Download Freedom`s Boundaries, At Home and Abroad, 1890-1900

Chapter 17
Freedom’s Boundaries, at Home and
Abroad, 1890-1900
The Populist Challenge
The Farmer’s Revolt
•
Like workers, farmers in the South and West faced growing economic insecurity as agricultural prices fell and
economic dependency on merchants and banks increased. Sharecropping kept millions of black and white southern
farmers in poverty and an oversupply of world cotton led to dramatic price decreases that threatened southern
farmers’ livelihoods and property. These farmers soon blamed their woes on railroads’ high freight rates, high
interest-rate loans from bankers and merchants, and the fiscal policies of the federal government that reduced the
money supply and farm prices. In response, farmers organized the Farmers’ Alliance in Texas in the late 1870s,
which quickly spread to dozens of states. The alliance at first stayed away from politics, and established cooperatives
called “exchanges” to finance and market crops. But when banks refused to loan money for the exchanges, the
alliance proposed the “subtreasury plan”: the federal government would establish warehouses where farmers could
store their crops until sold, and by using the crops as collateral, the government would issue loans directly to farmers
at low interest rates, ending their dependence on bankers and merchants for credit. Demands for the subtreasury led
the alliance to politics.
The People’s Party
•
In the early 1890s, the alliance formed the People’s Party (called Populists), the era’s greatest political insurgency.
The Populists appealed, not just to farmers, but to all “producers,” including miners, industrial workers, and small
businessmen. But most of its supporters were cotton and wheat farmers in the South and West. The Populists
organized massive educational campaigns using pamphlets, newspapers, and revival-style mass meetings
throughout the country. This was the last expression of the nineteenth-century idea that America was a
commonwealth of small producers whose freedom rested on individual ownership of productive property and the
dignity of labor. But the Populists were forward-looking, embracing scientific methods of agriculture and modern
technologies that made large-scale cooperatives possible, such as the railroad, telegraph, and national market, and
they wanted the federal government to regulate them for the public interest, a very twentieth-century idea.
The Populist Challenge
The Populist Platform
•
The Populists adopted a famous platform at their 1892 Omaha convention. It proposed many measures to
restore democracy and economic opportunity for ordinary Americans, some of which came to pass in the
next century, such as direct election of U.S. senators, government control of currency, a graduated income
tax, low-cost public financing for farmers, and workers’ right to organize unions. The platform also called for
national ownership of railroads to allow farmers to inexpensively get their crops to market.
The Populist Coalition
•
In some parts of the South, the Populists heroically tried to unite black and white farmers on a common
political and economic program, but the barriers were too great. Racism, the legacy of the Civil War, and
the fact that many white Populists were landowning farmers while black farmers were tenants and
agricultural laborers facing a different set of problems all militated against such an alliance. Black farmers
organized their own Cotton Farmer’s Alliance, whose strikes were suppressed by white authorities, some of
whom were even sympathetic to white Populists. While white Populists were hardly anti-racist, some
recognized that whites would have to appeal to blacks in order to break the Democratic Party’s hold on the
South and its opposition to reform, and in a few places, like North Carolina, white and black Populists
together won state elections. In most of the South, however, Democrats defeated the Populists by
mobilizing whites to vote against “Negro supremacy,” intimidating blacks, and rigging elections. The
Populists also engaged the reform efforts of farmer and middle-class women, and endorsed women’s
suffrage in many states. In 1892, the Populist candidate for president, James Weaver, won more than 1
million votes, and the party carried five western states and elected three governors and fifteen members of
Congress.
Map 17.1 Populist Strength, 1892
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
Map 17.2 The Presidential Election of 1892
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
The Populist Challenge
The Government and Labor
•
When a severe depression in 1893 intensified conflict between labor and capital, it seemed
that the Populists might gain the votes of industrial workers who had traditionally supported
the two major parties. Employers used state or federal authority to protect their economic
power and suppress labor unrest. In May 1894, the federal government dispersed Coxey’s
Army, a march of the unemployed led by Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey that converged on
the nation’s capital.
Debs and the Pullman Strike
•
Also in 1894, workers in Pullman, Illinois, who manufactured railroad cars for the Pullman
company went on strike against pay cuts. When the 150,000 members of the American
Railway Union, a union of skilled and unskilled workers led by the charismatic Eugene V.
