Period 6 (1865-1898)

Western Expansion:

Government encouragement of western settlement:

• Homestead Act (1862) - Enactment by Congress that gave 160 acres of publicly owned land to a farmer who lived on the land and farmed it for two years. The provisions of this bill inspired hundreds of thousands of Americans to move westward in the years after the Civil War
• Morrill Land Grant Act (1862) - Federal act designed to fund state "land-grant" colleges. State governments were given large amounts of land in the western territories; this land was sold to individual settlers, land speculators, and others, and the profits of these land sales could be used to establish the colleges

Agricultural innovation:

• Farmers who thrived on Great Plains used new technologies and business methods
• U.S. Department of Agriculture established in 1862
• Better plows and threshers
• Family farms displaced by much more extensive bonanza farms (larger agricultural concerns that grew only one or two cash crops)

Minorities on the Agricultural Frontier:

• Women played important role on the farm→women first gained vote in the West
• Exodusters - African Americans leave oppressive South for West (modeled their journey on exodus of the Israelites from Egypt to the Promised Land)

Mining and Lumbering Frontier:

• Miners sought gold and silver
• Chinese laborers 
• Mining corporations
• Anaconda Copper Company
• Lumber companies 
• Timber and Stone Act (1878) - allowed companies to purchase government land unsuitable for farming

Ranching Frontier:

• Western settlers inherited cattle-ranching culture from Mexico
• 1866 - some Texas ranchers drove their herds of cattle overland to nearest railroad in Kansas
• Cattle were then shipped by rail to cities where they were slaughtered and processed
• Beef could be sent for marketing because of newly invented refrigerated rail cars
• Conflicts between farmers & ranchers (farmers don't want animals on their crops)
• Joseph Glidden's invention of barbed wire in 1873 enabled farmers to protect their land

End of Native American Independence:

• Within 2 decades of end of Civil War, Plains tribes lost their independence
• Completion of transcontinental railroad in 1869 helped facilitate massive wave of western settlement
• Tribes lost most of their lands and were relegated to reservations and government supervision
• Government hoped missionaries and schools would "civilize" Native Americans and integrate them into American society
• Sioux - Plains tribe that tried to resist American westward expansion; after 2 wars, the Sioux were resettled in South Dakota. In 1876, Sioux fighters defeated the forces of General Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In 1890, almost 225 Sioux men, women, and children were killed by federal troops at the Massacre at Wounded Knee
• 1887 Dawes Act - broke up reservations and divided the land among the individual members of the tribes (ironically, hurt Native Americans)
• Ghost Dances - religious movement that emerged in 1890 due to the despairs of the Plains Indians - participants believed the dances would lead to the disappearance of white settlers, return of the buffalo, and resurrection of dead warriors 
• Opening of Oklahoma to settlement on April 22, 1889

Deflation in $→Emergence of the Populist Party:

• After the Civil War, the federal government took wartime "greenbacks" out of circulation and pursued "tight money" - U.S. on the gold standard, where every dollar in circulation could be exchanged for an equivalent value in gold
• This was made to prevent inflation, but deflation caused farmers to grow in debt (the prices for their crops declined)
• Western farmers founded the Grange in 1887 (local level)
• Greenback party called for printing of paper money to inflate the currency
• The Farmers' Alliance - linked farmer association on a statewide and regional level - demanded federal regulation of the railroads, currency reform, easily accessible farm credits, and agriculture departments in every state
• Government response
• Interstate Commerce Act (1887) - created Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate railroads
• Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) - outlawed any business that exercised a "restraint of trade"
• Populist party
• Launched by Farmers' Alliances on July 4, 1892
• People's party
• Argued that because of the powerful forces transforming the economy, the federal government had to play a more active role in American life
• Called for increasing amount of currency, progressive income tax aimed at the wealthy, direct election of senators, government ownership of railroads, telegraph and telephone systems, 8-hour day for workers, restrictions on immigration
• Opposed President Grover Cleveland because he backed the gold standard
• Populist was not more popular than Northern Republicans or Southern Democrats

Election of 1896:

• Republicans nominated William McKinley - industrial economy, called for gold standard, high tariff
• Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan - coining more silver to expand currency

Idea of the West: 

• Turner Thesis - published by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, "The Significance of the West in American History" stated that western expansion had played a fundamental role in defining the American character, and that the American tendencies toward democracy and individualism were created by the frontier experience

America Transformed into the Industrial Giant of the World (Gilded Age):

Industrial Revolution:

