CHAPTER 20Dissent, Depression, and War

1890–1900

Copyright © 2009 by Bedford/St. Martin’s

The Farmers’ Revolt • The Farmers’ Alliance

– Farmers faced series of economic challenges• Supported the Grange and Greenback Labor Party

• Falling prices - rising railroad rates - insufficient currency and credit system - farmers alliances in Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana - two regional alliances - more than 200,000 members: Northwestern Farmers’ Alliance and the more radical Southern Farmers’ Alliance.

– Southern Farmers’ Alliance worked with the Colored Farmers’ Alliance.

• 5. The Farmers’ Alliance supported the Great Southwestern Strike and the Knights of Labor - encouraged inclusion of women and children

• Socializing and political education - secular preaching to reach illiterate participants.

• Farmers’ cooperatives that sought to negotiate better prices - opposition from merchants, bankers, wholesalers, and manufacturers

• As cooperative movement died – direct political action – railroad regulation, laws against land speculation, and currency and credit reform.

The First Farmers’ Alliance Flag

Consumer Prices and Farm Income, 1865–1910

• The Populist Movement– Farmers’ Alliance - People’s Party - Populist

movement. • Stinging critique of industrial society – sub treasury, farmers to

store nonperishable crops in government storehouses until market prices rose

• Land reform and a plan to reclaim excessive lands granted to railroads or sold to foreign investors.

• Currency - free silver and greenbacks.• Prohibition and women’s suffrage too divisive.• An alternative vision of American economic democracy.

The Labor Wars

• The Homestead Lockout – In 1892, steelworkers in Pennsylvania v. Andrew Carnegie - right

to organize the Homestead steel mills.

- Carnegie against Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers – profits and control of industry – denied renewal at at Homestead mill - left plant under Henry Clay Frick, a tough anti

labor man – • Fifteen-foot fence around the plant - 316 mercenaries from the Pinkerton

Detective Agency to defend “Fort Frick.” • On June 28, Frick locked workers out – workers blocked Pinkertons entry –

scuffle killed or wounded more than a dozen Pinkertons and thirty workers - Pinkertons retreated to their barges - finally surrendered – faced verbal and physical violence Dubious victory for the workers - public outcry - governor of Pennsylvania called National Guard - Alexander Berkman, a Russian immigrant and anarchist, attempted to assassinate Frick

• Public opinion against the workers - four and a half months later workers returned to work - wages slashed, workday lengthened, and 500 jobs eliminated.

• Carnegie’s profits tripled - forty-five years for steelworkers, unskilled as well as skilled, to successfully unionize.

• The Cripple Creek Miners’ Strike of 1894– 1893 – depression - silver mines hit hard - miners found jobs in

the gold fields of Cripple Creek, Colorado. • Conservative mine owners increased workday from eight to ten

hours - Western Federation of Miners (WFM) protested.

• Strike in 1894 – support from local businesses, grocers, local officials and the governor

• County sheriff called troops - Populist governor Davis H. Waite refused - served as arbitrator in the dispute

• Mine owners eventually capitulated - eight-hour workday – decade later they hit back with support from state troops - took back control of mines - defeated the WFM and blacklisted its members.

• Eugene V. Debs and the Pullman Strike– By 1894 3 million unemployed –

• Workers in company town of Pullman affected– High rents and constant threat of eviction - Wages of Pullman workers

slashed five times in 1893 - 28 percent cuts - rent remained constant.

Homestead Workers Attack the Pinkertons

– Piecework for day wages - undermining skilled crafts workers - workers rebelled - American Railway Union (ARU) led by Eugene V. Debs.

– George Pullman fired three union leaders who led protest of wage cuts - 90 percent of Pullman’s thirty-three hundred workers began strike.

– Strikers appealed to ARU for help - ARU membership voted to boycott Pullman cars - switchmen in other states refused to handle any train carrying Pullman cars

– General Managers Association (GMA) recruited strikebreakers - fired protesting switchmen.

– Boycott/strike spread to more than fifteen railroads - affected twenty seven states and territories - peaceful.

– Management press releases distorted reality – reported about violence.– Attorney General Richard B. Olney - convinced President Grover Cleveland

to send federal troops to protect U.S. mail - governor of Illinois had refused to call out troops because strike was peaceful.

– Two conservative Chicago judges prohibited Debs from speaking in public and made the boycott a crime punishable by jail sentence for contempt of court.

– Cleveland called the army - Debs jailed - strike broken. – Workers had little recourse when government wielded its power in defense of

industrialists’ property rights.

Women’s Activism • Frances Willard and the Woman’s Christian Temperance

Union – Still unable to vote in the late nineteenth century - women were far

from apolitical - WCTU and women’s political activism• Frances Willard – led the campaign – alcoholism, a disease rather

than a sin – poverty, a cause rather than a result of drink.

• In a shrewd political tactic, Willard used cult of domesticity - moved women into public life – to ameliorate social problems.

• “home protection” – reform coalition with support from Knights of Labor, the People’s Party, and the Prohibition Party.

• Over 200,000 members in the 1890s - valuable experience in political action.

• Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and the Movement for Woman Suffrage– Movement for woman suffrage - small and relatively weak.

• Stanton and Anthony - National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA)

in 1869 - the vote for women.

The Election of 1892

Depression Politics • Coxey’s Army

– Spring of 1894 - unemployed Americans marched to Washington, D.C., - economic plight - public works program - end unemployment - Jacob S. Coxey from Massilon, Ohio.

