elevation to thepresidency sobered Arthur. Although he was a genial,convivial man, perhaps overly fond of good foodand flashy clothes, he comported himself with dig-nity as president. He handled patronage matters withrestraint, and he gave at least nominal support to themovement for civil service reform, which had beenstrengthened by the public’s indignation at the assas-sination of Garfield. In 1883 Congress passed thePendleton Act, “classifying” about 10 percent of allgovernment jobs and creating the bipartisan CivilService Commission to administer competitive exami-nations for these positions. The law made it illegal toforce officeholders to make political contributionsand empowered the president to expand the list ofclassified positions at his discretion.

As an administrator Arthur was systematic,thoughtful, businesslike, and at the same time cheer-ful and considerate. Just the same, he too was a polit-ical failure. He made relatively little effort to push hisprogram through Congress. He did not seek a secondterm in 1884.

The election of 1884 brought the DemocratGrover Cleveland to the White House. Clevelandgrew up in western New York. After studying law, he

settled in Buffalo. Although somewhat lacking in thesocial graces and in intellectual pretensions, he had abasic integrity that everyone recognized; when agroup of reformers sought a candidate for mayor in1881, he was a natural choice. His success in Buffaloled to his election as governor of New York in 1882.

In the governor’s chair his no-nonsense attitudetoward public administration endeared him to civilservice reformers at the same time that his basic con-servatism pleased businessmen. When he vetoed apopular bill to force a reduction of the fares chargedby the New York City elevated railway on the groundthat it was an unconstitutional violation of the com-pany’s franchise, his reputation soared. Here was aman who cared more for principle than for the adula-tion of the multitude, a man who was courageous,honest, hardworking, and eminently sound. TheDemocrats nominated him for president in 1884.

The election revolved around personal issues, forthe platforms of the parties were almost identical. Onthe one hand, the Republican candidate, the dynamicJames G. Blaine, had an immense following, but hisreputation had been soiled by the publication of the“Mulligan letters,” which connected him with thecorrupt granting of congressional favors to the Little

James A. Garfield lies mortally wounded. After failing to locate the bullet, surgeons called in Alexander Graham Bell,the famous inventor. Bell conceived of a device, pictured here, that anticipated the mine detector. Bell’s machinefailed to locate the bullet, however, perhaps because the metal bed springs interfered with its operation. Garfielddied, either from the bullet or the surgeon’s unsuccessful attempts to extricate it.

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Rock and Fort Smith Railroad. On the other hand, itcame out during the campaign that Cleveland, abachelor, had fathered an illegitimate child. Insteadof debating public issues, the Republicans chantedthe ditty,

Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa?Gone to the White House,Ha! Ha! Ha!

to which the Democrats countered,

Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine,The continental liar from the State of Maine.

Blaine lost more heavily in the mudslinging thanCleveland, whose quiet courage in saying “Tell thetruth” when his past was brought to light contrastedfavorably with Blaine’s glib and unconvincingdenials. A significant group of eastern Republicans,known as mugwumps, campaigned for theDemocrats.1 However, Blaine ran a strong race against ageneral pro-Democratic trend; Cleveland won the elec-tion by fewer than 25,000 votes. The change of 600 bal-lots in New York would have given that state, and thepresidency, to his opponent.

As a Democrat, Cleveland had no stomach forrefighting the Civil War. Civil service reformers over-estimated his commitment to their cause, for hebelieved in rotation in office. He would not summar-ily dismiss Republicans, but he thought that whenthey had served four years, they “should as a rule giveway to good men of our party.” He did, however,insist on honesty and efficiency regardless of party. Asa result, he made few poor appointments.

Cleveland had little imagination and too narrowa conception of his powers and duties to be adynamic president. His appearance perfectly reflectedhis character: A squat, burly man weighing well over200 pounds, he could defend a position against heavyodds, yet he lacked flexibility. He took a fairly broadview of the powers of the federal government, but hethought it unseemly to put pressure on Congress,believing in “the entire independence of the executiveand legislative branches.”

Toward the end of his term Cleveland bestirredhimself and tried to provide constructive leadership onthe tariff question. The government was embarrassedby a large revenue surplus, which Cleveland hoped toreduce by cutting the duties on necessities and on rawmaterials used in manufacturing. He devoted his entire

annual message of December 1887 to the tariff, therebyfocusing public attention on the subject. When worriedDemocrats reminded him that an election was comingup and that the tariff might cause a rift in the organiza-tion, he replied simply, “What is the use of beingelected or re-elected, unless you stand for something?”

In that contest, Cleveland obtained a plurality ofthe popular vote, but his opponent, Benjamin Harrison,grandson of President William Henry Harrison, carriedmost of the key northeastern industrial states by narrowmargins, thereby obtaining a comfortable majority inthe electoral college, 233 to 168.

Although intelligent and able, Harrison was tooreserved to make a good politician. One observercalled him a “human iceberg.” During the Civil Warhe fought under Sherman at Atlanta and won a repu-tation as a stern, effective disciplinarian. In 1876 heran unsuccessfully for governor of Indiana, but in1881 was elected to the Senate.

President Grover Cleveland and Frances Folsom in 1888. The couplehad married two years earlier; he was 48, and she, 21, the youngestFirst Lady. Her popularity blunted criticisms that Cleveland, abachelor, had earlier fathered an illegitimate child. When he lost the1888 election, his wife predicted that she would return as First Lady.Four years later, she did.

1The mugwumps considered themselves reformers, but on socialand economic questions nearly all of them were very conservative.They were sound-money proponents and advocates of laissez-faire.Reform to them consisted almost entirely of doing away with cor-ruption and making the government more efficient.

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African Americans in the South After Reconstruction 537

Harrison believed ardently in protective tariffs. Hisapproach to fiscal policy was conservative, though hewas freehanded in the matter of veterans’ pensions. Nomore flamboyant waver of the bloody shirt existed.Harrison professed to favor civil service reform, butfashioned an unimpressive record on the question. Heappointed the vigorous young reformer TheodoreRoosevelt to the Civil Service Commission and thenproceeded to undercut him systematically. Before longthe frustrated Roosevelt was calling the president a“cold blooded, narrow minded, prejudiced, obstinate,timid old psalm singing Indianapolis politician.”

Under Harrison, Congress distinguished itself byexpending, for the first time in a period of peace,more than $1 billion in a single session. It raised thetariff to an all-time high. The Sherman Antitrust Actwas also passed.

Harrison had little to do with the fate of any ofthese measures. The Republicans lost control ofCongress in 1890, and two years later GroverCleveland swept back into power, defeating Harrisonby more than 350,000 votes.

Pendleton Civil Service Act at www.myhistorylab.com

Harrison and Morton Campaign Ad at www.myhistorylab.com

African Americans in the South AfterReconstructionPerhaps the most important issue of the last quarter ofthe nineteenth century was the fate of the former slavesafter the withdrawal of federal troops from the South.Shortly after his inauguration in 1877, President Hayesmade a goodwill tour of the South and he urged blacksto trust southern whites. A new Era of Good Feelingshad dawned, he announced. Some southern leadersmade earnest attempts to respect the civil rights ofAfrican Americans. That same year Governor WadeHampton of South Carolina proposed to “secure toevery citizen, the lowest as well as the highest, black aswell as white, full and equal protection in the enjoy-ment of all his rights under the Constitution.”

But the pledge was not kept. By December, Hayeswas sadly disillusioned. “By state legislation, by frauds,by intimidation, and by violence of the most atrociouscharacter, colored citizens have been deprived of theright of suffrage,” he wrote in his diary. However, hedid nothing to remedy the situation. FrederickDouglass called Hayes’s policy “sickly conciliation.”