Debs, refused to work on Pullman cars and thus paralyzed the nation’s rail traffic, President
Grover Cleveland won an injunction from federal courts that ordered the strikers back to
work. Violence between strikers and troops from Maine to California left 34 dead, and when
union leaders, including Debs, were imprisoned for violating the injunction, the strike
collapsed. The Supreme Court reaffirmed Debs’s sentence in a famous ruling approving the
use of injunctions against strikes. Debs claimed that powerful capitalists aligned with state
and national government now infringed on Americans’ freedoms.
The Populist Challenge
Populism and Labor
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In 1894, the Populists doubled their efforts to appeal to industrial workers, and in state and congressional elections that year,
with the depression worsening, voters abandoned the Democrats. The Populist vote in rural areas increased, but most
workers did not vote Populist. Few Populist demands spoke to workers’ needs, as their calls for higher agricultural prices
would raise food costs for workers and diminish the value of their wages, and the movement’s Protestant and revivalist culture
alienated Catholic and immigrant workers. Urban workers instead voted for the Republicans, who argued that higher tariff
rates would revive the economy by protecting American manufacturing and workers from imports and cheap foreign labor. The
Republicans gained a massive 177 seats in the House.
Bryan and Free Silver
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In 1896, the Democrats and Populists united behind presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, a young congressman
from Nebraska. Bryan had won the Democratic nomination in a speech that captured the fears and hopes of farmers. Bryan
called for the “free coinage” of silver (the unrestricted minting of silver money), and he used Biblical imagery to condemn the
gold standard in perhaps the most famous lines of political oratory in American history: “You shall not press down upon the
brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Bryan’s demand for free silver was the
latest expression of a long-standing view that increasing the amount of currency in circulation would raise the prices of
farmers’ crops and make it easier for them to pay their debts. Bryan’s nomination represented a shift in Democratic leadership
away from elites live Cleveland who had long been tied to eastern businessmen. But Bryan’s appeal was highly religious and
revivalist, and influenced by the Social Gospel.
The Campaign of 1896
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Republicans argued gold was the only “honest” currency, and that abandoning it would prevent economic recovery by scaring
creditors away from making loans. They nominated Ohio governor William McKinley, who passed the highly protectionist
McKinley Tariff in Congress in 1890. The 1896 election was the first modern presidential election. The Republicans poured an
unprecedented amount of money into a highly organized campaign that used a massive educational effort directed against the
Democrats’ calls for free silver. The results showed a nation divided along regional lines. McKinley won the election with the
votes of industrial states in the Northeast and Midwest. Labor conflict did not produce political results. Party politics seemed to
mute class conflict, not reinforce it. Industrial America, from workers to industrialists, voted solidly Republican, and continued
to do so for years. McKinley’s victory shattered the political stalemate of the previous twenty years, launched a period of
Republican dominance that would last until the 1930s, and marked a height in voter participation, which ever since has been
in decline.
The Segregated South
The Redeemers in Power
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Populism’s defeat in the South allowed for the imposition of a new racial order. The Redeemers, a coalition
of merchants, planters, and businessmen who ruled the region after 1877 and claimed to have “redeemed”
the south from the corruption and horrors of “black rule,” worked to reverse Reconstruction’s achievements.
They reduced taxes and public spending, and cut back public schools, which especially hurt blacks. New
laws allowed the arrest of those without employment and increased punishment for petty crimes. As the
South’s prison population rose, convicts, mostly poor blacks, were rented out to railroad, miners, and
lumber companies as cheap, involuntary labor, at a high profit. Labor unions in the South assailed the
convict labor system.
The Failure of the New South Dream
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In the 1880s, Atlanta editor Henry Grady relentlessly promoted the dream of a New South in which
industrialization and agricultural diversification would deliver prosperity to the region. While planters,
merchants, and industrialists prospered, the region as a whole became more impoverished. While mining
and textiles developed in some areas, the region’s low wages and taxes and convict labor did not spur
much economic development. By 1900, except for the major iron and steel city of Birmingham, Alabama,
southern cities had little industry and mostly exported cotton, tobacco, and rice. The South as a whole
stayed dependent on the North for capital and manufactured goods.
