Unit 6 Princeton Review PT. 2 Flashcards
(31 cards)
Middle Class Leisure time
While the poor suffered, life improved for both the wealthy and the middle class. Increased production and wealth meant greater access to luxuries and more leisure time.
Sports, high theater, vaudeville (variety acts), and, later, movies became popular diversions.
It was also during this period that large segments of the public began to read popular novels and newspapers.
Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst
The growth of the newspaper industry was largely the responsibility of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, both of whom understood the commercial value of bold, screaming headlines and lurid tales of scandal.
This new style of sensational reporting became known as yellow journalism.
Limited Southern Industrialization
Most of the advances made during the machine age affected primarily northern cities. In the South, agriculture continued as the main form of labor.
The industrialization programs of Reconstruction did produce some results, however.
Textile mills sprang up around the South, reducing cotton farmers’ reliance on the North. Tobacco processing plants also employed some workers.
Still, the vast majority of Southerners remained farmers.
Post Civil War economics, Sharecropping
Postwar economics forced many farmers to sell their land, which wealthy landowners bought and consolidated into larger farms.
Landless farmers, both Black and white, were forced into sharecropping.
The method by which they rented land was called the crop lien system; it was designed to keep the poor in constant debt.
Because these farmers had no cash, they borrowed what they needed to buy seed and tools, promising a portion of their crop as collateral.
Huge interest rates on their loans and unscrupulous landlords pretty much guaranteed that these farmers would never overcome their debt, forcing them to borrow further and promise their next crop as collateral.
In this way, landlords kept the poor, both Black and white, in a state of virtual slavery.
The advent of Jim Crow laws made matters worse for Black people, Supreme Court made things worse
As the federal government exerted less influence over southern states, towns and cities passed numerous discriminatory laws.
The Supreme Court assisted the states by ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment did not protect Blacks from discrimination by privately owned businesses and that Blacks would have to seek equal protection from the states, not from the federal government.
In 1883, the Court also reversed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 (which said that businesses and public facilities couldn’t be segregated), thus opening the door to legal (de jure) segregation.
In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that the role of the federal government was not to maintain social equality.
It went on to establish that “separate but equal” facilities for the different races were legal.
In so doing, the Court set back the civil rights gains made during Reconstruction.
In this atmosphere, integration and equal rights for Black people seemed to most a far-off dream.
Booker T. Washington certainly felt that way.
A southern Black born into slavery, Washington harbored no illusions that white society was ready to accept Black people as equals.
Instead, he promoted economic independence as the means by which Blacks could improve their lot.
To pursue that goal, he founded the Tuskegee Institute, a vocational and industrial training school for Black people.
Some accused Washington of being an accommodationist because he refused to press for immediate equal rights.
Others believed that Washington simply accepted the reality of his time when he set his goals.
In his Atlanta Exposition, a famous speech delivered in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1895, Washington outlined his view of race relations.
Washington’s more aggressive rival W. E. B. Du Bois referred to the speech, which he deemed submissive, as “The Atlanta Compromise.”
The Railroads and Developments in the West
On the western frontier, ranching and mining were growing industries.
Ranchers drove their herds across the western plains and deserts, ignoring property rights and Native American prerogatives to the land.
Individual miners lacked the resources to mine and cart big loads, so mostly they prospected; when they found a rich mine, they staked a claim and sold their rights to a mining company.
Corruption in railroads
The railroads, although owned privately, were built largely at the public’s expense, through direct funding and substantial grants of land to the railroads.
Both federal and local governments were anxious for rails to be completed and so provided substantial assistance.
Although the public had paid for the rail system, rail proprietors strenuously objected to any government control of their industry, and it took years for railroad rates to come under regulation.
Until they were regulated, the railroads would typically overcharge wherever they owned a monopoly and undercharge in competitive and heavily trafficked markets.
This practice was particularly harmful to farmers in remote areas.
Impacts on Native Americans
As railroad construction crawled across the nation, rail companies organized massive hunts for buffalo (considered a nuisance).
Railroad bounty hunters hunted the herds to near extinction, destroying a resource upon which local Native Americans had depended.
Some tribes, such as the Sioux, fought back, giving the government an excuse to send troops into the region.
While Native Americans won some battles (notably at Little Big Horn, where George Custer met his death), the federal army ultimately overpowered them.
The railroads brought other changes as well.
Rails quickly transformed depot towns into vital cities by connecting them to civilization.
Easier, faster travel meant more contact with ideas and technological advances from the East.
Developments in railroad technology had applications in other industries and so accelerated the Industrial Revolution.
In addition, “railroad time,” by which rail schedules were determined, gave the nation its first standardized method of time telling with the adoption of time zones.
As the rails pushed the country westward, settlers started filling in the territory.
By 1889, North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington, and Montana were populous enough to achieve statehood; Wyoming and Idaho followed in 1890.