Hayes’s successors in the 1880s did no better.“Time is the only cure,” President Garfield said,thereby confessing that he had no policy at all.President Arthur gave federal patronage to antiblack

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groups in an effort to split the Democratic South. InPresident Cleveland’s day African Americans hadscarcely a friend in high places, North or South. In1887 Cleveland explained to a correspondent why heopposed “mixed [integrated] schools.” Expert opin-ion, the president said, believed “that separate schoolswere of much more benefit for the colored people.”Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur were Republicans, andCleveland a Democrat; party made little difference.Both parties subscribed to hypocritical statementsabout equality and constitutional rights, and neitherdid anything to implement them.

For a time blacks were not totally disenfranchisedin the South. Rival white factions tried to manipulatethem, and corruption flourished as widely as in themachine-dominated wards of the northern cities. Inthe 1890s, however, the southern states, led byMississippi, began to deprive blacks of the votedespite the Fifteenth Amendment. Poll taxes raised aformidable economic barrier, one that also disenfran-chised many poor whites. Literacy tests completed thework; a number of states provided a loophole for illit-erate whites by including an “understanding” clausewhereby an illiterate person could qualify by demon-strating an ability to explain the meaning of a sectionof the state constitution when an election official readit to him. Blacks who attempted to take the test wereuniformly declared to have failed it.

In Louisiana, 130,000 blacks voted in the electionof 1896. Then the law was changed. In 1900 only5,000 votes were cast by blacks. “We take away theNegroes’ votes,” a Louisiana politician explained, “toprotect them just as we would protect a little child andprevent it from injuring itself with sharp-edged tools.”Almost every Supreme Court decision after 1877 thataffected blacks somehow nullified or curtailed theirrights. The civil rights cases (1883) declared theCivil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. Blacks whowere refused equal accommodations or privileges byhotels, theaters, and other privately owned facilitieshad no recourse at law, the Court announced. TheFourteenth Amendment guaranteed their civil rightsagainst invasion by the states, not by individuals.

Finally, in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Courtruled that even in places of public accommodation,such as railroads and, by implication, schools, segre-gation was legal as long as facilities of equal qualitywere provided: “If one race be inferior to the othersocially, the Constitution of the United States cannotput them upon the same plane.” In a noble dissent inthe Plessy case, Justice John Marshall Harlanprotested this line of argument. “Our Constitution iscolor-blind,” he said. “The arbitrary separation of cit-izens, on the basis of race . . . is a badge of servitudewholly inconsistent with civil freedom. . . . The two

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races in this country are indissolubly linked together,and the interests of both require that the commongovernment of all shall not permit the seeds of racehatred to be planted under the sanction of law.”

More than half a century was to pass before theCourt came around to Harlan’s reasoning andreversed the Plessy decision. Meanwhile, total segrega-tion was imposed throughout the South. Separateschools, prisons, hospitals, recreational facilities, andeven cemeteries were provided for blacks, and thesewere almost never equal to those available to whites.

Most Northerners supported the governmentand the Court. Newspapers presented a stereotyped,derogatory picture of blacks, no matter what thecircumstances. Northern magazines, even high-quality publications such as Harper’s, Scribner’s, andthe Century, repeatedly made blacks the butt ofcrude jokes.

The restoration of white rule abruptly halted theprogress in public education for blacks that theReconstruction governments had made. Church groupsand private foundations such as the Peabody Fund andthe Slater Fund, financed chiefly by northern philan-thropists, supported black schools after 1877. Amongthem were two important experiments in vocationaltraining, Hampton Institute and Tuskegee Institute.

These schools had to overcome considerableresistance and suspicion in the white community; theysurvived only because they taught a docile philoso-phy, preparing students to accept second-class citizen-ship and become farmers and craftsmen. Sinceproficiency in academic subjects might have given thelie to the southern belief that blacks were intellectu-ally inferior to whites, such subjects were avoided.

The southern insistence on segregating the publicschools, buttressed by the separate but equal decisionof the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson, imposed acrushing financial burden on poor, sparsely settledcommunities, and the dominant opinion that blackswere not really educable did not encourage thesecommunities to make special efforts in their behalf.

Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896 atwww.myhistorylab.com

Booker T. Washington: A “Reasonable”Champion for African AmericansSince nearly all contemporary biologists, physicians,and other supposed experts on race were convincedthat African Americans were inferior, white Americansgenerally accepted black inferiority as fact. Most did

View the Image

A cartoon from Judge magazine in 1892 depicts Ku Klux Klansmen barring a black voter from the polls.

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Booker T. Washington: A “Reasonable” Champion for African Americans 539

not especially wish blacks ill; they simply consignedthem complacently to oblivion, along with theIndians. A vicious circle was established. By denyingblacks decent educational opportunities and goodjobs, the dominant race could use the blacks’ resul-tant ignorance and poverty to justify the inferior facil-ities offered them.

Southern blacks reacted to this deplorable situa-tion in a variety of ways. Some sought redress in racialpride and what would later be called black nationalism.Some became so disaffected that they tried to revive theAfrican colonization movement. “Africa is our home,”insisted Bishop Henry M. Turner, a huge, plainspokenman who had served as an army chaplain during thewar and as a member of the Georgia legislature duringReconstruction. Another militant, T. Thomas Fortune,editor of the New York Age and founder of the Afro-American League (1887), called on blacks to demandfull civil rights, better schools, and fair wages and tofight against discrimination of every sort. “Let us standup like men in our own organization,” he urged. “Ifothers use . . . violence to combat our peaceful argu-ments, it is not for us to run away from violence.”

For a time, militancy and black separatism wonfew adherents among southern blacks. For one thing,life was better than it had been under slavery.Segregation actually helped southern blacks whobecame barbers, undertakers, restaurateurs, and shop-keepers because whites were reluctant to supply suchservices to blacks. Even when whites competed withblack businesses, the resentment caused by segrega-tion led blacks to patronize establishments run bypeople of their own race. According to the most con-servative estimates, the living standard of the averagesouthern black more than doubled between 1865 and1900. But this only made many southern whites moreangry and vindictive.

This helps explain the tactics of Booker T.Washington, one of the most extraordinaryAmericans of that generation. Washington had beenborn a slave in Virginia in 1856. Laboriously heobtained an education, supporting himself while astudent by working as a janitor. In 1881, with thefinancial help of northern philanthropists, hefounded Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. His experi-ences convinced Washington that blacks must liftthemselves up by their own bootstraps but that theymust also accommodate themselves to white preju-dices. A persuasive speaker and a brilliant fund-raiser, he soon developed a national reputation as a“reasonable” champion of his race. (In 1891Harvard awarded him an honorary degree.)

In 1895 Washington made a now-famous speechto a mixed audience at the Cotton States InternationalExposition in Atlanta. To the blacks he said, “Cast

down your bucket where you are,” by which he meantstop fighting segregation and second-class citizenshipand concentrate on learning useful skills. “Dignifyand glorify common labor,” he urged. “Agitation ofquestions of racial equality is the extremest folly.”Progress up the social and economic ladder wouldcome not from “artificial forcing” but from self-improvement. “There is as much dignity in tilling afield as in writing a poem.”

Washington asked the whites of what he called“our beloved South” to lend the blacks a hand intheir efforts to advance themselves. If you will do so,he promised, you will be “surrounded by the mostpatient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful peoplethat the world has seen.”

This Atlanta Compromise delighted whiteSoutherners and won Washington financial supportin every section of the country. He became one ofthe most powerful men in the United States, con-sulted by presidents, in close touch with businessand philanthropic leaders, and capable of influenc-ing in countless unobtrusive ways the fate of mil-lions of blacks.

Blacks responded to the compromise with mixedfeelings. Accepting Washington’s approach mightrelieve them of many burdens and dangers. Being

Booker T. Washington in his office at Tuskegee Institute, 1900.Washington chose a policy of accommodation. Washington didnot urge blacks to accept inferiority and racial slurs but to ignorethem. His own behavior was indeed subtle, even devious. Inpublic he minimized the importance of civil and political rights.Behind the scenes he lobbied against restrictive measures,marshaled large sums of money to fight test cases in the courts,and worked hard in northern states to organize the black voteand make sure that black political leaders got a share of thespoils of office.