The Segregated South
Black Life in the South
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Black farmers, the most disadvantaged rural southerners, suffered the most from the region’s economic
condition. In the Upper South, mines, iron mills, and tobacco factories offered some jobs to black workers,
and some black farmers owned land. In the rice kingdom of coastal South Carolina and Georgia, the
plantations went to ruin, and many blacks acquired land and became self-sufficient farmers. In most of the
Deep South, however, blacks owned a smaller percentage of land in 1900 than they had in the late 1870s.
In southern cities, institutions such as schools, churches, businesses, and clubs created by blacks during
Reconstruction formed the basis of dynamic black urban communities. But the labor market was racially
divided, and black men were excluded from skilled and professional occupations, while black women were
limited to wage-work as domestic servants, and were excluded from occupations open to white women.
Most unions in the South excluded blacks from membership.
The Kansas Exodus
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Blacks, trapped at the bottom of an economically stagnant South, emigrated by the tens of thousands. In
1879 and 1880, nearly 60,000 African-Americans moved to Kansas, seeking political rights, safety, and
education and economic opportunity. Its participants called the move the Exodus, named after the biblical
account of the Jews’ flight from slavery in Egypt. But despite worsening conditions, most blacks had no
choice but to stay in the South. While economic expansion took place in Northern cities, most employers
there offered jobs only to white migrants from rural areas and European immigrants, not blacks. Only in
World War I did jobs open up for blacks, helping spur a massive movement northward called the Great
Migration.
The Segregated South
The Decline of Black Politics
•
Despite Redemption, blacks continued to hold office and vote in the South after 1877. Even while Democrats
restructured southern politics to limit blacks’ political power and representation, blacks continued to hold office in
states and Congress. But black political opportunities diminished in this period. Talented and ambitious black men
increasingly avoided politics and entered business, law, or the church. Black women became political leaders, and
“respectable” middle-class black women pressed for women’s rights and racial progress through organizations like
the National Association of Colored Women, formed in 1896. In some states, however, blacks continued to vote and
Republicans stayed competitive with Democrats. By the 1890s, however, Populist and Republican-led state
governments, such as North Carolina’s, fell to racial violence and electoral fraud.
The Elimination of Black Voting
•
Between 1890 and 1906, every southern state enacted laws or constitutional provisions intended to eliminate the
black vote. Because the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited the use of race as a qualification for the suffrage, southern
lawmakers designed laws that seemed color-blind, but were meant to keep blacks from voting. Most popular were the
poll tax (a fee citizens must pay to be eligible to vote), literacy tests, and a requirement that a voter show an
“understanding” of the state constitution. Although some white leaders presented disenfranchisement as a “good
government” measure that would end fraud and violence in elections, it was a means for ending black participation in
politics, and it worked—by 1940, only 3 percent of adult blacks in the South were registered to vote. Poor and
illiterate whites were also disenfranchised by these laws. Disenfranchisement led to a generation of southern
“demagogue” politicians who mobilized white voters by appealing to their racism. And disenfranchisement could not
have occurred without Northern approval. In 1891, the Senate defeated a proposal to protect black voting rights in the
South, and the Supreme Court approved disenfranchisement laws. According to the Fourteenth Amendment, any
state that deprived its male citizens of the franchise was supposed to lose part of its representation in Congress, but
this was not held to apply to blacks. Thus southern congressmen had far greater power than their small electorates
warranted.
The Segregated South
The Law of Segregation
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Alongside disenfranchisement in the 1890s, segregation was imposed throughout the South.
Laws and local customs that required separating the races had existed in the North before
the Civil War, and during Reconstruction, southern schools and other institutions had been
segregated. In the 1880s, though, race relations in the South were fluid, with some railroads,
theaters, and hotels admitting blacks and whites, while others discriminated. In 1883, the
Supreme Court invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had outlawed racial
discrimination by hotels and other public facilities, and held that the Fourteenth Amendment
banned unequal treatment by state authorities, not private business. In the landmark 1896
ruling Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court approved state laws requiring separate facilities for
blacks and whites, arguing that segregated facilities did not discriminate as long as they
were “separate but equal.”
