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51 Cards in this Set
- Front
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Freedmen's Bureau
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A federal experiment in social welfare set up to provide "such issues of provisions, clothing, and fuel" as might be needed to relieve "destitute and suffering refurgees and freedmen and their wives and children. It negotiated labor contracts, provided medical care, set up schools, had its own courst to deal with labor disputes and land titles, and supervised trials involving blacks in other courts. Its efforts were often hamstrung by the intensity of racial prejudice in the South
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John Wilkes Booth
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A crazed actor and Confederate zealot who assassinated President Lincoln on April 14, 1865. He was eventaully pursued into Virginia and killed in a burning barn.
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Andrew Johnson
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The vice president in Lincoln's administration, who was elevated to the presidency following Lincoln's assassination. He preferred the term restoration to reconstruction, and opposed granting suffrage to African Americans. He was a pro-Union Democrat from Tennessee.
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black codes
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Repressive laws restricting the freedom of African Americans, instituted by the new southern state legislatures to preserve slavery as nearly as possible. They were meant to highlight the distinction between a free man and a free Negro.
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Thaddeus Stevens
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A Pennsylvania representative who was a notable Radical Republican. Argued that the Confederate states should be viewed as conquered provinces, subject to the absolute will of the victors, and that the "whole fabric of southern society must be changed."
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Fourteenth Amendment
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A constitutional amendment which reaffirms the state and federal citizenship of pesons born or naturalized in the United States, and it forbids any state to "abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens," to deprive any person "of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" or to "deny any person ... the equal protection of the laws." Passed Congress on June 16, 1866 and was ratified by the states on July 28, 1868. Meant to remove all doubt about the constitutionality of the new Civil Rights Act
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Fifteenth Amendment
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A constitutional amendment which forbid the states to deny any person the vote on grounds of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Submitted to the states in 1869 and ratified in 1870. Georgia, Mississippi, Texas and Virgina were forced to ratify the amendment in order to re-enter the union.
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carpetbaggers
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Northern white Republicans who allegedly rushed South with all their belongings in carpetbags to grab the political spoils (called carpetbaggers by the opposition). Many were Union veterans who were drawn South by the hope of economic opportunity and other attractions that many of them had seen in their Union service. Many other carpetbaggers were teachers, social workers, or preaches animated by a sincere missionary impulse
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scalawags
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Even more reviled and misrepresented than the carpetbaggers, these were native white Republicans. Most scalawags had opposed secession. Some scalawags were former Whigs attracted by the Republican party's economic program of industrial and commercial expansion
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greenbacks
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The currency endorsed by the Democratic party to pay off the national debt. The Democrats endorsed representative George H. Pendleton's "Ohio idea" that, since most war bonds had been bought with depreciated greenbacks, they should be paid off in greenbacks rather than in gold.
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Crédit Mobilier scandal
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A scandal which rocked the Grant administration. Crédit Mobilier was a sham construction company composed of directors of the Union Pacific Railroad who had miled the Union Pacific for exorbitant ees in order to line the pockets of the insiders who controlled both firms. Union Pacific shareholders were left holding the bag. The schemers bought political support by giving congressmen stock in the enterprise. This had all taken place before Grant's election in 1868, but many prominent Republicans were involved, including Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax, later vice president, and Representative James A. Garfiled, later president.
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Horace Greeley
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The Liberal Republicans' candidate fo president in the election of 1872. He wa an eccentric with a record of hostility towards Democrats, whose support the Liberals needed. He was also the editor of the New York Tribune, and championed just about every reform available.
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Compromise of 1877
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A secret bargain at Wormley's Hotel in Washington. The Republicans promised that if Hayes were elected, he would withdraw the last federal troops from Louisiana and South Carolina, letting the Republican governments there collapse. In return, the Democrats promised to withdraw their oppostion to Hayes, accept in good faith the Reconstruction amendments (including civil rights for blacks), and refrain from partisan reprisals against Republicans in the South. This compromise brought a return to "home rule" in the South, which actually meant rule by white Democats. The Democrats largely ignored their promise to introduce civil rights for African-Americans.