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obsequious might, like discretion, be the better partof valor. But Washington was asking them to give upspecific rights in return for vague promises of futurehelp. The cost was high in surrendered personal dig-nity and lost hopes of obtaining real justice.

Washington’s career illustrates the terribledilemma that American blacks have always faced:the choice between confrontation and accommoda-tion. This choice was particularly difficult in the latenineteenth century.

City BossesOutside of the South, the main issue concerned munic-ipal government. This was complicated by the religiousand ethnic character of the city dwellers and by the spe-cial problems of late-nineteenth-century urban life:rapid, helter-skelter growth; the influx of Europeanimmigrants; the need to develop costly transportation,sanitation, and other public utility systems; and thecrime and corruption that the size, confusion, andanonymity incidental to urban existence fostered.

The immigrants who flocked into American citiesin the 1880s and early 1890s were largely of peasantstock, and having come from societies unacquaintedwith democracy, they had no experience with repre-sentative government. The tendency of urban work-ers to move frequently in search of better jobs furtherlessened the likelihood that they would develop polit-ical influence independently.

Furthermore, the difficulties of life in the slumsbewildered and often overwhelmed newcomers, bothnative- and foreign-born. Hopeful, but passive andnaive, they could hardly be expected to take a broadview of social problems when so beset by personalones. This enabled shrewd urban politicians—most ofthem in this period of Irish origin, since the Irishbeing the first-comers among the migrants and,according to mobility studies, more likely to stayput—to take command of the city masses and marchthem in obedient phalanxes to the polls.

Most city machines were loose-knit neighborhoodorganizations headed by ward bosses, not tightlygeared hierarchical bureaucracies ruled by a singleleader. “Big Tim” Sullivan of New York’s Lower EastSide and “Hinky Dink” Kenna of Chicago were typicalof the breed. Sullivan, Kenna, and others like them per-formed many useful services for people they liked tothink of as their constituents. They found jobs for newarrivals and distributed food and other help to all inbad times. Anyone in trouble with the law could obtainat least a hearing from the ward boss, and often, if thecrime was minor or due to ignorance, the difficultywas quietly “fixed” and the culprit was sent off with aword of caution. Sullivan provided turkey dinners for

5,000 or more homeless people each Christmas, dis-tributed new shoes to the poor children of his districton his birthday, and arranged summer boat rides andpicnics for young and old alike. At any time of year thevictim of some sudden disaster could turn to the localclubhouse for help. Informally, probably without con-sciously intending to do so, the bosses educated theimmigrants in the complexities of American civiliza-tion, helping them to leap the gulf between the almostmedieval society of their origins and the modern indus-trial world.

The price of such aid—the bosses were notaltruists—was unquestioning political support, whichthe bosses converted into cash. In New York, Sullivanlevied tribute on gambling, had a hand in the liquorbusiness, and controlled the issuance of peddlers’licenses. When he died in 1913, he was reputedlyworth $1 million. Yet he and others like him wereimmensely popular; 25,000 grieving constituents fol-lowed Big Tim’s coffin on its way to the grave.

The more visible and better-known city bossesplayed even less socially justifiable roles than theward bosses. Their principal technique for extract-ing money from the public till was the kickback. Toget city contracts, suppliers were made to pad theirbills and, when paid for their work with funds fromthe city treasury, turn over the excess to the politi-cians. Similarly, operators of streetcar lines, gas andelectricity companies, and other public utilitieswere compelled to pay huge bribes to obtain favor-able franchises.

The most notorious of the nineteenth-centurycity bosses was William Marcy Tweed, whose “TweedRing” extracted tens of millions of dollars from NewYork City during the brief period of 1869–1871.Tweed was swiftly jailed. More typical was RichardCroker, who ruled New York’s Tammany Hall orga-nization from the mid-1880s to the end of the cen-tury. Croker held a number of local offices, but hispower rested on his position as chairman of theTammany Hall finance committee. Although moreconcerned than Tweed with the social and economicservices that machines provided, Croker was primarilya corrupt political manipulator; he accumulated alarge fortune and owned a mansion and a stable ofracehorses, one of which was good enough to win theEnglish Derby.

Despite their welfare work and their popularity,most bosses were essentially thieves. Efforts toromanticize them as the Robin Hoods of industrialsociety grossly distort the facts. However, the systemdeveloped and survived because too many middle-class city dwellers were indifferent to the fate of thepoor. Except during occasional reform waves, fewtried to check the rapaciousness of the politicos.

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Crops and Complaints 541

Many substantial citizens shared at least indi-rectly in the corruption. The owners of tenementswere interested in crowding as many rent payers aspossible into their buildings. Utility companies seek-ing franchises preferred a system that enabled themto buy favors. Honest citizens who had no selfishstake in the system and who were repelled by the sor-didness of city government were seldom sufficientlyconcerned to do anything about it. When youngTheodore Roosevelt decided to seek a political careerin 1880, his New York socialite friends laughed in hisface. They told him, Roosevelt wrote in his autobiog-raphy, “that politics were ‘low’; that the organiza-tions were not controlled by ‘gentlemen’; that Iwould find them run by saloonkeepers, horse-carconductors, and the like.”

Many so-called urban reformers resented theboss system mainly because it gave political powerto people who were not “gentlemen” or, as onereformer put it, to a “proletarian mob” of “illiteratepeasants, freshly raked from Irish bogs, orBohemian mines, or Italian robber nests.” A Britishvisitor in Chicago struck at the root of the urbanproblem of the era. “Everybody is fighting to be

rich,” he said, “and nobody can attend to makingthe city fit to live in.”

Crops and ComplaintsThe vacuity of American politics may well havestemmed from the complacency of the middle-classmajority. The country was growing; no foreign enemythreatened it; the poor were mostly recent immi-grants, blacks, and others with little influence, whowere easily ignored by those in comfortable circum-stances. However, one important group in societysuffered increasingly as the years rolled by: the farm-ers. Out of their travail came the force that finally, inthe 1890s, brought American politics face to facewith the problems of the age.

After the Civil War, however, farmers did well.Harvests were bountiful and wheat prices high at over adollar a bushel in the early 1870s. Well into the 1880sfarmers on the plains experienced boom conditions. Inthat decade the population of Kansas increased by43 percent, that of Nebraska by 134 percent, and thatof the Dakotas by 278 percent. Land prices rose andfarmers borrowed money to expand their farms.

A farm family in Custer, Nebraska, in 1888, a region where Populist sentiment was strong.

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In the 1890s disaster struck. First came a succes-sion of dry years and poor harvests. Then farmers inAustralia, Canada, Russia, and Argentina took advan-tage of improvements in transportation to sell theirproduce in European markets that had relied onAmerican foodstuffs. The price of wheat fell to aboutsixty cents a bushel. Cotton, the great southern sta-ple, which sold for more than thirty cents a pound in1866 and fifteen cents in the early 1870s, at times inthe 1890s fell below six cents.

The tariff on manufactured goods appeared toaggravate the farmers’ predicament, and so did thedomestic marketing system, which enabled a multi-tude of middlemen to gobble up a large share of theprofits of agriculture. The shortage of credit, particu-larly in the South, was an additional burden.

The downward swing of the business cycle in theearly 1890s completed the devastation. Settlers whohad paid more for their lands than they were worth andborrowed money at high interest rates to do so foundthemselves squeezed relentlessly. Thousands lost theirfarms and returned eastward, penniless and dispirited.The population of Nebraska increased by fewer than4,000 persons in the entire decade of the 1890s.