Segregation and White Domination
•
States responded to Plessy by passing laws requiring segregation in every part of southern
life, in schools, hospitals, toilets, and cemeteries. Despite the doctrine of “separate but
equal,” facilities for blacks were either inferior or nonexistent. Segregation was an important
part of a system of white supremacy in the South, in which each part, such as
disenfranchisement, economic inequality, inferior education, reinforced the others.
Segregation did not so much keep races apart as ensure that whites would have the
advantage wherever they did meet. A racial social etiquette developed, in which blacks had
to give way to whites on sidewalks and could not raise their voices at whites or otherwise be
assertive.
The Segregated South
The Rise of Lynching
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Blacks who challenged white supremacy or refused to accept the indignities of segregation
faced political and legal power and immediate violent reprisal. In each year between 1883
and 1905, more than fifty persons, most of them black, were lynched (killed by a mob) in the
South. Lynching continued well into the twentieth century. Some were secret, others were
public and promoted by organizers and the media. Lynchings often resulted in atrocities
against the victims, and law enforcement rarely prevented lynching or punished lynchers.
Many victims were accused of having raped or assaulted white women, an allegation often
without basis. But many white southerners considered preserving white womanhood a
sufficient basis for extrajudicial murder. Lynching is virtually unknown as a phenomenon
anywhere else in the world.
The Politics of Memory
•
The reconciliation of the North and South in the 1880s and 1890s came at the cost of
widespread hopes for racial equality that had existed during and after the Civil War. In
popular literature and at veterans’ reunions, the war came to be remembered as a tragic
quarrel between brothers, in which blacks had played no role, and which had been caused
by clashes over states’ rights and the preservation of the Union, not slavery. Reconstruction
came to be universally seen as a period of black misrule imposed on the South by the North,
a view which legitimized disenfranchisement and segregation in the South. Southern
governments and schools celebrated the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy and condemned
the evils of Reconstruction.
Table 17.1 States With Over 200 Lynchings, 1889–1918
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Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
Redrawing the Boundaries
The New Immigration and the New Nativism
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The effective nullification of Reconstruction-era laws and amendments and the making of blacks into second-class citizens
reflected trends across the nation. America seemed to be fracturing along racial and class lines in the late nineteenth
century. One observer noted that the result was a far-reaching obsession with redrawing the boundary of freedom by
identifying and excluding those unworthy of freedom’s blessings. Many Americans seemed to adopt a more exclusive
definition of nationhood and national identity.
•
Immigrants were increasingly seen as a threat to Americans’ sense of identity and traditions. This was largely due to a
change in the sources of immigration to the United States. Despite prolonged depression, 3.5 million immigrants came to
the United States in the 1890s, looking for industrial work in the Northeast and Midwest. They came not from Ireland,
England, Germany, or Scandinavia, as had earlier European immigrants, but from nations in southern and eastern Europe,
particularly Italy and the Russian and Austo-Hungarian empires. These “new immigrants” were seen as members of
distinct “races” whose lower level of civilization was held to explain their acceptance of low-paying jobs and their innate
criminality. The Immigration Restriction League, founded in Boston in 1894, called for reducing immigration by barring the
illiterate from entering the country. This measure was adopted by Congress in 1897 but vetoed by President Cleveland,
though most states adopted the secret ballot as a means of disenfranchising immigrants, many of whom did not read
English and thus had had their ballots cast by party workers. States stopped allowing immigrants to vote before they had
become citizens and imposed new residency and literacy requirements. Along with black disenfranchisement in the South,
suffrage seemed more and more a privilege, not a right.
Chinese Exclusion and Chinese Rights
•
Although single Chinese men had been welcomed as cheap contract labor in the West, when Chinese families started to
migrate in the 1870s, Congress barred women from migrating. In 1883, Congress temporarily excluded all Chinese
immigrants from entering the country. This was the first time that race had been used to exclude an entire group of people
from entering the U.S., and it was made permanent in 1902. When exclusion occurred, more than 100,000 people of
Chinese descent lived in America, mostly on the West Coast, and they suffered intense discrimination and occasional mob
violence. States like California discriminated against the Chinese in education and other areas. While the Supreme Court
upheld the right of Chinese to pursue a living and the citizenship of Chinese born in the United States, the Court also
affirmed the right of Congress to erect racial restrictions on immigration.