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New South
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A vision of the South that presented a perfect democracy of small farms and diversifying industries. A South no longer run by the planter aristocracy and no longer dependent upon slave labor. Proponents of a "New South" argued that the region must abandon its single-minded preoccupation with agriculture and pursue industrial and commercial development. The vision's major prophet during the 1880s was Henry W. Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution. Many people believed the Confederacy had lost the war because it had relied too much upon King Cotton. Proponents also believed that a more diversified, efficient agriculture would be a foundation for economic growth, that more widespread education, especially vocational training, would promote material success, and that sectional peace and racial harmony would provide a stable environment for economic growth.
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sharecropping
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Sharecropping was the practice by which laborers (called sharecroppers), who had nothing to offer the landowner but their labor, worked the owner's land in return for supplies and a share of the crop, generally about half. The practice of sharecropping and tenancy among blacks and whites grew increasingly prevalent after sagging prices for farm crops made it more difficult than ever to own land.
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Bourbons
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The term used by opponents of the redeemers to label them, in an effort to depict them as reactionaries. Like the French royal family that Napoléon had said forgot nothing and learning nothing in the ordeal of revolution, the Bourbons of the postwar South were said to have forgotten nothing and to have learned nothing in the ordeal of the Civil War.
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redeemers
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Generally pursued a government fiscal policy of retrenchment and frugality, except for the tax emptions and other favors they offered business. The redeemers used convict leasing as a solution to the wartime destruction of prisons and the poverty of state treasuries combined with the demand for cheap labor. Reduced not only state expenditures but also the public debt, simply by not paying it. Created commissions to regulate the rates charged by railroads for commercial transport, established board of agriculture and mechanical colleges, teacher-training schools and women's colleges, and even state colleges for African Americans. Ultimate paradox of the Bourbons' rule was that these paragons of white supremacy tolerated a lingering black voice in politics and showed no haste to raise the barriers of racial separation in public places.
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"Jim Crow" laws
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laws which mandated segregation of the races in various public places. These were instituted as a result of a calculated campaign by white elites and racist thugs to limit African American political, economic, and social life.
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Mississippi plan
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Mississippi's plan for the near-total disenfranchisement of blacks and many poor whites as well. First, a residence requirement - two years in the state, one year in an election district - struck at those African American tenant farmers who were in the habit of moving yearly in search of better opportunities. Second, voters were disqualified if convicted of certain crimes. Third, all taxes, including a poll tax, had to be paid before a person cold vote. This proviso fell most heavily on poor whites and blacks. Fourth and finally, all voters had to be literate. The alternative, designed as a loophole for otherwise-disqualified whites, was an "understanding" clause. The voter, if unable to read the Constitution, could qualify by being able to "understand" it - to the satisfaction of the registrar.
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"separate but equal"
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Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States Constitutional law that justified systems of segregation. Under this doctrine, services, facilities and public accommodations were allowed to be separated by race, on the condition that the quality of each group's public facilities were (supposedly) to remain equal. The phrase was derived from a Louisiana law of 1890.[1] This phrase made an appearance in Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy v. Ferguson
Seal of the United States Supreme Court.svg Supreme Court of the United States Argued April 13, 1896 Decided May 18, 1896 Full case name Homer A. Plessy v. Ferguson Citations 163 U.S. 537 (more) 16 S. Ct. 1138; 41 L. Ed. 256; 1896 U.S. LEXIS 3390 Prior history Ex parte Plessy, 11 So. 948 (La. 1892) Subsequent history None Holding The "separate but equal" provision of public accommodations by state governments is constitutional under the Equal Protection Clause. Court membership Chief Justice Melville Fuller Associate Justices Stephen J. Field · John M. Harlan Horace Gray · David J. Brewer Henry B. Brown · George Shiras, Jr. Edward D. White · Rufus W. Peckham Case opinions Majority Brown, joined by Fuller, Field, Gray, Shiras, White, Peckham Dissent Harlan Brewer took no part in the consideration or decision of the case. Laws applied U.S. Const. amend. XIV; 1890 La. Acts 152 Overruled by Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence of the United States, upholding the constitutionality of racial segregation even in public accommodations (particularly railroads), under the doctrine of "separate but equal". |
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Booker T. Washington
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Waas the foremost black educator in the nation by the 1890s. Educated at Hampton Institute, then founded a college in Tuskegee, Alabama. He argued that blacks should first establish an economic base for their advancement before striving for social equality. "Cast down your bucket where you are - cast it down in making friends ... of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded. Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions." Some people critized him for making a bad bargain: the sacrifice of broad educational and civil rights for the dubious acceptance of white conservatives and economic opportunities.