The Populist MovementThe agricultural depression triggered a new outburstof farm radicalism, the Alliance movement. Allianceswere organizations of farmers’ clubs, most of whichhad sprung up during the bad times of the late 1870s.The first Knights of Reliance group was founded in1877 in Lampasas County, Texas. As the Farmers’Alliance, this organization gradually expanded innortheastern Texas, and after 1885 it spread rapidlythroughout the cotton states. Alliance leaders stressedcooperation. Their co-ops bought fertilizer and othersupplies in bulk and sold them at fair prices to mem-bers. They sought to market their crops cooperativelybut could not raise the necessary capital from banks,with the result that some of them began to questionthe workings of the American financial and monetarysystem. They became economic and social radicals inthe process. A similar though less influential Alliancemovement developed in the North.

Although the state alliances of the Dakotas andKansas joined the Southern Alliance in 1889, for a timelocal prejudices and conflicting interests prevented theformation of a single national organization. But the farmgroups emerged as a potent force in the 1890 elections.

In the South, Alliance-sponsored gubernatorialcandidates won in Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina,and Texas; eight southern legislatures fell underAlliance control, and forty-four representatives andthree senators committed to Alliance objectives weresent to Washington. In the West, Alliance candidates

swept Kansas, captured a majority in the Nebraska leg-islature, and accumulated enough seats in Minnesotaand South Dakota to hold the balance of powerbetween the major parties.

Such success, coupled with the reluctance of theRepublicans and Democrats to make concessions totheir demands, encouraged Alliance leaders to create anew national party. By uniting southern and westernfarmers, they succeeded in breaking the sectional bar-rier erected by the Civil War. If they could recruitindustrial workers, perhaps a real political revolutioncould be accomplished. In February 1892, farm lead-ers, representatives of the Knights of Labor, and vari-ous professional reformers, some 800 in all, met atSt. Louis. They organized the People’s (Populist)party, and issued a call for a national convention tomeet at Omaha in July.

In Kansas in 1893 a Populist governor and a Populist-controlledSenate invalidated the election of some Republicans in the KansasHouse of Representatives, giving the Populists control of that body,too. The displaced Republicans, denied seats, smashed their wayinto the capitol building with this sledgehammer and ousted thePopulists, who decided to meet in a separate building. Eachproclaimed itself to be the true legislature and passed its own laws.Eventually the Kansas Supreme Court decided in favor of theRepublican legislature and disbanded the Populist gathering.Source: Kansas State Historical Society.

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The Populist Movement 543

That convention nominated General James B.Weaver of Iowa for president (with a one-leggedConfederate veteran as his running mate) and drafteda platform that called for a graduated income tax andnational ownership of railroads, the telegraph, andtelephone systems. It also advocated a “subtreasury”plan that would permit farmers to keep nonperishablecrops off the market when prices were low. Under thisproposal the government would make loans in theform of greenbacks to farmers, secured by crops heldin storage in federal warehouses. When prices rose,the farmers could sell their crops and repay the loans.To combat deflation further, the platform demandedthe unlimited coinage of silver and an increase in themoney supply “to no less than $50 per capita.”

To make the government more responsive topublic opinion, the Populists urged the adoption ofthe initiative and referendum procedures and theelection of U.S. senators by popular vote. To win thesupport of industrial workers, their platformdenounced the use of Pinkerton detectives in labordisputes and backed the eight-hour day and therestriction of “undesirable” immigration.

The Populists saw themselves not as a persecutedminority but as a victimized majority betrayed bywhat would a century later be called the establish-ment. They were at most ambivalent about the freeenterprise system, and they tended to attribute social

and economic injustices not to built-in inequities inthe system but to nefarious conspiracies organized byselfish interests in order to subvert the system.

The appearance of the new party was the mostexciting and significant aspect of the presidential cam-paign of 1892, which saw Harrison and Clevelandrefighting the election of 1888. The Populists putforth a host of colorful spellbinders: Tom Watson, aGeorgia congressman whose temper was such that onone occasion he administered a beating to a localplanter with the man’s own riding crop; William A.Peffer, a senator from Kansas whose long beard andgrave demeanor gave him the look of a Hebrewprophet; “Sockless Jerry” Simpson of Kansas, unlet-tered but full of grassroots shrewdness and wit, a for-mer Greenbacker, and an admirer of the single taxdoctrine of Henry George; and Ignatius Donnelly,the “Minnesota Sage,” who claimed to be an author-ity on science, economics, and Shakespeare. (Hebelieved that Francis Bacon wrote the plays.)

In the one-party South, Populist strategistssought to wean black farmers away from the rulingDemocratic organization. Southern black farmers hadtheir own Colored Farmers’ Alliance, and even before1892 their leaders had worked closely with the whitealliances. Nearly 100 black delegates had attended thePopulist convention at St. Louis. Of course, the blackswould be useless to the party if they could not vote;therefore, white Populist leaders opposed the south-ern trend toward disfranchising African Americans andcalled for full civil rights for all.

The results proved disappointing. Tom Watson losthis seat in Congress, and Donnelly ran a poor third inthe Minnesota gubernatorial race. The Populists didsweep Kansas. They elected numbers of local officials inother western states and cast over a million votes forGeneral Weaver. But the effort to unite white and blackfarmers in the South failed miserably. ConservativeDemocrats, while continuing with considerable successto attract black voters, played on racial fears cruelly,insisting that the Populists sought to undermine whitesupremacy. Since most white Populists saw the alliancewith blacks as at best a marriage of convenience, thisargument had a deadly effect. Elsewhere, even in the oldcenters of the Granger movement, the party made nosignificant impression. Urban workers remained aloof.

By standing firmly for conservative financial poli-cies, Cleveland attracted considerable Republican sup-port and won a solid victory over Harrison in theelectoral college, 277 to 145. Weaver received twenty-two electoral votes.

Mary Elizabeth Lease, the Populist Crusaderat www.myhistorylab.com

The People’s Party Platformat www.myhistorylab.com

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Mary Elizabeth Lease was a prominent Populist, noted for herrallying cry to “raise less corn and more hell.”Source: Kansas State Historical Society.

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Showdown on SilverOne conclusion that politicians reached after analyz-ing the 1892 election was that the money question,particularly the controversy over the coinage of silver,was of paramount interest to the voters. Despite thewide-ranging appeal of the Populist platform, most ofWeaver’s strength came from the silver-mining states.

In truth, the issue of gold versus silver wassuperficial; the important question was what, if any-thing, should be done to check the deflationary spi-ral. The declining price level benefited people withfixed incomes and injured most others. Industrialworkers profited from deflation except when depres-sion caused unemployment.

By the early 1890s, discussion of federal mone-tary policy revolved around the coinage of silver.Traditionally, the United States had been on abimetallic standard. Both gold and silver werecoined, the number of grains of each in the dollarbeing adjusted periodically to reflect the commercialvalue of the two metals. The discovery of numerous

gold mines in California in the 1840s and 1850sdepressed the price of gold relative to silver. By1861, a silver dollar could be melted down and soldfor $1.03. No miner took silver to the mint to bestamped into coin. In a short time, silver dollarswere withdrawn and only gold dollars circulated.However, an avalanche of silver from the mines ofNevada and Colorado gradually depressed the priceuntil, around 1874, it again became profitable forminers to coin their bullion. Alas, when they tried todo so, they discovered that the Coinage Act of1873, taking account of the fact that no silver hadbeen presented to the mint in years, had demone-tized the metal.

Silver miners denounced this as the “Crime of‘73.” Inflationists joined them in demanding areturn to bimetallism. They knew that if more dol-lars were put into circulation, the value of each dol-lar would decline; that is, prices and wages wouldrise. Conservatives, still fighting the battle againstinflationary greenback paper money, resistedstrongly. The result was a series of compromises. In

L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and a fan of William Jennings Bryan, perhaps wrote his story as an allegory of the1896 election. Dorothy, wearing “silver” slippers (in the original), follows a “yellow brick road” (gold) on a crusade to free the Munchkins (theoppressed little people) from the Wicked Witch of the East (the rapacious corporations and financiers). Liberation is to come in Emerald City(greenbacks) through the intervention of a kindly, but ultimately ineffective wizard (Bryan). Only the entire people—Dorothy and entourage—can prevail against wickedness. Judy Garland starred as Dorothy in the film version of The Wizard of Oz (1939).Source: The Wizard of Oz ©1939 The Kobal Collection/ MGM. Warner Brothers Motion Picture Titles.