In the Great Plains, farming and ranching constituted the main forms of employment.
New farm machinery and access to mail (and mail-order retail) made life on the plains easier, but it was still lonely and difficult.
Frontier Thesis
The result of the 1890 census prompted the Progressive historian Frederick Jackson Turner to declare that the American frontier was gone, and with it the first period of American history.
Turner argued that the frontier was significant in (1) shaping the American character, (2) defining the American spirit, (3) fostering democracy, and (4) providing a safety valve for economic distress in urban, industrial centers by providing a place to which people could flee.
Historians refer to these ideas collectively as the Turner or Frontier Thesis.
Gov tries to attract settlers
In the Great Plains, farming and ranching constituted the main forms of employment.
New farm machinery and access to mail (and mail-order retail) made life on the plains easier, but it was still lonely and difficult.
The government, realizing the potential of the region as the nation’s chief agricultural center, passed two significant pieces of legislation in 1862—the Homestead Act and the Morrill Land-Grant Act.
Anxious to attract settlers to develop the West, the federal government offered 160 acres of land to anyone who would “homestead” it (cultivate the land, build a home, and live there) for five years.
It was quickly discovered that 160 acres wasn’t enough to productively farm on some of the very dry land in the West or to compete with some of the large-scale commercial agricultural farms, so subsequent acts had to give out more land if farmers agreed to irrigate the land or plant trees on the land.
The Morrill Land- Grant Act set aside land and provided money for agricultural colleges. Eventually, agricultural science became a huge industry in the United States.
With many families and corporations heading West, both government and conservation groups sought for added protection of natural resources.
The U.S. Fish Commission was created in 1871 to study, monitor, and preserve wild fisheries.
Today the Fish Commission is part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a division of the Department of the Interior
In 1892, naturalist John Muir created the Sierra Club, one of the first large organizations devoted to conservation in the United States.
Impact of Expansion on Native Americans
In this expansionist era, those who lost out the most were, of course, the Native Americans.
At first, pioneers approached the tribes as sovereign nations.
They made treaties with them, which the settlers or their immediate successors broke. The result was warfare, leading the government to try another approach.
The new tack was to force Native Americans onto reservations, which typically were made up of the least desirable land in a tribe’s traditional home region.
The reservation system failed for a number of reasons, including the inferiority of the land, the grouping of incompatible tribes on the same reservation, and the lack of autonomy granted the tribes in managing their own affairs.
Moreover, some Westerners simply ignored the arrangement and poached on reservation lands.
Helen Hunt Jackson’s book A Century of Dishonor detailed the injustices of the reservation system and inspired reformers to push for change, which came in 1887 in the form of the Dawes Severalty Act.
The Dawes Severalty Act
broke up the reservations and distributed some of the land to the head of each Native American family.
Similar to the Homestead Act, the allotment was 160 acres of land.
This time, however, it was required that the family live on the land for 25 years, after which time the land was legally theirs.
And the grand prize was American citizenship!
The Dawes Act was intended as a humanitarian solution to the “Indian problem”; its main goal was to accelerate the assimilation of Native Americans into Western society by integrating them more closely with whites.
Native Americans, naturally, resisted.
Furthermore, poverty drove many to sell their land to speculators, leaving them literally homeless.
Ghost Dance Movement, Wounded Knee Massacre
Some displaced Native Americans turned to religion for comfort.
The Ghost Dance Movement started in 1889, inspired by the visions of the prophet Wovoka.
In his prophecies, Wovoka promised followers that, through proper ceremony and supernatural magic, federal expansion in the West would end and Native Americans would live peacefully on their native lands.
Many Lakota Sioux were active in the Ghost Dance Movement and later met their bloody fate at the hands of federal agents during the Wounded Knee Massacre, a dispute started by cavalry troops intent on disarming the members of the Pine Ridge Reservation.
Hundreds of Lakota were killed or injured and the site of the battlefield is now a National Historic Landmark.
Mark Twain dubbed the era between Reconstruction and 1900 the Gilded Age of politics.
America looked to have entered a period of prosperity, with a handful of families having amassed unprecedented wealth, but the affluence of a few was built on the poverty of many.
Similarly, American politics looked like a shining example of representative democracy, but just beneath the surface lay crass corruption and patronage.
Political machines, not municipal governments, ran the cities.
Big business bought votes in Congress and then turned around and fleeced consumers.
Workers had little protection from the greed of their employers because the courts turned a deaf ear to worker complaints.
The presidents of this era were generally not corrupt, but were relatively weak
Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, and Chester A. Arthur concerned themselves primarily with civil service reform while Grover Cleveland believed that government governed best which governed least.
Benjamin Harrison took the opposite tack, and he and his allies in the Capitol passed everything from the nation’s first meat inspection act to the banning of lotteries to the purchase of several battleships.
