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Chapter 16
 In
the waning decades of the 19th century,
America seemed like 2 nations. One was
an advanced industrial society– the
America of factories and sprawling cities.
But another America remained frontier
country, with pioneers streaming onto the
Great Plains, repeating the old dramas of
“settlement” they had been performing
ever since Europeans had first set foot on
the continent.
Last tragic episode in the suppression of the
Plains Indians, the massacre at Wounded Knee,
South Dakota, occurred only 18 months before
the great Homestead steel strike of 1892.
 The U.S. Census of 1890 declared that a “frontier
of settlement” no longer existed; the “unsettled
area has been so broken into… that there can
hardly be said to be a frontier line.”
 That same year, the United States overtook Great
Britain as the world’s leading steel producer.

 Probably
100,000 Native Americans lived
on the Great Plains at mid-19th century.
 Less vulnerable to epidemics because
they were dispersed were the haunting
tribes on the Great Plains: Kiowas and
Comanches in the southwest; Arapahos
and Cheyennes on the central plains;
and, to the north of the Arkansas River as
their hunting grounds.
 Dependent
on nature’s bounty for
survival, the Sioux endowed every
manifestation of the natural world with
the sacred meaning.
 By prayer and fasting, Sioux prepared
themselves to commune with these
mysterious powers.
 Medicine men provided instruction, but
the religious experience was personal,
open to both sexes.
When white traders appeared on the upper
Missouri River during the 18th century, the Sioux
began to trade with them.
 Although the buffalo remained their staff of life,
the Sioux came to rely as well on the traders’
kettles, blankets, knives, and guns.
 The trade system they entered was linked to the
Euro-American market economy, yet it was also
integrated into the Sioux way of life.
 Everything depended on keeping the Great
Plains as the Sioux had found it: wild grassland
on which the buffalo ranged free.

Chapter 19
 In
1877, with Rutherford B. Hayes safely
settled in the White House, the era of
sectional strife finally ended.
 Although Union defenders had
envisioned a society reshaped by an
activist state, now, in the 1880s, political
leaders retreated to a more modest
conception of national power.
 There
were 5 presidents from 1877-1893:
Rutherford B. Hayes (Republican, 18771881), James A. Garfield (Republican,
1881), Chester A. Arthur (Republican,
1881-1885), Grover Cleveland (Democrat,
1885-1889) and Benjamin Harrison
(Republican, 1889-1893). All were
estimable men.
 The
president’s most demanding task was
dispensing patronage to the faithful.
 Under the spoils system, government jobs
rewarded those who had served the
victorious party.
 In 1881, shortly after taking office, President
Garfield was shot and killed. The motives of
his assassin, Charles Guiteau, were murky,
but civil service reformers blamed a spoils
system that left many people disappointed
in the scramble for office.
 The
resulting Pendleton Act (1883)
established a nonpartisan Civil Service
Commission authorized to fill federal jobs
by examination.
 Historically, the Democrats favored states’
rights, while the Republicans inherited the
Whig enthusiasm for strong government.
 After Reconstruction, however, the
Republicans backed away from state
interventionism, and party differences
became muddy.
 Only the tariff remained a fighting issue.
 It was an article of Republican faith, as
President Harrison said in 1892, that “the
protective system… has been a mighty
instrument for the development of the
national wealth.”
 Economic doctrine of laissez-faire– the
belief, already well-rooted in the
Jeffersonian politics of the antebellum era–
that the less government interfered, the
better.
 Ideology
of individualism in the age of
enterprise.
 From the pulpit, the Episcopal bishop
William Lawrence of Massachusetts
preached that “godliness is in league
with riches.”
 Bishop Lawrence was voicing a familiar
theme of American Protestantism:
Success in one’s earthly calling revealed
the promise of eternal salvation.
 The
celebration of individualism was
underscored by social theorizing drawn
from the science of biology.
 Evolution itself– the idea that species are
not fixed but ever-changing– went back to
the early 19th century but lacked any
explanatory theory. This was what the British
naturalist Charles Darwin provided in On
the Origin of Species (1859), with his
concept of natural selection.
 In
nature, Darwin wrote, all creatures
struggle to survive.
 Individual members of a species are born
with random genetic mutations that better fit
them for their particular environment–
camouflage coloring for a bird or butterfly,
for example.
 These survival characteristics, since they
are genetically transmissible, become
dominant in future generations, and the
species evolves.
 But
Darwin had given evolution the stamp
of scientific legitimacy, and other people,
less scrupulous than he about drawing
larger conclusions, moved confidently to
apply evolution to social development.
 Foremost was the British philosopher
Herbert Spencer, who spun out an
elaborate analysis of how human society
had advanced through