• Second Industrial Revolution - The massive economic growth that took place in America from 1865 until the end of the century that was largely based on the expansion of the railroad, the introduction of electric power, and the production of steel for building. By the 1890s America had replaced Germany as the major industrial producer in the world→growth of heavy industry - steel, iron, and other materials that can be used for building purposes
• Changing workplace
• Taylorism - following management practices of the industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, the belief that factories should be managed in a scientific manner, utilizing techniques that would increase the efficiency of the individual workers and the factory process as a whole
• Development of the assembly line
• Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903. Bursts of productivity with assembly line
• New workplace no longer required skilled workers
• Immigrants became a major source of industrial labor
• Women continued to make up a large part of the workforce
• Children were employed in factories
• Men still paid more than women, led many women into prostitution
• Big business
• Andrew Carnegie - arrived to U.S. as penniless eight-year-old, made his fortune manufacturing steel and retired one of the richest men in the world
• Vertical integration - strategy of gaining as much control over a single industry as possible by controlling the production, marketing, and distribution of the finished product. Andrew Carnegie and United States Steel are the best examples from the era of this approach
• John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil and at one time had a near monopoly of the American oil business
• Trusts - allowed  stockholders of a subsidiary company to place control of their shares of that company "in trust" to the corporate board of Standard Oil
• Horizontal integration - strategy of gaining as much control over a single industry as possible, often by creating trusts and holding companies; this strategy was utilized by John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil
• Gap between rich and poor grew dramatically as great industrialists accumulated vast fortunes→was justified by Social Darwinism - William Graham Sumner believed that human interactions reflected Charles Darwin's evolutionary principle of "natural selection" - those better suited to succeed because of intelligence, determination, and strength would thrive, while those less fit would fall behind
• Andrew Carnegie softened the hard edges of Social Darwinism with his "Gospel of Wealth" - great industrialists were the "guardians" of American wealth. Industrialists should not pass on all their fortunes to their children, but should devote much of it to improving the community
• Both Carnegie and Rockefeller created foundations that over the years have dispensed over $650 million to educational and artistic causes
• Many industrialists referred to as "Robber Barons"

• Labor Unions
• As industry grew, so did the unions
• Most influential union during 1870s - Knights of Labor - was not a single large union, but a federation of unions of many industries. Accepted unskilled workers. 
• Knights of Labor blamed for Haymarket Square - location in Chicago of labor rally called by anarchists and other radical labor leaders on May 2, 1886. A bomb was hurled toward police officials, and police opened fire on the demonstrators; numerous policemen and demonstrators were killed and wounded. Response in the nation's press was decidedly antiunion
• American Federation of Labor (AFL) proved more successful than the Knights of Labor. AFL was composed of skilled workers. 
• Resisted organizing women, African Americans, and other unskilled workers
• Strike against Carnegie Steel Company at Homestead, Pennsylvania in 1892
• American Railway Union's strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company in 1894
• Leader of the American Railway Union was Eugene V. Debs. The suppression of the Pullman strike convinced him to embrace socialism. Debs would run for president several times as head of the Socialist party
• Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) - embraced radical social vision; called for revolutionary violence and the imposition of socialism
• "Mother" Jones worked with coal miners
• Brutally squashed by federal government during World War I
• New Immigration
• New immigrants - began pouring into the U.S. in the late 1880s. Came from Italy, Eastern Europe, and Russia. Did not speak English. Many were poor, and looked and sounded very different from Northern European immigrants Americans had grown used to. Many were Roman Catholic or Jewish, which made them seem even more alien than Protestant America
• 14,000 Chinese workers were brought to U.S. to help complete the construction of the transcontinental railroad
• Anti-Chinese sentiment in Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 - restricted entrance of Chinese laborers into U.S.
• Japanese immigration had same prejudices that Chinese encountered
• Webb Alien Land Law - passed by anti-Japanese Californians; prohibited Asians who were non-citizens from owning land 

Gilded Age Politics:

• Mark Twain popularized the term "Gilded Age" - refers to period between 1875 and 1900. For Twain, expression satirized political corruption and crude money-grubbing that he thought characterized contemporary American society (Something that is gilded has only a thin layer of gold over a baser metal)
• Role of government was strictly limited
• President Hayes tried to reform spoils system (caused him to be unpopular) 
• Republican Congressman James Garfield won the election, but was assassinated by deranged man who believed he should have been given government job→convinced Congress that something had to be done about the spoils system
• Pendleton Civil Service Act - took a number of government jobs out of political control; established Civil Service Commission; applicants for these jobs had to demonstrate their fitness by passing examinations
• President Cleveland→Harrison→back to Cleveland in 1892
• Cleveland ignored Coxey's Army, Populist army that formed in reaction to economic downturn
• President William McKinley's election began era of Republican electoral dominance
• Political machines
• Organization that controls the politics of a city, a state, or even the country, sometimes by illegal or quasi-legal means. A machine employs a large number of people to do its "dirty work" for which they are either given some government job or are allowed to pocket government bribes or kickbacks. 
• The best example of a political machine was the Tammany Hall organization that controlled New York City in the late 19th century. Tammany boss William M. Tweed, "Boss Tweed" embezzled millions of dollars from City Hall
• Social criticism in the Gilded Age
• Jacob Riss published study of poor in New York City entitled How the Other Half Lives (1890) - described appalling conditions in tenement houses of Lower East Side, documented evocative photographs that pioneered modern photo-journalism 
• Upton Sinclair's The Jungle was an indictment of conditions in Chicago's meatpacking industry (unsanitary practices of meatpacking plants)