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The Depression of 1893 545

1878 the Bland-Allison Silver Purchase Actauthorized the buying of between $2 million and$4 million of silver a month at the market price,but this had little inflationary effect because thegovernment consistently purchased the minimumamount. The commercial price of silver continuedto fall. In 1890 the Sherman Silver Purchase Actrequired the government to buy 4.5 million ouncesof silver monthly, but in the face of increasing sup-plies the price of silver fell still further. By 1894, asilver coin weighed thirty-two times more than agold one.

The compromises satisfied no one. Silver minersgrumbled because their bullion brought in only halfwhat it had in the early 1870s. Debtors notedangrily that because of the general decline in prices,the dollars they used to meet their obligations wereworth more than twice as much as in 1865.Advocates of the gold standard feared that unlimitedsilver coinage would be authorized, “destroying thevalue of the dollar.”

The Depression of 1893Both the silverites and “gold bugs” warned of eco-nomic disaster if their policies were not followed.Then, in 1893, after the London banking house ofBaring Brothers collapsed, a financial panic precipi-tated a worldwide industrial depression. In theUnited States hundreds of cotton mills and ironfoundries closed, never to reopen. During the harshwinter of 1893–1894, millions were without jobs.Discontented industrial workers added their voices tothe complaints of the midwestern farmers.

President Cleveland believed that the controversyover silver had caused the depression by shaking theconfidence of the business community and that allwould be well if the country returned to a single goldstandard. He summoned a special session of Congress,

and by exerting immense political pressure heobtained the repeal of the Sherman Silver PurchaseAct in October 1893. All that this accomplished wasto split the Democratic party, its southern and westernwings deserting him almost to a man.

During 1894 and 1895, while the nation floun-dered in the worst depression it had ever experienced,a series of events further undermined public confi-dence. In the spring of 1894 several “armies” of theunemployed, the most imposing led by Jacob S.Coxey, an eccentric Ohio businessman, marched onWashington to demand relief. Coxey wanted the gov-ernment to undertake a program of federal publicworks and other projects to hire unemployed workersto build roads.

When Coxey’s group of demonstrators, perhaps500 in all, reached Washington, he and two otherleaders were arrested for trespassing on the groundsof the Capitol. Their followers were dispersed byclub-wielding policemen. This callous treatment con-vinced many Americans that the government had lit-tle interest in the suffering of the people, an opinionstrengthened when Cleveland, in July 1894, used fed-eral troops to crush the Pullman strike.

The next year the Supreme Court handed downseveral reactionary decisions. In United States v.E. C. Knight Company it refused to employ theSherman Antitrust Act to break up the Sugar Trust.The Court also denied a writ of habeas corpus toEugene V. Debs of the American Railway Union,who was languishing in prison for disobeying a fed-eral injunction during the Pullman strike.

On top of these indications of official conser-vatism came a desperate financial crisis. Throughout1894 the Treasury’s supply of gold dwindled asworried citizens exchanged greenbacks (now con-vertible into gold) for hard money and foreigninvestors cashed in large amounts of American secu-rities. The government tried to sell bonds for gold

Table 20.1 The Supreme Court Supports Racial Segregation and Corporate Power

Civil Rights Cases 1883 Overturned Civil Rights Act of 1875 Limited Fourteenth Amendment to protectingblacks from deprivation of rights by states;allowed individuals to do so

Plessy v. Ferguson 1896 Upheld principle of “separate but equal”in public accommodations

Allowed southern states and municipalitiesto pass laws enforcing separation of whitesand blacks

U.S. v. E. C. Knight Co. 1895 Refused to break up the Sugar Trust forbeing a monopoly

Rendered the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890nearly meaningless

In Re Debs 1895 Refused to free Eugene V. Debs, presidentof the American Railway Union who hadbeen jailed for leading a strike

Enabled the government to use injunctions tostop strikes, thereby depriving union leaders ofthe chance to plead their case in court

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to bolster the reserve, but the gold reserve contin-ued to melt away. Early in 1895 it touched a lowpoint of $41 million.

At this juncture a syndicate of bankers headedby J. P. Morgan turned the tide by underwriting a$62 million bond issue, guaranteeing that half thegold would come from Europe. This caused a greatpublic outcry; the spectacle of the nation beingsaved from bankruptcy by a private banker infuri-ated millions.

As the presidential election of 1896 approached,with the Populists demanding unlimited coinage of sil-ver, the major parties found it impossible to continuestraddling the money question. The Populist vote hadincreased by 42 percent in the 1894 congressionalelections. Southern and western Democratic leadersfeared that they would lose their following unlessCleveland was repudiated. Western Republicans, led bySenator Henry M. Teller of Colorado, were threaten-ing to bolt to the Populists unless their party came outfor silver coinage. After a generation of political equiv-ocation, the major parties had to face an importantissue squarely.

The Republicans, meeting to choose a candidateat St. Louis in June 1896, announced for the goldstandard. “We are unalterably opposed to every mea-sure calculated to debase our currency or impair thecredit of our country,” the platform declared. “Weare therefore opposed to the free coinage of silver. . . .The existing gold standard must be maintained.” Theparty then nominated Ohio’s William McKinley forpresident. McKinley, best known for his staunchadvocacy of the protective tariff yet highly regardedby labor, was expected to run strongly in the Midwestand the East.

The Democratic convention met in July inChicago. The pro-gold Cleveland element made ahard fight, but the silverites swept them aside. Thehigh point came when a youthful Nebraskan namedWilliam Jennings Bryan spoke for silver against gold,for western farmers against the industrial East. Bryan’severy sentence provoked ear-shattering applause:

We have petitioned and our petitions have beenscorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties havebeen disregarded; we have begged, and they havemocked when our calamity came. We beg nolonger; we entreat no more; we petition no more.We defy them!

The crowd responded like a great choir to Bryan’soratorical cues. “Burn down your cities and leave ourfarms,” he said, “and your cities will spring up again asif by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will

grow in the streets of every city in the country.” Heended with a marvelous figure of speech that set thetone for the coming campaign. “You shall not pressdown upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns,”he warned, bringing his hands down suggestively tohis temples. “You shall not crucify mankind upon across of gold!” Dramatically, he extended his arms tothe side, the very figure of the crucified Christ.

The convention promptly adopted a platform call-ing for “the free and unlimited coinage of both silverand gold at the present legal ratio of 16 to 1” andwent on to nominate Bryan, who was barely thirty-six,for president.

This action put tremendous pressure on thePopulists. If they supported the Democrat Bryan, theyrisked losing their party identity; if they nominatedanother candidate, they would ensure McKinley’selection. In part because the delegates could not find aperson of stature willing to become a candidateagainst Bryan, the Populist convention nominatedhim, seeking to preserve the party identity by substi-tuting Watson for the Democratic vice-presidentialnominee, Arthur Sewall of Maine.

William Jennings Bryan, Cross of GoldSpeech at www.myhistorylab.com

The Election of 1896Never did a presidential campaign raise such intenseemotions. The Republicans from the silver-miningstates swung solidly behind Bryan. But many solid-money Democrats, especially in the Northeast,refused to accept the decision of the Chicago con-vention. Cleveland professed to be “so dazed by thepolitical situation that I am in no condition forspeech or thought on the subject.” Many othersadopted the policy of Governor David B. Hill ofNew York, who said, “I am a Democrat still—verystill.” The extreme gold bugs, calling themselvesNational Democrats, nominated their own candi-date, seventy-nine-year-old Senator John M. Palmerof Illinois. Palmer ran only to injure Bryan. “FellowDemocrats,” he announced, “I will not consider itany great fault if you decide to cast your vote forWilliam McKinley.”

