Gregory Bodenhamer Books Articles Guides Workbooks Free Enterprise NDITC Urban politics and reform. In the late nineteenth century, municipal government often failed to meet the needs of its constituents — citizen and immigrant alike. In many cities across the country, power rested not in the hands of elected officials but with the boss who handpicked the candidates for office and controlled the vote through the political machine, or organization, that he ran. Some of the bosses were New York's William Marcy Tweed and George Washington Plunkitt, Kansas City's “Big Jim” Pendergast, and Cincinnati's George Cox. Although reformers bitterly attacked the corruption and inefficiency that went along with boss politics, the system did provide valuable services. In return for immigrants' votes and help organizing campaigns, bosses could arrange jobs on the growing city payrolls for them or their children. Bosses also provided the poor with money and food and helped them work out problems with the police or other city agencies. In sum, political machines ran a large-scale welfare system at a time when even the concept of a social safety net was unheard of.

Urban politics and reform. In the late nineteenth century, municipal government often failed to meet the needs of its constituents — citizen and immigrant alike. In many cities across the country, power rested not in the hands of elected officials but with the boss who handpicked the candidates for office and controlled the vote through the political machine, or organization, that he ran. Some of the bosses were New York's William Marcy Tweed and George Washington Plunkitt, Kansas City's “Big Jim” Pendergast, and Cincinnati's George Cox. Although reformers bitterly attacked the corruption and inefficiency that went along with boss politics, the system did provide valuable services. In return for immigrants' votes and help organizing campaigns, bosses could arrange jobs on the growing city payrolls for them or their children. Bosses also provided the poor with money and food and helped them work out problems with the police or other city agencies. In sum, political machines ran a large-scale welfare system at a time when even the concept of a social safety net was unheard of.

The strong late-nineteenth-century impulse to help the poor and recent immigrant arrivals often had a distinctly Christian overtone. Groups like the Young Men's Christian Association, whose North American branch was founded in 1851, grew rapidly after the Civil War, and an American branch of the Salvation Army was established in 1880. Charitable assistance was encouraged by the Social Gospel, a philosophy embraced by a number of Protestant ministers, which noted that personal salvation came through the betterment of society and that churches could help bring this about by fighting poverty, slum conditions, and drunkenness. Churches built gymnasiums, opened libraries, set up lectures, and took on social programs in the hope of attracting the working poor.

The settlement house movement was a nonsectarian approach to the same problems addressed by the churches. Established in the poorest neighborhoods, settlement houses served as community centers whose primary function was to help immigrant families adjust to life in the United States. They offered a variety of services, including nurseries and kindergartens, classes on sewing, cooking, and English, and a range of sports and recreation programs. The first settlement house was the Neighborhood Guild in New York (1886), but the most famous were the Hull House in Chicago, founded by Jane Addams in 1889, and the Henry Street Settlement on Manhattan's Lower East Side, founded by Lillian Wald in 1893. College-educated middle-class women, who in effect created the field of social work, generally ran the settlement houses. As professionals, they were interested in gathering information on a wide range of urban problems. The data they collected helped bring about changes in building codes, improved health care and factory safety, and highlighted the need for new child labor laws.

African‐Americans after Reconstruction

In much of the country in the late nineteenth century, social tensions were defined in terms of rich versus poor, native-born versus immigrant, and worker versus capitalist. In the states of the former Confederacy, despite all the calls for a New South in the years after Reconstruction, tensions continued to center upon the relations between blacks and whites. Although a small percentage of African-Americans found work in the new iron foundries and steel mills, they were generally barred from the textile mills that grew into the region's major industry. Mill owners preferred to use white women and children rather than blacks, who were increasingly portrayed as lazy, ignorant, and shiftless. Consequently, the overwhelming majority of African-Americans were tied to the land as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. By 1900, segregation was institutionalized throughout the South, and the civil rights of blacks were sharply curtailed.

Jim Crow laws and segregation. Under the Civil Rights Act of 1875, racial discrimination in public accommodations such as hotels, railroads, and theaters was prohibited. Several challenges to the law were mounted in the courts. In 1883 the Supreme Court ruled in the Civil Rights Cases that the Act was invalid because it addressed social as opposed to civil rights. Furthermore, the Court noted that the Fourteenth Amendment protected people against violations of their civil rights by states, not by the actions of individuals (for example, when the owner of a hotel refused to rent a room to an African-American). In the wake of the decision, state legislatures throughout the South enacted laws that legalized racial segregation in essentially all public places, from schools to hospitals to restaurants. The Supreme Court upheld such Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in its landmark decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In this case, the Court set forth its famous separate but equal doctrine, which stated that segregation in itself did not violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, provided the facilities for blacks and whites were equal.

Segregated facilities, whether schools or public transportation, were rarely equal. For example, while several Southern states spent nearly the same amount on the education of whites and blacks in 1890, there was a tremendous disparity in spending in favor of whites within 20 years. Legalized segregation also reinforced the notions of white racial superiority and African-American inferiority, creating an atmosphere that encouraged violence, and during the 1890s lynchings of blacks rose significantly. Despite these obvious problems, the concept of separate but equal was not overturned by the Supreme Court until 1954.