• May 1, Coxey’s army in Washington - in Capitol grounds - met by police using nightsticks.

• Comfortable Americans - specter of insurrection and rebellion everywhere in 1894.

• Coxey jailed - by August – movement ended• Unsuccessful - called into question the underlying values of the new

industrial order - ordinary citizens and use of means outside the regular party system to influence politics in the 1890s.

• The People’s Party and the Election of 1896 – Populists rally against status quo.– Fiery rhetoric frightened many – call not to reform but to revolution. – People’s Party captured more than a million votes in the presidential

election of 1892.– Sectional and racial animosities threatened party unity - common cause

with black farmers - hated in the white South.

The Election of 1896

– Election of 1896 - intensified cries for reform not only from the Populists, but throughout the electorate.

– Republicans nominated Ohio governor William McKinley - preservation of the gold standard - western advocates of free silver walked out of the convention

– Democratic Party as vast segments in the West and South repudiated President Grover Cleveland because of support for gold - William Jennings Bryan - passionate call for free silver.

– People’s Party – Populists urged the party to ally with the Democrats and endorse Bryan – but Democratic vice presidential candidate, Arthur M. Sewall, a railroad director and bank president, posed significant obstacles to Populists who advocated fusion with Democrats.

– Populism’s regional constituencies - divided about tactics and united in call for change - vice presidential candidate, Tom Watson of Georgia and Bryan for president.

– Silver states of the Rocky Mountains lined up for Bryan - Northeast stood solidly for McKinley - much of the South, with the exception of the border states, abandoned the Populists and returned to the Democratic fold - Midwest hanging in the balance - costing Bryan crucial votes.

– Unprecedented voter turnout - McKinley won twenty-three states and Bryan twenty-two – Populists and the People’s Party crushed but Populism set domestic political agenda for the United States in the next decades - banking and currency reform, electoral reform, and an enlarged role for the federal government in the economy.

The United States and the World • Markets and Missionaries

– Depression of the 1890s provided a powerful impetus to American commercial expansion abroad for profits.

– American missionaries - spread the gospel of Christianity to the “heathen” – series of anti foreign uprisings in China - culminated

in the Boxer uprising of 1900. • Boxers terrorized missionaries and Christian converts throughout

northern China, some 800 Americans and Europeans sought refuge in foreign legation buildings in Beijing.

• August 1900 - 2,500 U.S. troops joined an international force to rescue foreigners besieged in Beijing - routed Boxers - looted Forbidden City - imperial court - Dowager Empress flees – paradox of bringing Christianity to China at gunpoint.

• The Monroe Doctrine and the Open Door Policy– United States as a world power - against colonial powers -

Share of the World Wheat Market, 1860–1900

Expansion in U.S. Trade, 1870–1910

• Germany and Japan - threat to the twin pillars of America’s expansionist foreign policy: the Monroe Doctrine and Open Door policy.

– Monroe Doctrine’s assertion of American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.

• Americans risked war with Great Britain over America’s role in– Conflict between Venezuela and British Guiana – American business triumphed in a bloodless takeover that saw

French and British interests routed by the United Fruit Company of Boston.

– European powers to stay out of the Western Hemisphere - but U.S. competing with colonial powers

• For trade in the Eastern Hemisphere• Risking war with Germany to maintain dominance over the harbor

at Pago Pago in the Samoan Islands.• The biggest prize in Asia - 1899–1900, Secretary of State John

Hay wrote a series of notes to Britain, Germany, Russia, France, Japan, and Italy, calling for an “open door” policy that would ensure access to all and maintain Chinese sovereignty.

• United States - secured access to Chinese markets - expanding economic power while avoiding problems of maintaining a far-flung colonial empire on the mainland of Asia.

War and Empire

• “A Splendid Little War” – Spanish-American War – respite for Americans marred by a

decade of bitter depression, social unrest, and political upheaval.• Moral outrage over treatment of Cuban revolutionaries – Hearst and

Pulitzer and newspaper subscription - pressure for U.S. intervention mounted.

• American interests in Cuba - more than $50 million invested in Cuban sugar – trade of a brisk $100 million a year before the rebellion – now dropped to near zero.

• Expansionists such as Theodore Roosevelt believed in Cuban independence and the prospect of expansion into Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippine Islands.

• President McKinley slowly moved toward intervention - dispatched armored cruiser Maine to Cuba - mysterious blast destroyed the ship - 267 crew killed - cries for war.

• Congress declared war in April - Commodore George Dewey’s forces destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay.

• The war in Cuba - Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders

The Spanish-American War, 1898

U.S. Overseas Expansion through 1900

The Battle of San Juan Hill

• The Debate over American Imperialism– After Spanish- American – United States in possession of an

empire stretching halfway around the globe - Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.

– Cuba freed from Spanish rule – did not gain full autonomy. – Treaty of Paris that ended the war with Spain gave the

Philippines to the United States along with Spain’s former colonies in Puerto Rico and Guam.

– Filipino revolutionaries bitterly fought American troops - nasty guerrilla war for seven years.

– Vocal minority at home - mostly Democrats and former Populists resisted U.S. foray into empire - unwise, immoral, and unconstitutional.

– The anti-imperialists drowned out by cries for empire – justification - social Darwinism and missionary zeal.