At the start the Republicans seemed to haveeverything in their favor. Bryan’s youth and relativelack of political experience—two terms in theHouse—contrasted unfavorably with McKinley’s dis-tinguished war record, his long service in Congressand as governor of Ohio, and his reputation for hon-esty and good judgment. The severe depressionoperated in favor of the party out of power, although

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20 Chapter 46423 11/12/10 8:49 AM Page 546

foundations of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Central toKazin’s analysis was Bryan’s mastery of an impassionedrhetorical style that appealed to the common person andmobilized the masses.

Palin’s oratory and the Tea Party protests in someways resemble Bryan’s combative rhetoric style. But Palin’scritics note that few common people could have affordedthe $349 cost of a ticket to hear her speech in Nashville,which helped pay her $100,000 fee. Perhaps the mostimportant point is that Palin’s supporters and critics alikeseek to lay claim to a “populist” label dating back to the1880s and 1890s.

Source: John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (1931); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of

Reform (1955); Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise (1976); Michael Kazin,

A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (2006).

In February 2010 the National Tea Party held its first conven-tion. Sarah Palin, Republican candidate for Vice President in

2008, delivered the keynote address.“This movement isabout the people,” she added,“and Washington has brokentrust with the people.” Palin’s broad definition of “populism”evoked the grass-roots insurgency of farmers and industrialworkers that culminated in the Populist party of the 1890s.

Back then, well-educated Americans generally dis-missed the Populists as ill-informed and simple-minded,and this disdain persisted well into the twentieth century.But in 1931 historian John D. Hicks championed thePopulists as far-sighted reformers who sought to protectsmall farmers from the excesses of rapacious railroadbarons and eastern financiers. Although the Populist move-ment swiftly collapsed, Hicks insisted that its ideas showed“an amazing vitality.”

But as Hitler seized power later in the 1930s by appeal-ing to the prejudices of the German masses, American intel-lectuals returned to their skepticism toward grass-rootspopulism. Historian Richard Hofstadter charged the Populistswith bigotry and derided their nostalgia for the past.

In 1976 Lawrence Goodwyn countered Hofstadter’scriticisms. The Populists were not backward-looking cranks,but activists in a “cooperative crusade” whose main goal—weakening the monopoly power of the corporations—wassound. But Goodwyn’s assertion raised another question: Ifthe Populists were on the right track, why did their move-ment die out?

In 2006 Michael Kazin declared that Bryan had notfailed. On the contrary, the Populist movement had laid the

DEBATING THE PAST

Populism—Crusade of Cranks or Potent Grass-Roots Protest?

547

Sarah Palin, latter-day proponent of populism at a Tea Partyconvention in Nashville (2010), sought to “go back to our roots as a God-fearing nation” that would “start seeking some divineintervention.”

A William Jennings Bryan poster alludes to religion: “no crown ofthorns” and “no cross of gold.”

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548 Chapter 20 From Smoke-Filled Rooms to Prairie Wildfire: 1877–1896

by repudiating Cleveland the Democrats escapedmuch of the burden of explaining away his errors.The newspapers came out almost unanimously forthe Republicans. The New York Times accused Bryanof being insane, his affliction being variously classi-fied as “paranoia querulenta,” “graphomania,” and“oratorical monomania.” The Democrats had verylittle money and few well-known speakers to fightthe campaign.

But Bryan proved a formidable opponent.Casting aside tradition, he took to the stump per-sonally, traveling 18,000 miles and making over600 speeches. He was one of the greatest of orators.A big, handsome man with a voice capable of carry-ing without strain to the far corners of a great hallyet equally effective before a cluster of auditors at arural crossroads, he projected an image of absolutesincerity without appearing fanatical or argumenta-tive. At every major stop on his tour, huge crowdsassembled. In Minnesota he packed the 10,000-seatSt. Paul Auditorium, while thousands milled in the

streets outside. His energy was amazing, and hischarm and good humor were unfailing. At onewhistle-stop, while he was shaving in his compart-ment, a small group outside the train began clamor-ing for a glimpse of him. Flinging open the windowand beaming through the lather, he shook handscheerfully with each of the admirers. Everywhere hehammered away at the money question. Yet he didnot totally neglect other issues. He was defending,he said, “all the people who suffer from the opera-tions of trusts, syndicates, and combines.”

McKinley’s campaign was managed by a new typeof politician, Marcus Alonzo Hanna, an Ohio busi-nessman. In a sense Hanna was a product of thePendleton Civil Service Act. When deprived of thecontributions of officeholders, the parties turned tobusiness for funds, and Hanna was one of the firstleaders with a foot in both camps. Politics fascinatedhim, and despite his wealth and wide interests, he waswilling to labor endlessly at the routine work of polit-ical organization.

Hanna aspired to be a kingmaker and early fas-tened on McKinley, whose charm he found irre-sistible, as the vehicle for satisfying his ambition. Hespent about $100,000 of his own money on the pre-convention campaign. His attitude toward the candi-date, one mutual friend observed, was “that of a big,bashful boy toward the girl he loves.”

Before most Republicans realized how effectiveBryan was on the stump, Hanna perceived the dangerand sprang into action.

Certain that money was the key to political power,he raised an enormous campaign fund. When business-men hesitated to contribute, he pried open their pursesby a combination of persuasiveness and intimidation.Banks and insurance companies were “assessed” a per-centage of their assets, big corporations a share of theirreceipts, until some $3.5 million had been collected.

Hanna disbursed these funds with efficiency andimagination. He sent 1,500 speakers into the doubt-ful districts and blanketed the land with 250 millionpieces of campaign literature, printed in a dozen lan-guages. “He has advertised McKinley as if he were apatent medicine,” Theodore Roosevelt, never at a lossfor words, exclaimed.

Incapable of competing with Bryan as a swayer ofmass audiences, McKinley conducted a “front-porchcampaign.” This technique dated from the firstHarrison-Cleveland election, when Harrison regularlydelivered off-the-cuff speeches to groups of visitors rep-resenting special interests or regions in his hometownof Indianapolis. The system conserved the candidate’senergies and enabled him to avoid the appearance ofseeking the presidency too openly—which was still

William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech inspired thiscartoonist’s caricature of it as “plagiarized from the Bible.” Bryan’sspeech in favor of bimetallism was, in fact, studded with religiousreferences. He described the unlimited coinage of silver and gold asa “holy cause” supported by those who built churches “where theypraise their Creator.”

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The Meaning of the Election 549

The Meaning of the ElectionDuring the campaign, some frightened Republicanshad laid plans for fleeing the country if Bryan wereelected, and belligerent ones, such as TheodoreRoosevelt, then police commissioner of New YorkCity, readied themselves to meet the “social revolu-tionaries” on the battlefield. Victory sent such peopleinto transports of joy. Most conservatives concludedthat the way of life they so fervently admired hadbeen saved for all time.

However heartfelt, such sentiments were notfounded on fact. With workers standing beside capi-talists and with the farm vote split, it cannot be saidthat the election divided the nation class againstclass or that McKinley’s victory saved the countryfrom revolution.

Far from representing a triumph for the statusquo, the election marked the coming of age ofmodern America. The battle between gold and sil-ver, which everyone had considered so vital, hadlittle real significance. The inflationists seemed tohave been beaten, but new discoveries of gold inAlaska and South Africa and improved methods ofextracting gold from low-grade ores soon led to agreat expansion of the money supply. In any case,within two decades the system of basing the vol-ume of currency on bullion had been abandoned.Bryan and the “political” Populists who supportedhim, supposedly the advance agents of revolution,were oriented more toward the past than thefuture; their ideal was the rural America ofJefferson and Jackson.