Redrawing the Boundaries
The Emergence of Booker T. Washington
•
Social movements that helped to expand nineteenth-century boundaries of
freedom now revised their goals so they could be achieved in the new economic
and intellectual environment. Some black leaders, for example, started to
emphasize self-help and individual self-advancement into middle-class America
as an alternative to politics. Booker T. Washington symbolized this change in
black life. In 1895, Washington delivered a speech at the Atlanta Cotton
Exposition urging blacks to accommodate segregation and cease agitation for
civil and political rights. He founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a center
for vocational training (education for jobs, not broad liberal arts), as he believed
obtaining farms and skilled work was more important than full citizenship for
blacks. He told a white audience in Atlanta, “In all things that are purely social
we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential
to mutual progress.” Whites who wanted a docile labor force that would not form
unions and work cheaply embraced his vision, while many blacks supported him
from a belief that direct assaults on white power were failures and that blacks
should build up their own communities.
Redrawing the Boundaries
The Rise of the American Federation of Labor (AFL)
•
The dissolution of the Knights of Labor and the rise of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in the 1890s
signaled in the labor movement a similar move away from broad reforms to more limited aims. Strikes like
the Pullman strike seemed to show that direct confrontations with capital devastated workers’ organizations.
Unions, declared Samuel Gompers, the AFL’s founder and longtime president, should avoid seeking
economic independence, politics, or the utopian goals of groups like the Knights. Gompers and the AFL
thought unions should simply bargain with employers for higher wages and better working conditions. Like
Washington, Gompers used the language of the era’s business culture; his strategy was known as
“business unionism.” He embraced the idea of freedom of contract and turned it into an argument against
the interference of judges with workers’ right to organize unions.
•
In the 1890s, union membership recovered from its decline in the late 1880s. But the AFL unions that grew
abandoned the Knights’ ideal of labor solidarity, and restricted its membership to skilled workers, a small
minority of workers, which effectively excluded most unskilled workers, who were mostly blacks, women,
and new European immigrants. The AFL became strong in trades with highly skilled workers, like printing
and construction, but was weak or nonexistent in basic industries like steel or the factories that dominated
the economy.
Redrawing the Boundaries
The Women’s Era
•
Changes in the woman’s movement reflected the same expansion of activity and narrowing
boundaries. The 1890s began what would be called the “women’s era”—three decades in
which women, though still denied the vote, had greater opportunities for economic
independence and a role in public life. Nearly 5 million women worked for wages by 1900,
and though most were young, unmarried, and worked in traditional women’s jobs such as
domestic service and garments, a new generation of college-educated women were taking
better-paid white-collar jobs.
•
Women also had more influence in politics and society, through a number of new
organizations, like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874, which
moved from demanding prohibition laws to demanding comprehensive economic and
political reform, including the vote. Yet, feminism in this period moved away demanding
equal rights to claims more in line with dominant racial and ethnic norms. While “equal rights
feminism” was never fully repudiated, the mostly native-born, white and middle-class women
who dominated the suffrage movement laid claim to the vote as members of a “superior
race,” and complained that unworthy non-whites, such as immigrants, had the vote while
white women did not.
Becoming a World Power
The New Imperialism
•
America’s narrowed definition of nationhood was projected abroad in the late 1890s, as the
United States became an imperial power in the world. The last quarter of the nineteenth
century is known as the age of imperialism, when rival European empires divided large parts
of the world among themselves. In this period, the United States was considered a secondrate power and not included in imperial competition and diplomacy. Although large landbased empires such as the Russian, Ottoman, and Chinese empires and overseas empires
such as the British, French, and Spanish, dominated much of the nineteenth century, after
1870 a “new imperialism” emerged, dominated by European powers and Japan. Belgium,
Great Britain, and France consolidated their colonies in Africa, and Germany acquired
colonies on that continent. The British and Russians intensified their struggle to control
Central Asia, and all European powers competed to control parts of China. By the early
twentieth century, most of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Pacific had been divided
among these empires, each of which justified its domination of other peoples in the name of
bringing civilization to backward peoples who required instruction in Western values,
government, Christianity, and labor practices.