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W.E.B. Du Bois
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First African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard. He led the criticism against Booker T. Washington for sacrificing civil rights for the dubious acceptance of white conservatives and economic opportunities. Criticized Booker T. Washington's "accomodationist" philosophy. Washington, Du Bois argued, preached "a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as...to overshadow the higher aims of life." The education of blacks, Du Bois, maintained, should not be merely vocational but should nurture bold leaders willing to challenge segregation and discimination through political action. He demanded that disenfranchisement and legalized segregation cease immediately and that the laws of the land be enforced. Du Bois called Washington's 1895 speech "the Atlanta Compromise" and said that he would not "surrender the leadership of this race to cowards."
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Ida B. Wells
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One of the most outspoken African American activists in the late 19th century. Assumed responsibility for her five younger siblings and secured a job as a country schoolteacher. Taught in segregated schools in Memphis and gained entrance ot the social life of the city's striving African American middle class. Confronted the reality and power of white supremacy in 1883. She was the first African American to file suit against the discrimination of being denied a seat on a railroad car because she was black. After the Supreme Cout overturned the ruling (which was initially in her favor), Wells began writing under the pen name Iola nad became a prominent editor of Memphis Free Speech, a newspaper focusing on African American Issues. Launched a lifelong crusade against lynching in 1892 after three of her friends were lynched. Helped found the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in 1909 and worked to promote women's suffrage. In promoting full equality, Wells often found herself in direct opposition to the accomodationist views of Booker T. Washington
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panning
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A process by which gold miners would sift dust and nuggets out of riverbeds. The first wave of mines who rushed to California in 1849 sifted gold this way.
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George A. Custer
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A reckless, glory-seeking officer who led an exploratory expedition into the Black Hills. Miners were soon filtering onto the Sioux hunting grounds despite promises that the army would keep them out. The army had done little to protect Indian land, but when ordered to move against wandering bands of Sioux hunting on the range according to their treaty rights, it moved vigorously. Custer led 210 men to death in 1876 at the Little Bighorn River. They were annihilated by 2500 warriers.
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Great Sioux War
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The largest military event since the end of the Civil War and one of the largest campaigns against Indians in American history. It lasted fifteen months and entailed fifteen battles in present-day Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska. The Sioux were ably led by the heroic Chief Sitting Bull. In 1876, after several indecisive encounters, Custer found the main encampment of Sioux and their Northern Cheyenne allies on the Little Bighorn Rver. Separated from the main body of soldiers and surrounded by 2500 warriers, Custer's detachment of 210 men was annihilated. Instead of following up their victory, the Indians celebrated and renewed their hunting. The army quickly regained the offensive and compelled the Sioux to give up their hunting grounds and goldfields in return for payments.
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Ghost Dance movement
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A movement meant to hasten the Indians' deliverance (being rescued and having their lands restored) by taking up a ceremonial dance at each new moon. Wovoka (or Jack Wilson), a Paiute in western Nevada, fell ill and in a delirium imagined he had visited the spirit world and learned of this dance. White authorities banned the Ghost Dance on Lakota reservations after the Lakota Sioux adopted it with fervor in 1890. It led to a bloodbath on December 29, 1980 in Wounded Knee, South Dakota. An accidental rifle discharge led nervous soldiers to fire into a group of Indians who had come to surrender.