McKinley, for all his innate conservatism, wascapable of looking ahead toward the new century. Hisapproach was national where Bryan’s was basically

parochial. Though never daring and seldomimaginative, McKinley was able to deal

pragmatically with current prob-lems. Before long, as the United

States became increasingly anexporter of manufactures, hewould even modify his posi-tion on the tariff. And noone better reflected thespirit of the age than MarkHanna, the outstandingpolitical realist of his gener-

ation. Far from preventingchange, the outcome of the

election of 1896 made possiblestill greater changes as theUnited States moved into thetwentieth century.

considered bad form—and at the same time allowedhim to make headlines throughout the country.

Guided by the masterful Hanna, McKinley broughtthe front-porch method to perfection. Superficially theproceedings were delightfully informal. From every cor-ner of the land, groups representing various regions,occupations, and interests descended on McKinley’sunpretentious frame house in Canton, Ohio. Gatheringon the lawn—the grass was soon reduced to mud, thefence stripped of pickets by souvenir hunters—the visi-tors paid their compliments to the candidate and heardhim deliver a brief speech, while beside him on theporch his aged mother and adoring invalid wife listenedwith rapt attention. Then there was a small reception,during which the delegates were given an opportunityto shake their host’s hand.

Despite the air of informality, these performanceswere carefully staged. The delegations arrived on atightly coordinated schedule worked out by McKinley’sstaff and the railroads, which operated cut-rateexcursion trains to Canton from all over the nation.McKinley was fully briefed on the special interests andattitudes of each group, and the speeches of delegationleaders were submitted in advance. Often his secretaryamended these remarks, and on occasion McKinleywrote the visitors’ speeches himself. His own talks werecarefully prepared, each calculated to make a particularpoint. All were reported fully in the newspapers. Thuswithout moving from his doorstep, McKinley metthousands of people from every section of the country.

These tactics worked admirably. On election dayMcKinley collected 271 electoral votes to Bryan’s 176,the popular vote being 7,036,000 to 6,468,000.

McKinley and Hobart Campaign Poster at www.myhistorylab.com

View the Image

Campaign buttons for McKinley and Bryan in 1896. Bryan sought to expand the money supplythrough the coinage of silver dollars; McKinley sought to remain with the gold standard.

20 Chapter 46423 11/12/10 8:49 AM Page 549

200

160

120

80

40

180

140

100

60

200

1865 1869 1873 1877

Index: 1913 = 100

1881 1885 1889 1893

Wheat prices

Consumer prices

Cotton prices

Wheat and Cotton Prices and Consumer Price Indexes,1865–1896 Farm prices fell by about 50 percent after the Civil War;the Consumer Price Index declined, too, though less precipitously.

550

MAPPING THE PAST

Agrarian Discontent andthe Populist Challenge

ARKANSAS

KANSAS

NEBRASKA

MISSOURI

IOWA

WISCONSIN

MINNESOTA

TEXAS

SOUTH

DAKOTA

NORTH

DAKOTA

NEWMEXICO

TERRITORY

INDIANTERR.

OKLAHOMATERR.

MONTANA

WYOMING

COLORADO

ARIZONATERRITORY

UTAH

NEVADA

OREGON

WASHINGTON

CALIFORNIA

IDAHO

C A N A D A

LOUISIANA

MICHIGAN

INDIANAILLINOIS

OHIO

ALABAMAMISS. GEORGIA

SOUTHCAROLINA

NORTHCAROLINA

VIRGINIA

WESTVIRGINIA

KENTUCKY

TENNESSEE

NEWYORK

PENNSYLVANIAN.J.

CONN.

MASS.

VT.N.H.

MAINE

R.I.

MD. DEL.

FLORIDA

63554020

4

Percentage of allfarmers, 1900

MEXICOGulf ofMexico

ATLANTICOCEAN

Falling Pricesand FarmTenancyAfter 1870 the falling price ofwheat and cotton (see thegraph,below) spelled disas-ter to farmers who wereobliged to make fixed pay-ments on their mortgages.Beleaguered farmers joinedthe Farmers’Alliance and simi-lar organizations to poolresources and negotiate betterdeals with railroads,banks,andgrain merchants.Nevertheless,manyfarmers fell behind in their mortgagepayments; millions became bankruptand lost their farms,obliging them towork as sharecroppers, tenant farmers,or hired hands in the fields.

To avert bankruptcy, farmersincreasingly formed politicalgroups whose chief goal was to drive upfarm prices. Many blamed falling prices on the federal govern-ment’s return to hard money after the Civil War. Not enoughgold had been minted into dollars during the subsequentdecades of economic expansion. As more goods were pro-duced with a constant or slowly-rising supply of gold dollars,prices fell.Thus the farmers lobbied for an infusion of newcurrency—greenbacks as well as silver dollars—to raiseprices.“We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the vergeof moral, political and material ruin,”declared the People’sparty in 1892.The nation must abandon the “gold standard.”

The Rise of Populism in TexasThat Populism was fueled by agrarian discontent is reflected inthe accompanying map of Texas in the 1890s. In Texas, thebirthplace of the Knights of Reliance (Lampasas County) andthe Southern Alliance, Populists made the most gains in themarginal cotton-growing counties, the drier counties near thewestern edge of the cotton-cultivating frontier, and the pinewoods of east Texas. Conversely, the more prosperous farminglands of the Black and Grand prairies rarely voted Populist.Populism appealed most to marginal farmers.

Bryan versus McKinley in 1896The depression of 1893, which lasted much of the decade,altered the geography of American politics. PresidentCleveland’s defense of the gold standard fractured theDemocrats. In the congressional election of 1894,Republicans seized control of both houses of Congress and

increased their delegation in the House by 100 votes.Thisdefeat prompted Democrats from the West and South toreach out to the Populists in 1896; the Democratic party thenadopted a platform that endorsed the free coinage of silver,and nominated William Jennings Bryan, a proponent of silvercurrency, for president.

The Republicans nominated William McKinley, whoseendorsement of the gold standard, though ambiguouslyworded, ensured that the election of 1896 would be themost sharply defined since the Civil War.

On election day,Bryan won in the South, the Plains states,and the Rocky Mountain region.But McKinley carried the East;

Sharecroping and Tenancy, 1880–1900 Sharecropping and farm tenancy, which hadprevailed in the South since the Civil War, spread to other parts of the nation after 1880.

20 Chapter 46423 11/12/10 8:49 AM Page 550

the Midwest, including even Iowa,Minnesota,and North Dakota; and thePacific Coast states of Oregon and California.

The sharp sectional division markedthe failure of the Populist effort to unitenorthern and southern farmers and also thetriumph of the industrial part of the countryover the agricultural. Business and financialinterests voted solidly for the Republicans,fearing that a Bryan victory would bringeconomic chaos.When one Nebraskalandowner tried to float a mortgage duringthe campaign, a loan company officialwrote to him: “If McKinley is elected, wethink we will be in the market, but we donot care to make any investments whilethere is an uncertainty as to what kind ofmoney a person will be paid back in.”

Other social and economic interestswere far from being united. Many thou-sands of farmers voted for McKinley, as hissuccess in states such as North Dakota,Iowa, and Minnesota proved. In the farmareas north of the Ohio and east of theMissouri Rivers, the agricultural depres-sion was not severe, and farm radicalismwas almost nonexistent.

A preponderance of the labor votealso went to the Republicans. In part thisresulted from the tremendous pressuresthat many industrialists applied to theirworkers. “Men,”one manufacturerannounced,“vote as you please, but if Bryanis elected . . . the whistle will not blowWednesday morning.”Some companiesplaced orders for materials subject tocancellation if the Democrats won.Yetcoercion was not a major factor, forMcKinley was highly regarded in laborcircles.While governor of Ohio, he hadadvocated the arbitration of industrialdisputes and backed a law finingemployers who refused to permit work-ers to join unions. He had invariablybased his advocacy of high tariffs on theargument that American wage levelswould be depressed if foreign goodscould enter the country untaxed.TheRepublicans carried nearly all the largecities, and in closely contested statessuch as Illinois and Ohio this made thedifference between victory and defeat.