Becoming a World Power
American Expansionism
•
Territorial expansion had been part of American life from the beginning, but the 1890s marked a major
transformation of America’s relationship to the rest of the world. Americans more and more saw their nation
as an emerging world power. Until the 1890s, the expansion of the United States had been in North
America, though the Monroe Doctrine shows that many Americans had seen the Western Hemisphere as
an American sphere of influence. Americans talked of acquiring Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and other
territories, but the only territory acquired after the Civil War was Alaska, regarded by many as worthless.
Most who looked overseas wanted to expand trade, not take new possessions. Many farmers and
manufacturers believed that America’s production could no longer be absorbed in domestic markets, and
thought “overproduction” was causing recurrent economic crisis. They wanted foreign customers for their
products.
The Lure of Empire
•
Christian missionaries actively spread American influence overseas in the late 19th century. Groups like the
Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions believed it was their mission to prepare the world for
Christ’s second coming and enlighten the heathens abroad. A few late-19th century thinkers actively
promoted American expansionism. Josiah Strong, a well-known Congregationalist clergyman, tried to
update manifest destiny in his book, Our Country (1885). Here he argued that Anglo-Saxon Americans, who
had shown their ability for liberty and self-government in North America, should spread their institutions and
values to “inferior races” overseas whom, he suggested, would benefit American manufacturers by
becoming new consumers of their goods. Naval officer Alfred T. Mahan, in The Influence of Sea Power
Upon History (1890), argued that no nation could prosper without a large merchant fleet engaged in
international trade and a powerful navy to protect it, which required overseas bases. Mahan insisted that
with the western frontier closed, Americans had to look overseas for opportunity. Mahan influenced James
G. Blaine, President Harrison’s Secretary of State, who advocated the acquisition of Hawaii, Puerto Rico,
and Cuba for naval bases. In 1893, American planters in Hawaii organized a rebellion there that overthrew
the native Hawaiian government of Queen Liliuokalani. Though Harrison asked the Senate to pass a treaty
of annexation, President Cleveland withdrew it. In 1898, during the Spanish-American War, the United
States annexed the Hawaii islands. The depression that began in 1893 intensified Americans’ belief that an
aggressive foreign policy would create markets for manufactured goods.
Becoming a World Power
• The “Splendid Little War”
•
All these factors contributed to America’s emergence as a world power in the Spanish-American War of
1898. But the war’s immediate cause was Cubans’ long struggle for national independence from Spain. Ten
years of guerrilla warfare began in 1868, and revolt resumed in 1895. Reports of Cuban civilians suffering in
Spanish detention camps aroused outrage and sympathy in America. Cries for intervention increased after
February 15, 1898, when an explosion, probably accidental, destroyed the Maine, an American battleship in
Havana harbor, killing 270 sailors. When Spain rejected American demands for a cease-fire and eventual
Cuban independence, the Congress approved President McKinley’s request for a declaration of war, which
was justified as a humanitarian intervention. Congress adopted the Teller Amendment, declaring that the
United States had no intention of annexing or dominating Cuba. The war was brief and resulted in only a
few hundred American casualties, what one official called a “splendid little war.” The war’s most important
battle actually happened in the Pacific Ocean, in Manila Bay in the Philippines, a Spanish colony, where
Admiral George Dewey defeated a Spanish fleet.
