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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