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range wars
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violent disputes between ranchers and farmers in which ranchers often tried to drive off neighboring farmers and farmers in turn tried to sabotage the cattle barons, cutting their fences and spooking their herds. The cattle ranchers also clashed with sheepherders over access to grassland. A strain of ethnic and religious prejudice heightened the tension between ranchers and herders. In the Southwest, shepherds were typically Mexican Americans, in Idaho and Nevada they were from the Basque region of Spain, or they were Mormons. Many Anglo-American cattle ranchers and cowboys viewed those ethnic and religious groups as un-American and inferior adopting an attitude that helped them rationalize the use of violence against sheepherders. Warfare gradually faded, however, as the sheep for the most part found refuge in the high pastures of the mountains, leaving the grasslands of the plains to the cattle ranchers. There also developed a perennial tension between large and small cattle ranchers. The large ranchers fenced in huge tracts of public land, leaving the smaller ranchers with too little pasture. To survive, the smaller ranchers cut the fences. In central Texas this practice sparked the Fence-Cutters' War of 1883-1884. Several ranchers were killed and dozens wounded before the state ended the conflict by passing legislation outlawing fence cutting.
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Jay Gould
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The prince of the railroad robber barons. A secretive trickster who mastered the fine art of buying rundown railroads, making cosmetic improvements, and selling out at a profit, meanwhile using corporate funds for personal investment and judicious bribes for politicians and judges. Ousted by a reform group after looting New York's Erie Railroad, he moved on to richer spoils in western railroads. Nearly every enterprise he touched was compromised or ruined; Gould, meanwhile, was building a fortune that amounted to $100 million upon his death, at age fifty-six.
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Cornelius Vanderbilt
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A man wh was already rich before the Civil War but decided to give up the hazards of wartime shipping in favor of land transport. (He was nicknamed Commodore by virtue of his early exploits in steamboating)
Vanderbilt merged separate trunk lines connecting Albany and Buffalo, New York, into a single powerful rail network led by the New York Central. This accomplished, he forged connections to New York City and then tried to corner the stock of his chief competitor, the Erie railroad. But the directors of that line fended him off by printing new Erie stock faster than Vanderbilt could buy it. In 1873, however, he bought a midwest rail company that gave his lines connections to the lucrative Chicago market. After the Commodore's death, in 1877, his son William Henry extended the Vanderbilt railroads to include more than 13,000 miles in the Northeast. The consolidation trend was nationwide: about two thirds of the nation's railroad mileage were under the control of only seven major groups by 1900. |
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John D. Rockefeller
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John Rockefeller was a man with a passion for systematic organization and self-discipline. He was obsessed with precision, order and tidiness. Early on he decided to bring order and rationality to the chaotic oil industry. The economic importance of the oil rush soon outstripped that of the gold rush from ten years before. Rockefeller recognized the potential profits in refining oil, and in 1870 he incorporated his various interests into Standard Oil Company of Ohio. He wanted all of the oil business. Bought out competitiors because he felt they were flooding the market with too much refined oil, bringing down prices and reducing profits. Much of his success was based upon his determination to "pay nobody a profit." He pioneered heavy vertical integration (producing its own barrels, cans, staves, and whatever else it needed.) The company also kept large amounts of cash reserves to make it independent of banks in case of a crisis. Furthermore, Rockefeller set out to control his transportation needs. With Standard Oil owning most of the pipelines leading to railroads, plus the railroad tank cars and the oil-storage facilities, it was able to dissuade the railroads from serving its eastern competitors. To consolidate their scattered business interests under more efficient control, Rockefeller and his advisers resorted to a new legal device: in 1882 they organized the Standard Oil Trust. All thirty-seven stockholders in various Standard Oil enterprises conveyed their stock to nine trustees, receiving "trust certificates" in return. The nine trustees thereby controlled al the varied Standard Oil comapnies. But the trust device, widely copied by other companies in the 1880s, proed vulnerable to prosecution under state laws against monopoly or restraint of trade. In 1892, Ohio's supreme court ordered the Standard Oil Trust dissolved. For a while the company managed to unify control by the simple device of interlocking directorates, through which the board of directors of one company was made identical or nearly so to the boards of the others. Gradually, however, Rockefeller perfected the idea of the holding company: a company taht controlled other companies by holding all or at least a majority of their stock. He was convinced that such big business was a natural result of capitalism at work. In 1899, Rockefeller brought his empire under the direction of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, a gigantic holding company Though less vulnerable to prosecution under state law, some holding companies were broken up by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. Rockefeller not only made a colossal fortune, but he also gave much of it away, mostly to support advances in education and medicine. A man of simple tastes who opposed the use of tobacco and alcohol and believed his fortune was a public trust awarded by God, he became the world's leading philanthropist. He donated more than $500 million during his ninety-eight-year lifetime. "I have always regarded it as a religious duty," Rockefeller said late in life, "to get all I could honorably and to give all I could."