Roosevelt at San Juan Hill
•
The most publicized land battle of the war involved the assault on San Juan Hill, outside Santiago, Cuba,
made by Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Roosevelt was pro-expansionist and believed war would
unite the nation and its men, whose masculinity he thought had suffered in the economic crisis of the
1890s. Although Roosevelt organized the Rough Riders to be a cross-section of America, it excluded
blacks, and Roosevelt neglected to mention that black troops had actually reached the top of San Juan Hill
before his troops. But Roosevelt’s exploits made him a national hero, and after being elected New York’s
governor that fall, he became McKinley’s vice-president in 1900
Map 17.4a The Spanish American War: The Pacific
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
Map 17.4b The Spanish American War: The Caribbean
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
Becoming a World Power
An American Empire
•
The war to liberate Cuba soon became an imperial mission that culminated with the creation of a small overseas
American empire. McKinley would not return the Philippines to Spain or hand it over to the Filipinos who had fought
for independence, because he didn’t believe they could govern themselves. He also spoke of Americans’ duty to
“uplift and civilize” the Filipinos and train them to rule themselves. In the treaty ending the war, the United States
acquired the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Before McKinley recognized Cuba’s independence, he forced that
island’s new government to approve the Platt Amendment to the new Cuban constitution, which gave the United
States the right to intervene in Cuba with its military whenever it saw fit. Cuban patriots were extremely disappointed
by what they saw as America’s betrayal, and such resentments would help inspire the revolution in Cuba fifty years
later.
•
Americans’ interest in their new insular possessions had more to do with trade than settlement or extracting
resources, however, and they sought Cuba and Puerto Rico, and in the Pacific, the Philippines, Guam and Hawaii, as
outposts for trade to Latin America and Asia. In 1899, secretary of state John Hay declared the Open Door Policy,
demanding that European powers which had divided China into commercial spheres of influence allow equal trade
access to America. Western influence and presence in China soon led to the Boxer Rebellion, in which Christian
Chinese and foreigners were targeted by Chinese nationalists, and American troops helped quell the uprising.
The Philippine War
•
While many Cubans, Filipinos, and Puerto Ricans had welcomed American intervention as a means to wrest
independence from Spain, continued American control, direct and indirect, quickly alienated these patriots and
others. After victory in the Philippines, Emilio Aguinaldo, the leader of the independence movement there, established
a provisional government with a constitution modeled on that of America. When McKinley decided to retain
possession of the islands, the Filipinos rebelled. A second longer and far more bloody war ensued, lasting from 1899
to 1903, and costing the lives of more than 100,000 Filipinos and 4,200 Americans. The war was hotly debated in the
United States, where reports of atrocities against Filipino civilians, including burning villages, torture, and rape and
executions, seemed to damage America’s image as a liberator. McKinley’s administration justified the war as an
effort to “uplift and civilize and Christianize” the Filipinos (most residents were already Catholics). The American
colonial government, led by William Howard Taft, quickly modernized the islands with railroads, schools and public
health officials, and modern agriculture. But American policies in its new possessions tended to favor land-based
local elites, whether native-born or American, and usually created persistent poverty for the majority.
Map 17.5 American Empire, 1898.
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
Becoming a World Power
Citizens or Subjects?
•
American rule came with American racial attitudes. In an 1899 poem, British writer Rudyard Kipling asked
the United States to take up the “white man’s burden” of imperialism. American supporters of empire felt
that white domination of non-white peoples represented the progress of civilization. But America’s new
empire sparked an intense debate about the relationship between democracy, race, and American
citizenship. America’s governmental system had no provision for permanent colonies, and the right of every
people to self-government was a key principle of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s idea of
America as an “empire of liberty” assumed that new territories would eventually be admitted as new states,
and its residents would be American citizens.
•
Yet after the Spanish-American War, nationalism, democracy, and American freedom seemed aligned with
ideas of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Both Democratic and Republican leaders who wanted to retain the new
possessions feared negative consequences of incorporating “alien races” into America. The Foraker Act of
1900 declared Puerto Rico an “insular” territory different from previous territories in the American West. Its
1 million inhabitants were defined as citizens of Puerto Rico, not the United States, and were denied a
future path to statehood. Filipinos were given the same status. In a series of cases decided between 1901
and 1904 known as the “Insular Cases,” the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution did not fully apply to
overseas territories held by the United States, thus sharply limiting the extent of American freedom.
Congress had to recognize the fundamental rights of these new peoples, but could otherwise govern them
as it saw fit for an indefinite time. Hawaii became a traditional territory and was admitted as a state in 1959.
The Philippines became independent in 1946. Although Congress gave American citizenship to Puerto
Ricans in 1917, Puerto Rico has the status of a “commonwealth,” neither a state or a territory, which has its
own government but lacks a voice in Congress and presidential elections.