Much of the legislation we have discussed, from the Sherman Antitrust Act to the second Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act, was passed under Harrison’s watch.
But the public’s discomfort with the activism of Harrison and the Billion-Dollar Congress of 1890 led to Grover Cleveland’s return to the White House.
In response to the outcry over widespread corruption, the government made its first stabs at regulating itself and business.
Munn v. Illinois
Interstate Commerce Commission
Munn v. Illinois
Many states imposed railroad regulations because railroads were engaging in price gouging.
In 1877, the Supreme Court upheld an Illinois state law regulating railroads and grain elevators in the case of Munn v. Illinois.
This was a surprising decision, given that railroads crossed state lines and only Congress can regulate interstate commerce.
The Court argued that states had the power to regulate private industry that served the “public interest.”
Although the Supreme Court would reaffirm Congress’s authority nine years later in the Wabash case, when it ruled that states could not establish rates involving interstate commerce, an important precedent for regulating business in the public’s interest had been established.
ICC
In 1887, just one year after the Wabash decision, Congress passed the first federal regulatory law in U.S. history.
The Interstate Commerce Act set up the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to supervise railroad activities and regulate unfair and unethical practices.
Women’s suffrage became important issue
It was also during this period that women’s suffrage became an important political issue. Susan B. Anthony led the fight, convincing Congress to introduce a suffrage amendment to the Constitution.
The bill was introduced every year and rarely got out of committee, but the fight had begun in earnest.
Meanwhile, organizations such as the American Suffrage Association fought for women’s suffrage amendments to state constitutions.
By 1890, they had achieved some partial successes, gaining the vote on school issues.
Use of silver and Populists
In the period after the Civil War, production on all fronts— industrial and agricultural—increased. Greater supply accordingly led to a drop in prices.
For many farmers, lower prices meant trouble, as they were locked into long- term debts with fixed payments.
Looking for a solution to their problem, farmers came to support a more generous money supply.
An increase in available money, they correctly figured, would make payments easier. It would also cause inflation, which would make the farmers’ debts (held by northern banks) worth less.
Not surprisingly, the banks opposed the plan, preferring for the country to use only gold to back its money supply.
The farmers’ plan called for the liberal use of silver coins, and because silver was mined in the West, this plan had the added support of western miners along with that of midwestern and southern farmers.
Thus, the issue had a regional component.
Because it pitted poor farmers against wealthy bankers, it also had elements of class strife.
Although a complicated matter, the money issue was potentially explosive.
The “silver versus gold” debate provided an issue around which farmers could organize, they did
First came the Grange Movement, which, founded in 1867, boasted more than a million members by 1875.
The Grangers started out as cooperatives, with the purpose of allowing farmers to buy machinery and sell crops as a group and, therefore, reap the benefits of economies of scale.
Soon, the Grangers endorsed political candidates and lobbied for legislation.
The Grangers ultimately died out because of a lack of money, but they were replaced by Farmers’ Alliances.
The Grangers were responsible for most of the laws regulating the railroads in the 1870s and 1880s.
These are referred to as the Granger Laws.
Farmers’ Alliances
The Alliances allowed women to be politically active (Mary Elizabeth Lease was a huge organizer for them), and they had branches all around the nation.
The Farmers’ Alliances were even more successful than the Grange Movement, and they soon grew into a political party called the People’s Party, the political arm of the Populist movement.
The People’s Party ran a candidate in 1892, growing in size
Their platform was called the Omaha Platform.
It called for solidarity with industrial workers, opposition to immigration to help American workers, and trying to earn more support for Eastern laborers, among other things.
Aside from supporting the generous coinage of silver, the Populists called for government ownership of railroads and telegraphs, a graduated income tax, direct election of U.S. senators, and shorter workdays.
Although their 1892 presidential candidate, James Weaver, came in third, he won more than 1 million votes, awakening Washington to the growing Populist movement.
As Cleveland took office in 1893, the country entered a four-year financial crisis.
Hard economic times made Populist goals more popular, particularly the call for easy money. (Most people at the time, after all, had no money at all)
Times got so bad that even more progressive (some would say radical) movements gained popularity; in 1894, the Socialists, led by Eugene V. Debs, gained support.
By 1896, the Populists were poised for power.
Election of 1896, William Jennings Bryan, end of Populists
By 1896, Populists backed Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan against Republican nominee William McKinley, and Bryan ran on a strictly Populist platform; he based his campaign on the call for free silver.
He is probably best remembered for his “Cross of Gold” speech (a typical multiple-choice question).
He argued that an easy money supply, though inflationary, would loosen the control that northern banking interests held over the country.
The Republicans, on the other hand, became solidly allied with big businesses, as McKinley received huge campaign contributions from large companies.
Business leaders told their employees that they would lose their jobs if Bryan won the election.
Bryan lost the campaign; this, coupled with an improved economy, ended the Populist movement.