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The Standard Oil Company of Ohio
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the enterprise which incorporated Rockefeller's various interests. By 1879, Standard Oil was controlling 90 to 95 percent of the oil refining in the country.
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Andrew Carnegie
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Carnegie was a promoter, salesman and organizer with a gift for hiring men of expert ability. He insisted upon up-to-date machinery and equipment and used times of recession to expand cheaply by purchasing struggling companies. He also preached to his employees a philosophy of continual innovation in order to reduce operating costs. Carnegie stood out from other business titans as a thinker who fashioned a philosophy of big business, a conservative rationale that became deeply ingrained in the conventional wisdom of some Americans. He believed that however harsh their methods at times, he and other captains of industry were on the whole public benefactors. He argued in "The Gospel of Wealth" that in the evolution of society the contrast between the millionaire and the laborer measures the distance society has come. "Not evil, but good, has come to the race from the accumulation of wealth by those who have the ability and energy that produces it." Th process had been costly in many ways, but the law of human competition is "best for the trade, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department."
When Carnegie retired from business, at age sixty-fkve, he devoted himself to dispensing his fortune for the public good, out of a sincere desire to promote social welfare and further world peace. He called himself a "distributor" of wealth (he disliked the term philanthropy). He gave money to many universities, built 1,700 libraries, and helped fund numerous hospitals, parks, halls for meetings and concerts, swimming pools, and church buildings. He also donated 800 organs to churches around the world. |
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J. Pierpont Morgan
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An investment banker, which meant that he would buy corporate stocks and bonds wholesale and sell them at a profit. The growth of large corporations put investment firms such as Morgan's in an increasingly strategic position in the economy. Since the investment business depended upon the general good health of client companies, investment bankers became involved in the operation of their clients' firms, demanding seats on the boards of directors so as to influence company policies. Like John Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan sought to consolidate rival firms into giant trusts. Morgan early realized that railroads were the key to the times, and he acquired and reorganized one line after another. By the 1890s he alone controlled a sixth of the nation's railway system. To Morgan, an imperious, domineering man, the stability brought by his operations helped the economy and the public. His crowning triumph was consolidation of the steel industry. After a rapid series of mergers in the iron and steel industry, he bought out Andrew Carnegie's huge steel and iron holdings in 19101. In rapid succession, Morgan added other steel interests as well as the Rockefeller iron ore holdings in Minnesota's Mesabi Range and a Great Lakes shipping fleet. The new United States Steel Corporation, a holding company for these varied interests, was a marvel of the new century, the first billion-dollar corporation, the climactic event in the age of relentless business consolidation.
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Sears, Roebuck and Company
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A retailer which came to dominate the mail-order industry. It was founded by two young mid-western entrepreneurs, Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck, who began offering a cornucopia of goods by mail in the early 1890s. The Sears, Roebuck catalog in 1897 was 786 pages long. It featured groceries, drugs, tools, bells, furniture, iceboxes, stoves, household utensils, musical instruments, farm implements, boots and shoes, clothes, books, and sporting goods. The company's ability to buy goods in high volume from wholesalers enabled it to sell items at prices below those offered in rural general stores. By 1907, Sears, Roebuck and Company had become one of the largest business enterprises in the nation. The Sears catalog helped create a truly national market and in the process transformed the lives of millions of people. With the advent of free rural mail delivery in 1898 and the widespread distribution of Sears catalogs, families on farms and in small towns and villages could purchase by mail the products that heretofore were either prohibitively expensive or available only to city dwellers. By the turn of the century, 6 million Sears catalogs were being distributed each year, and the catalog had become the single most widely read book in the nation after the Bible.