Drawing the Global Color Line
•
America’s racial attitudes had a global impact in the age of imperialism. Global concerns about immigration,
race relations, and the “white man’s burden” seemed to inspire solidarity among “Anglo-Saxon” nations.
Chinese exclusion and segregation in the Jim Crow South influenced discriminatory laws in Canada, South
Africa, and Australia. Other nations seemed to learn from Reconstruction’s “failure” that multiracial
democracy was impossible.
Becoming a World Power
“Republic or Empire?”
•
America’s new empire caused intense debate and controversy. Opponents formed the Anti-Imperialist League, which
united writers and social reformers who wanted reforms at home, businessmen who thought overseas empire was
too expensive, and racists who did not want non-whites brought within the United States. The League warned
Americans that empire was incompatible with democracy and urged Americans to help Puerto Ricans and Filipinos
gain their independence. In 1900, the Democrats once again nominated William Jennings Bryan to run against
President McKinley, and the Democrats’ platform opposed the Philippine War for militarily subjugating a foreign
people demanding “liberty and self-government.” The president of the Anti-Imperialist League declared that the
nation’s most pressing question was whether the nation would be a “republic or empire?”
•
Proponents of American empire embraced the language of freedom, too. Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana argued
that America sought abroad not material resources or national power but desired only to bring freedom to other
peoples. America practiced a “benevolent” imperialism that would uplift backward cultures and spread liberty.
America, Beveridge argued, only went abroad for trade, not to rule other nations. McKinley, benefiting from economic
recovery and a swell of patriotism from winning the Spanish-American war, beat Bryan in 1900.
•
At the start of the twentieth century, America seemed ready to become a great power. Writers at home and abroad
predicted that American influence would soon pervade the globe. In his book The New Empire, Brooks Adams, the
grandson of John Quincy Adams, predicted that America’s economic might would make it “outweigh any single empire, if
not all empires combined.” This did not happen until after World War II, but the characteristics that would constitute
America’s global strength were already present in 1900. The United States had already surpassed Britain, France, and
Germany in industrial production, the merger movement of 1897–1904 left much of the economy controlled by
corporations, politics had stabilized and the white North and South had reconciled, while hardened racial lines—
segregation, Chinese exclusion, Indian reservations—limited the boundaries of citizenship and freedom. Yet questions
central to nineteenth-century debates over freedom, such as the relationship between economic and political liberty, the
role of government in creating the social conditions for freedom, and the definition of citizenship and national identity, had
not been finally answered. They would continue to be central to American life in the twentieth century.
Additional Art for Chapter 17
A Trifle Embarrassed
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
Andrew Carnegie’s ironworks at Homestead
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
A group of Kansas Populists
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
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Tom Watson
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
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In a cartoon from Tom Watson’s People’s Party Paper
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
Coxey’s Army on the march in 1894.
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
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Federal troops pose atop a railroad engine.
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
A cartoon from the magazine Judge
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
A Republican cartoon
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
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A group of Florida convict laborers.
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Coal miners, in a photograph by Lewis Hine.
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Black women washing laundry
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An 1878 poster seeking recruits for the Kansas Exodus.
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Benjamin “Pap”
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African-Americans of all ages were required to
abide by segregation laws.
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
Part of the crowd of 10,000 that watched
the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith in Paris
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
A cartoon from the magazine Judge
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
Chinese agricultural laborers in southern California
around 1880.
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
Result of an anti-Chinese riot in Seattle, Washington.
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Booker T.Washington
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Woman’s Holy War
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A drawing for the 1896 meeting of the National
American Woman Suffrage Association
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Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
A cartoon in Puck
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The destruction of the battleship Maine in
Havana Harbor
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Charge of the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill
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Civilization Begins at Home.
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
In this cartoon comment on the American
effort to suppress the movement
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
Emilio Aguinaldo
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William Howard Taft
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Some of the 1,200 Filipinos exhibited
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School Begins, an 1899 cartoon from Puck
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A Republican campaign poster from the election of 1900
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Norton Lecture Slides
Independent and Employee-Owned
This concludes the Norton Lecture Slides
Slide Set for Chapter 17
Give Me Liberty!
AN AMERICAN HISTORY
THIRD EDITION
by
Eric Foner