551

Gulf of

MexicoCounty carried by the Populists morethan once between 1892 and 1898

Areas in which the true value of real estateand improvements exceed $10 per acre

Westward limit of extensive cottoncultivation C. 1890

M E X I C O

LampasasCounty

T E X A S

Gr a

n d P r a i r i e

Bl a

ck

Pr

ai r

i e

Populism in Texas, 1892–1898 Populism was strongest in the cotton-farming region ofTexas—east of the red-colored line. But the Populists carried few of the counties in thefertile Grande and Black prairies. The poorer cotton-farming counties, such as Lampasas(birthplace of the Knights of Reliance in 1877), were more likely to elect Populist candidates.

Questions forDiscussion■ What is the relationship between

falling prices and sharecropping and farm tenancy?How do the maps of Populism in Texas and the elec-tion of 1896 confirm a correlation between agrariandiscontents and Populist support?

Gulf ofMexico

ATLANTIC

OCEAN

C A N A D A

LOUISIANA

MICHIGAN

INDIANAILLINOIS

OHIO

ALABAMA

MISS. GEORGIA

SOUTHCAROLINA

NORTHCAROLINA

VIRGINIA

WESTVIRGINIA

KENTUCKY

TENNESSEE

NEWYORK

PENNSYLVANIAN.J.

CONN.MASS.

VT.N.H.

MAINE

R.I.

MD. DEL.

FLORIDAStates decisive to theoutcome of the election

McKinley, Republican

Bryan, Democrat

Territories not voting

ARKANSAS

KANSAS

NEBRASKA

MISSOURI

IOWA

WISCONSIN

MINNESOTA

TEXAS

SOUTHDAKOTA

NORTHDAKOTA

NEWMEXICO

TERRITORYINDIANTERR.

OKLAHOMATERR.

MONTANA

WYOMING

COLORADO

ARIZONATERRITORY

UTAH

NEVADA

OREGON

WASHINGTON

CALIFORNIA

IDAHO

Gulf ofMexico

Election of 1896Electoral voteby state

Republican(McKinley) Democrat(Bryan)

Total

271

176

447

Popular votescast

7,036,000

6,468,000

13,504,000

Bryan vs. McKinley, 1896 Democrat/Populist Bryan carried much of the South and West, andmost of the farming regions of the plains. But he failed to win over enough industrial workersto take states in the North.

■ In the 1896 election, where were Bryan’s strongestsources of support? McKinley’s? What parts of Texas didBryan carry?

20 Chapter 46423 11/12/10 8:49 AM Page 551

552 Chapter 20 From Smoke-Filled Rooms to Prairie Wildfire: 1877–1896

1872 Ulysses Grant is reelected president1873 Congress suspends the coining of silver (“Crime

of ‘73”)1876 Rutherford B. Hayes is elected president1877 Farmers’ Alliance movement is founded1878 Bland-Allison Act authorizes government

silver purchases1879 Specie payments resume1880 James Garfield is elected president1881 Garfield is assassinated; Grover Cleveland

becomes president1881 Booker T. Washington founds Tuskegee Institute

for blacks1883 Pendleton Act creates Civil Service Commission

Supreme Court Overturns Civil Rights Act of1875 in the civil rights cases

1884 Republicans support Democrats duringMugwump Movement

Grover Cleveland is elected president1887 Interstate Commerce Act regulates railroad rates

Cleveland delivers tariff message1888 Benjamin Harrison is elected president

Englishman James Bryce analyzes Americanpolitics in The American Commonwealth

1890 Sherman Silver Purchase Act requires governmentsilver purchase

1890– Blacks are deprived of the vote in the South19001892 People’s (Populist) party is founded

Cleveland is elected president a second time1893 Sherman Silver Purchase Act is repealed1893 Panic of 1893 causes industrial depression1894 Coxey’s Army marches to Washington to

demand relief1895 Supreme Court declares federal income tax

unconstitutional (Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan andTrust Company)

Booker T. Washington urges self-improvement inAtlanta Compromise Speech

J. P. Morgan raises $62 million in gold for theU.S. Treasury

1896 William Jennings Bryan delivers “Cross ofGold” speech

William McKinley is elected presidentSupreme Court upholds “separate but equal” in

Plessy v. Ferguson

Milestones

Chapter Review

Key TermsAtlanta Compromise A social policy, propounded

by black leader Booker T. Washington in 1895,advocating that blacks concentrate on learning use-ful skills rather than agitate over segregation, dis-franchisement, and discrimination. In Washington’sview, black self-help and self-improvement was thesurest way to economic advancement, 539

Bland-Allison Silver Purchase Act An 1878 com-promise law that that provided for the limitedcoinage of silver, 545

civil rights cases A group of cases in 1883 in whichthe U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutionalthe Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had prohibitedracial discrimination in hotels, theaters, and otherprivately owned facilities. The Court ruled that theFourteenth Amendment barred state govern-ments from discriminating on the basis of race butdid not prevent private individuals, businesses, ororganizations from doing so, 537

mugwumps A group of eastern Republicans, dis-gusted with corruption in the party, who cam-paigned for the Democrats in the 1884 elections.These anticorruption reformers were conservative onthe money question and government regulation, 536

Pendleton Act An 1883 law bringing civil servicereform to federal employment; it classified manygovernment jobs and required competitive examsfor these positions, 535

People’s (Populist) party The People’s party ofAmerica was an important “third party,”founded in 1891, that sought to unite variousdisaffected groups, especially farmers. The partynominated James B. Weaver for president in1892 and in 1896 joined with the Democraticparty in support of William Jennings Bryan forpresident, 542

Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling (1896)that held that racial segregation of public accom-modations did not infringe on the “equal protec-tion” clause of the Constitution; this “separate butequal” doctrine was overturned by Brown v. Boardof Education in 1954, 537

Sherman Silver Purchase Act An 1890 law thatobliged the federal government to buy and coinsilver, thereby counteracting the deflationary ten-dencies of the economy at the time; its repeal in1894, following the Depression of 1893, caused apolitical uproar, 545

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Chapter Review 553

Review Questions1. The introduction to this chapter suggests that

Americans from 1877 to 1896 were as enthralledwith politics as Americans are today with AmericanIdol. And yet the chapter contends that the majorparties took similar positions on the major issues.What explains the high voter turnouts of the era?

2. How did the urban bosses respond to the chal-lenges confronting the cities?

3. How did the decisions of the Supreme Courtaggravate race relations and give rise to political

protest? What strategies did African American lead-ers consider in response to increased segregation?

4. Why did such a seemingly dull issue as currencyreform generate such passion, culminating inWilliam Jennings Bryan’s crusade against “across of gold” in 1896? Why did the Populistsfail to win the support of northern labor, andthus the election?

5. How has populism fared among historians? Howis populism regarded by politicians today? Why?

Read and ReviewChapter 20

Pendleton Civil Service Act,p. 537

Harrison and MortonCampaign Ad, p. 537

Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896, p. 538

The People’s PartyPlatform, p. 543

McKinley and HobartCampaign Poster, p. 549

View the Image

Read the Document

View the Image

View the Image

Read the Document

Study and Review

Research and ExploreMary Elizabeth Lease, the

Populist Crusader, p. 543

William Jennings Bryan,Cross of Gold Speech, p. 546

Read the Document

Read the Document

Reinforce what you learned in this chapter by studying the many documents,images, maps, review tools, and videos available at www.myhistorylab.com.

Hear the audio file for Chapter 20 atwww.myhistorylab.com.

Hear the Audio

Connections

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