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Knights of Labor
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A labor group of national standing, founded by Uriah S. Stephens, a Philadelphia tailor. Stephens felt that secrecy, along with a semireligious ritual, would protect members from retaliation by employers and create a sense of solidarity. It was started in 1869, grew slowly, but spread rapidly during the depression of the 1870s. Its preamble and platform endorsed the reforms advanced by previous workingmen's groups, including the creation of bureaus of labor statistics and mechanics' lien laws (to ensure payment of salaries), elimination of convict-labor competition, establishment of the eight-hour day, and use of paper currency. One plank in the platform, far ahead of the times, called for equal pay for equal work by men and women. Throughout its existence, the Knights of Labor emphasized reform measures and preferred boycotts to strikes as a way to put pressure on employers. The Knights of Labor also proposed to organize worker cooperatives that would enable members, collectively, to own their own large-scale manufacturing and mining operations. The Knights allowed as members all who had ever worked for wages, except lawyers, doctors, bankers, and those who sold liquor. Theoretically it was one big union of all workers, skilled or unsilled, regardless of race, color, creed or sex. Though the violent incident at Haymarket Square triggered widespread revulsion at the Knights of Labor and labor groups in general, the Knights nevertheless attained some lasting achievements, among them the creation of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1884 as well as several state labor bureaus; the Foran Act of 1885 which, though weakly enforced, penalized employers who imported contract labor (an arrangement similar to the indentured servitude of colonial times, in which workers were committed to a term of labor in exchange for transportation to America); and an 1880 federal law providing for the arbitration of labor disputes. The Knights by example also spread the idea of unionism and initiated a new type of union organization: the industrial union, and industry-wide union of skilled and unskilled workers.
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Samuel Gompers
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The president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) from its start until his death, in 1924, with only one year's interruption. He focused on concrete economic gains-higher wages, shorter hours, better working conditions - and avoided involvement with utopian ideas or politics. He willingly used strikes to achieve favorable trade agreements, including provisos for union recognition in the form of closed shops (which could hire only union members) or union-preference shops (which could hire others only if no union members were available. He never frowned upon industrial unions, and several become important affiliates of the AFL. The AFL was a collective of twenty-ive craft unions (skilled workers) who opposed industrial unionism.
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American Federation of Labor
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A skilled labor union started by twenty-five craft unions (skilled workers) who opposed industrial unionism. Leaders of the craft unions feared that joining with unskilled laborers would mean a loss of their craft's identity and a loss of the skilled workers' greater bargaining power. Its structure differed from that of the Knights of Labor in that it was a federation of national organizations, each of which retained a large degree of autonomy and exercised greater leverage against management. The AFL at first grew slowly, but by 1890 it had surpassed the Knights of Labor in membership. By the turn of the century, it claimed 500,000 members in affiliated unions; in 1914, it had 2 million, and in 1920 it reached a peak of 4 million. Organized labor's strongholds were in transportation and the building trades.
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Eugene V. Debs
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Founded the American Railway Union. Became a tireless spokesman for labor radicalism by the early 1890s, and strove to organize all railway workers - skilled or unskilled - into the American Railway Union. Soon he was in charge of a powerful new labor organization, and he quickly turned his attention to the controversy in Pllman, Illinois. After George Pullman refused Debs's plea for arbitration in June 1894, the union workers stopped handling Pullman railcars. A few das after the strike ended, the district court cited Debs for violating the injunction, and he served six months in jail. The Supreme Court upheld the decree in the case of In re Debs (1895) on broad grounds of national sovereignty: "The strong arm of the national government may be put forth to brush away all obstructions to the freedom of interstate commerce or the transportation of the mails." Debs served his jail term, during which he read deeply in socialist literature, and emerged to devote the rest of his life to socialism.