American Imperialism:

New Land for the U.S.

• 1867 - Secretary of State William Henry Seward successfully purchased Alaska from Russia. Initially termed "Seward's Folly," it soon became recognized that Alaska was rich in resources
• Also in 1867, U.S. acquired Midway Islands in Pacific Ocean (stopping point on way to China and Japan)
• Acquiring Hawaii
• American missionaries arrived in Hawaii during 1820s
• Sugar planters want Hawaii to be an American colony to be able to have what is considered domestic produce and compete effectively in American market
• 1893 - planters staged coup that overthrew Queen Liliuokalani
• William McKinley declared it was America's "Manifest Destiny" to posses the islands→Congress approved annexation of Hawaii in 1898
• Pearl Harbor = strategically valuable base for Navy

The New Imperialism

• Naval officer Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power upon History argued that naval power was necessary to acquire markets overseas and to protect continued access to them
• Naval Act of 1900 - expanded U.S. Navy
• Social Darwinism - philosophy that emerged from the writings of Charles Darwin on the "survival of the fittest"; this was used to justify the vast differences between the rich and the poor in the late nineteenth century as well as American and European imperialistic ventures
• "White Man's Burden" by Rudyard Kipling urged Americans to accept mission of ruling and civilizing "inferior races"

The Spanish-American War

• In 1868, Cuban colonists launched revolt against Spanish authorities; many Americans owned sugar plantations or had other financial investments in Cuba and did not support the revolutionaries
• Americans for war against Spain
• Yellow journalism - method of journalism that utilized sensationalized accounts of the news to sell newspapers, of Spanish "misdeeds" to Cubans. This approach helped to whip up nationalistic impulses that led to the Spanish-American War
• Yellow press encouraged jingoism - patriotism that demanded war with Spain
• War became inevitable after the U.S.S. Maine exploded and sank (yellow journalists declared that the Spanish had sunk the ship)
• Theodore Roosevelt = ardent imperialist, resigned post in Navy Department to lead volunteer "Rough Riders"
• War ended with the Treaty of Paris
• Spain granted Cuba independence and for $20 million ceded the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico to the U.S.
• Cuba
• Teller Amendment - declared that U.S. had no intention of annexing Cuba
• Platt Amendment - integrated in Cuban constitution. Prohibited Cubans from making treating without American approval. Gave the U.S. the power to intervene in Cuban politics "when necessary"

The Debate over Empire

• Anti-Imperialist League - founded 1898 to oppose colonial adventure in the Philippines. 
• Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, William Jennings Bryan
• U.S. fights war against Filipino rebels from 1899-1902 (Americans won the war)
• Open Door policy - allowed all nations equal access to trade in China

The Panama Canal

• When McKinley was assassinated in 1901, Roosevelt succeeded him
• Columbia owned Panama, and French company attempted to construct canal, French organized rebellion in Panama 
• 1904 Hay-Bunay-Varilla Treaty, signed with new Panamanian regime, gave U.S. permanent sovereignty over 10-mile-wide strip of land across country (for $10 million to Panama)
• Panama Canal was a success
• Facilitated trade, made it easier to shift American naval vessels between the oceans
• Established U.S. as a bullying power

The Roosevelt Corollary

• Roosevelt's military power→"speak softly and carry a big stick"
• 1904 - Dominican Republic defaulted on its debts to Europeans during an economic crisis - angry European powers threatened to collect these debts through military force
• Roosevelt declared Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine - asserted right of the American government to police any country in the Western Hemisphere that acted in ways "harmful to the United States" and risked intervention of outside powers
• Roosevelt took over the Dominican customs service and arranged for the orderly payment of that nation's foreign debt
• William Howard Taft, shied away from the "big stick" and preferred "dollars over bullets"→during his administration he pursued a policy of extending American influence abroad through investment and economic engagement ("Dollar Diplomacy")