Losing the right to vote. The end of Reconstruction did not mean an end to African-American political influence in the South. Blacks continued to serve in several state legislatures as late as 1900 and were even elected to Congress after 1877, albeit from all-black districts. However, a change took place in the 1890s as attitudes about race became more strongly felt and the prospect of an electoral alliance between poor whites and blacks that could threaten the power structure became a possibility. While the Fifteenth Amendment ensured that African-Americans could not be denied the right to vote simply because they were African-American, the southern states came up with various ways to disenfranchise blacks.

Mississippi's 1890 constitution imposed limitations on voting that were aimed primarily at African-Americans. These limitations included residency requirements, disqualification of individuals convicted of even minor crimes, payment of all taxes (including the poll tax), and a literacy test. Loopholes existed within these restrictions to favor whites who might have been otherwise ineligible to vote. For example, an illiterate person who could demonstrate to the registrar that he “understood” the constitution would be allowed to vote. Louisiana adopted the so-called grandfather clause, which allowed men to vote if their fathers or grandfathers had been eligible to vote as of January 1, 1867. No blacks had the right to vote anywhere in the South at that time. Although the Supreme Court ultimately declared the grandfather clause unconstitutional, this and similar laws drastically cut African-American voter registration in the South by 1900.

The African-American response. Blacks responded to increasing discrimination in several ways. The initial wave of the Great Migration of African-Americans, moving from the rural South to the urban North, began in the 1890s, and there was a very small emigration back to Africa as well. Former slaves established all-black towns in Tennessee, Kansas, and the Oklahoma Territory, and organized early civil rights organizations such as the Citizens Equal Rights Association (1887) and the Afro-American League (1890). The divisions within the African-American community on how best to achieve equality were reflected in the disparate philosophies of two men: Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois.

The founder of the Tuskegee Institute (1882), an agricultural and vocational training school in Alabama, Washington believed that blacks should concentrate on economic self-improvement rather than on demanding social equality and civil rights. After he outlined his views in a speech in Atlanta in 1895, which included an apparent acceptance of segregation, his accommodationist position became known as the Atlanta Compromise. Massachusetts-born and Harvard-trained Du Bois attacked Washington's philosophy in his The Souls of Black Folks (1903). He believed that education for blacks had to include more than learning a trade, and he demanded access to higher education. Indeed, Du Bois believed it would be this educated African-American elite that would lead the way to equality by using the ballot box in states where they could vote and “agitation,” or protest, where they could not.

Everyday Life in America

In the decades after the Civil War, Americans experienced remarkable changes in their everyday life, from the clothes they wore and food they ate to their opportunities for recreation. Mail order catalogs allowed rural residents to buy new equipment and follow the latest trends in fashion or household appliances without ever going to a store. The public school and university systems grew and developed as the demand for education increased. Meanwhile, Americans filled their leisure time with a diverse range of activities, from sports to vaudeville to amusement parks. The impact of these changes in lifestyle was reflected in both the serious and popular literature of the time, which emphasized realism and targeted the growing middle class.

The impact of mass production. Mass production changed the way Americans dressed, shopped, and ate. After the Civil War, handmade clothing quickly gave way to ready-to-wear clothes sold through retail outlets. But people did not have to live in large cities or even visit the stores themselves to buy what they needed. In 1872, Aaron Montgomery Ward opened the first mail-order retail business and issued a one-page catalog featuring nearly 150 items; by 1884 the catalog contained more than 200 pages and listed over 10,000 items. Montgomery Ward and its more successful competitor Sears, Roebuck and Company brought the benefits of mass production to farms and small towns by selling everything from clothes to agricultural implements through their catalogs. Mail-order buying was made even more accessible in 1896 with the first rural free delivery (RFD) service.

The variety of foods available also increased dramatically. By the 1880s, Easterners could buy California oranges, Wyoming beef, and fresh milk shipped from rural dairies by rail in refrigerated cars. More and more women shopped for commercially prepared food and did less baking and canning. Many of today's best known brand names — Campbell's soup, Nabisco crackers, and Coca-Cola — were introduced in the 1890s. These products were marketed through grocery chain stores like the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, or A & P, which added foodstuffs and household products to its inventory in the 1870s. Perhaps the best known example of the chain store was the “five and dime,” created by F. W. Woolworth in 1879. Like the new department stores, the retailing success of A & P and Woolworth's was due to large-volume buying and heavy advertising.

The expansion of education. Public-school enrollment doubled between 1870 and 1900, including a significant jump in the number of high school students during the same period. Both trends contributed to a sharp drop in illiteracy in the United States. The growth in elementary education reflected the influx of immigrants. Immigrant parents wanted their children to go to school as a means of getting ahead, while educators and public officials saw schools as the best instruments for acculturation. Children of the middle class, however, accounted for the increase in the secondary-school population. New classes in American history, the sciences, and the “manual arts” were added to the basic curriculum of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the first vocational high schools were established by the turn of the century.