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Pullman Strike
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A notable walkout in American history. It paralyzed the economies of the twenty-seven states and territories making up the western half of the nation. It involved a dispute at Pullman, Illinois, a model industrial town built on 4,000 acres outside Chicago, where workers of the Pullman Palace Car Company were housed. The town's idyllic appearance was deceptive, however. Employees were required to live there, pay rents and utility costs that were higher than those in nearby towns, and buy goods from company stores. During the depression of 1893, George Pullman laid off 3,000 or his 5,800 employees and cut wages 25 to 40 percent, but not his rents and other charges. After Pullman fired three members of a workers' grievance committee, a strike began on May 11, 1894. During this tense period, Pullman workers had been joining the new American Railway Union, founded the previous year by Eugene V. Debs. In June 1894, after George Pullman refused Debs's plea for arbitration, the union workers stopped handling Pullman railcars. By the end of July they had tied up most of the railroads in the Midwest. Railroad executives then hired strikebreakers to connect mail cars to Pullman cars so that interference with Pullman cars would entail interference with the federal mail. The U.S. attorney general, a former railroad attorney himself, swore in 3,400 special deputies to keep the trains running. When clashes occured between those deputies and some of the strikers, angry workers ignored Debs's plea for an orderly boycott. They assaulted strikebreakers (scabs) and destroyed property. Finally, on July 3, 1894, President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops into the Chicago area, where the strike was centered. The Illinois governor insisted that the state could keep order, but Cleveland claimed authority and a duty to ensure delivery of the mail. Meanwhile, the attorney general won an injunction forbidding any interference with the mail or any effort to restrain interstate commerce; the principle was that a strike or boycott violated the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act. On July 13 the union called off the strike. A few days later the district court cited Debs for violating the injunction, and he served six months in jail. The Supreme Court upheld the decree in the case of In re Debs (1895) on broad grounds of national sovereignty: "The strong arm of the national government may be put forth to brush away all obstructions to the freedom of interstate commerce or the transportation of the mails." Debs served his jail term, during which he read deeply in socialist literature, and emerged to devote the rest of his life to socialism.
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Ellis Island
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Ellis Island was created as a Congress-funded effort to replace the corrupt state0run Castle Garden. It was a tiny island off the New Jersey coast, a mile south of Manhattan, near the Statue of Liberty. In 1892, Ellis Island opened its doors to the "huddled masses" of the world. In 1907, the reception center's busiest year, more than 1 million new arrivals passed through the receiving center, an average of about 5,000 per day; in one day alone, immigration officials processed some 11,750. These were the immigrants who crammed into the steerage compartments deep in the ships' hulls. Those refugees who could afford first- and second-class cabins did not have to visit Ellis Island; they were examined on board, and most of them simply walked down the gangway onto the docks in lower Manhattan.
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nativist
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Native-born American who saw the wave of new immigrants as a threat to their way of life and their jobs. "Immigrants do work for almost nothing," groused one laborer. Other "nativists" felt that the newcomers threatened traditional American culture. A Stanford University professor called them "illiterate, docile, lacking in self-reliance and initiative, and not possessing the Anglo-Teutonic conceptions of law, order, and government." Cultural differences confirmed in the minds of nativists the assumption that the Nordic peoples of the old immigration were superior to the Slavic, Italian, Greek, and Jewish peoples of the new immigration. Many of the new immigrants were illiterate, and more appeared so because they could not speak English. Some resorted to crime, encouraging suspiciouns that criminals were being quietly helped out of Europe just as they had once been transported from England to the colonies. Religious prejudice, mainly anti-Catholic, anti-Buddhist, and anti-Semitic sentiments, also underlay hostility toward the latest newcomers. During the 1880s nativist groups emerged to stop the flow of immigrants. The most successful of the nativist groups, the American Protective Association (APA), operated mainly in Protestant strongholds of the upper Mississippi Valley. Its organizer harbored paranoid fantasies of Catholic conspiracies and was especially eager to keep public schools free from Jesuit control. The association grew slowly from its start in 1887 unti 1893, when leaders took advantage of a severe depression to draw large numbers of the frustrated to its ranks. The APA promoted government restrictions on immigration, more stringent naturalization requirements, workplaces that refused to employ aliens or Catholics, and the teaching of the "American" language in the schools.
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Chinese Exclusion Act
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This was the first federal law to restrict immigration on the basis of race and class, shutting the door to Chinese immgration for ten years. The discriminatory legislation received overwhelming support. One congressman explained that because the "industrial army of Asiatic laborers" was increasing the tension between workers and management, "the gate must be closed." The Chinese Exclusion Act was periodically renewed before being extended indefinitely in 1902. Not until 1943 were barriers to Chinese immigration finally removed. Although the Chinese Exclusion Act sharply reduced the flow of Chinese immigrants, it did not stop the influx completely. In 1910, the West Coast counterpart of Ellis Island opened on rugged Angel Island, six miles offshore from San Francisco, to process tens of thousands of Asian immigrants, most of them Chinese. Those arrivals from China who could claim a Chinese American parent were allowed to enter, as were certain officials, teachers, merchants and students. The powerful prejudice that the Chinese immigrants encountered helps explain why over 30 percent of the arrivals at Angel Island were denied entry.
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Frederick Law Olmstead
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The designer of New York's Central Park, which opened in 1858. He went on to design parks for Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and many other cities. These parks appealed to people's desires to escape the congestion and disease associated with city life and participate in forms of outdoor recreation.
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social Darwinism
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The application of the evolutionary theory to the social world. Herbert Spencer championed this view.
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Herbert Spencer
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The first major prophet of social Darwinism and an important influence on American thought. Spencer argued that human society and institutions, like organisms, passed through the process of natural selection, which resulted, in Spencer's chilling phrase, in the "survival of the fittest." For Spencer, social evolution was the engine of progress, ending "only in the establishment of the greatest perfection and the most complete happiness." If, as Spencer believed, society naturally evolved for the better, then government interference with the process of social evolution was a serious mistake. Social Darwinism implied a government policy of hands off; it decried the regulation of business, the graduated income tax, and sanitation and housing regulations. Such intervention, Spencer charged, would help the "unfit" survive and thereby impede progress. The only acceptable charity was voluntary, and even that was of dubious value. Spencer warned that "fostering the good-for-nothing[people] at the expense of the good, is an extreme cruelty." For Spencer and his many American supporters, successful businessmen and corporations promoted social progress. If small businesses were crowded out by trusts and monopolies, that too was part of the evolutionary process. The oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller told his Baptist Sunday-school class that the "growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest...This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God."
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The Gilded Age
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The thirty-five years between the end of the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century. It had several distinctive elements: Local politics, especially in cities crowded with waves of new immigrants, was usually controlled by "rings" - small groups of political insiders who managed the nomination and election of candidates, conducted primaries, and influenced policy. Each ring typically had a powerful "boss" who ran things, using his "machine" - a network of neighborhood activists and officials - to govern the town or city. Bosses organized neighborhoods (precincts), mediated disputes, picked candidates, helped the needy and distiruted patronage. The Gilded Age was labeled such by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner when they collaborated on a novel titled The Gilded Age, a depiction of widespread political corruption and corporate greed. National political parties during the Gilded Age were much more dominant forces than they are today. Party loyalty was powerful, often extending over many generations. Parties also were the nexus of political activity. They controlled access to political offices, dominated elections, and shaped policy making. Another distinctive element was the close division between Republicans and Democrats in Congress, which created the sense of a stalemate. Neither party was willing to embrace controversial issues or take bold initiatives because each one's relative strength was so precarious. Many observers then and since considered this a time of political mediocrity, in which the parties refused to confront "real issues" such as the runaway growth of an unregulated economy and its attendant social injustices. The nature of political culture during the Gilded Age was essentially local.
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William "Boss" Tweed
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A boss in the Tammany Hall ring who shamelessly ruled, plundered and occasionally improved municipal government, often through dishonest means and frequent bribes. Until his arrest in 1871 and his conviction in 1873, Tweed used the Tammany Hall ring to dominate the nation's largest city.
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Tammany Hall
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a powerful organization within the Democratic Party that was widely associated with corruption. Founded as a fraternal and benevolent society in 1789, it came to dominate political life in New York City in the 19th and early 20th centuries, before being reduced in power by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the early 1930s. William "Boss" Tweed used the Timmany Hall ring to dominate the nation's largest city until his arrest in 1871 and his conviction in 1873.
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"city machines"
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Used patronage and favoritism to keep the loyalty of business supporters while providing jobs or food or fuel to working-class voters who had fallen on hard times. The party faithful eagerly took part in rallies and picnics, deriving from them a sense of camaraderie as well as an opportunity for recreation that offered a welcome relief from their usual workday routine.
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James Gillepsie Blaine
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A congressman from Maine who saw nothing wrong in accepting stock certificates from an Arkansas railroad after helping it win a land grant from Congress. Neither did his supporters.
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