Higher education also expanded. As a result of both public and private investment, American colleges and universities had almost 250,000 students by 1900, four times the number 30 years earlier. The Morrill Act of 1862 led to the creation of 12 new state colleges, 8 agricultural and mechanical colleges, and 6 black colleges, and the federal government provided partial funding for these institutions through the Second Morrill Act (1890). At the same time, wealthy entrepreneurs and philanthropists endowed new schools, such as Johns Hopkins University (1873), Stanford University (1885), and the University of Chicago (1890). Higher education became more accessible to women as several women's colleges, such as Vassar (1861) and Smith (1871), were founded and state land-grant universities became coeducational. In fact, women accounted for nearly 20 percent of college graduates in 1900. Not everyone fully shared in these changes though. Although a number of all-black colleges were established, African-Americans certainly did not benefit as much as middle-class whites from the expansion of public education.

The use of leisure time. Sports became a popular pastime for many Americans in the late nineteenth century. Golf, tennis, and bicycling (which became a short-lived national craze in the 1890s) attracted middle-class and well-to-do men and women, while baseball drew more diverse and much larger crowds. Not long after the professional Cincinnati Red Stockings began barnstorming around the country, the National League was formed (1876) and the rules of the modern game took shape. The rival American League began play in 1901, and the inaugural World Series was held two years later. Prizefighting, long considered a working man's sport, gained wider acceptance with the introduction of the Queensberry rules, which mandated the use of gloves, set the length of a round at three minutes, and outlawed wrestling holds; no less a figure than Theodore Roosevelt endorsed boxing as a manly sport. Football quickly became the premier collegiate spectator sport, and Dr. James Naismith invented basketball in 1891 as an indoor game that could be played between the football and baseball seasons.

Vaudeville, which grew out of the pre-Civil War minstrel shows, was an important form of family entertainment. A variety of acts, including dancing, singing, magic, juggling, acrobatic, and trained-animal, toured on circuits organized by theater owners. For more highbrow tastes, almost every major American city had a symphony orchestra by the turn of the century. Band performances, both open-air and in concert halls, were well attended in cities and small towns across the county. The repertoire relied heavily on patriotic marches such as John Philip Sousa's “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Ragtime, which came out of the African-American tradition, became part of American popular music. The publication of Scott Joplin's “Maple Leaf Rag” in 1899 brought syncopated rhythms of the saloons and black community to a wider audience. New York's Coney Island became the first and best known of the great amusement parks, which offered exhilarating rides, strange sideshows, and cheap food. A smaller number of Americans had the opportunity to see the wondrous products of the industrial age and the cornucopia from the country's farms at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition and the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago.

Literature and popular reading. Realism was the central literary style in the works of American writers after the Civil War. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was the first major American writer born west of the Appalachian Mountains. His most famous works — The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) — drew on his experiences of life in Missouri and along the Mississippi River before the Civil War. Among Twain's contemporaries were William Dean Howells and Henry James. Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) portrays the newly rich middle class and is among the earliest fictional accounts of an American businessman, while James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881) examines a young American woman's experiences in the European societies of England and Italy. Influenced by the deterministic aspects of Darwinism, Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser used naturalism — a form of realism emphasizing the role of environment and fate in characters' lives — to present a more pessimistic depiction of society and human existence. Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) tells the story of the slums of New York and an innocent woman's fall into prostitution and death. In Sister Carrie(1900), Dreiser describes how a young country girl is literally seduced by her own ambition and city life. One of the most popular books of the late nineteenth century was not a realistic depiction of urban life but a utopian novel. Edward Bellamy,mn's Looking Backward (1888) is set in the year 2000 when poverty, crime, and corruption have disappeared and everyone is working for a government-owned-and-operated trust for the same pay.

Popular reading was often geared to a specific audience. As the tide of immigration grew, so did the number of ethnic newspapers published in the United States. The foreign-language press included dailies and weeklies in French, German, Greek, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish (the language spoken and read by East European Jews). Magazines aimed primarily at middle-class women appeared, such as Harper's Bazar (1867), Ladies Home Journal (1883), and Ladies' Home Companion (1886). An enduring notion of post-Civil War America perpetuated in popular reading was that anyone could be successful through hard work and perseverance. Horatio Alger, who wrote more than 100 young-adult novels beginning with the best seller Ragged Dick (1867), did more than anyone else to popularize the “rags-to-riches” myth. In fact, his heroes managed to pull themselves up more by luck than by sheer determination — they saved the life of the daughter of a wealthy businessman and got a job with the company as a reward. Alger's suggestion that anyone could succeed did not match the reality of social mobility. Successful men usually came from a middle or upper class background and had fathers who were in commerce, banking, or the professions.

Domestic Politics

In the period from the end of Reconstruction to the beginning of the twentieth century, there was little difference between the agendas of Republicans and Democrats. Both parties were generally pro-business, despite the fact that steps were taken to regulate the railroads and the trusts, and neither was concerned with the economic and social dislocations brought about by industrialization and urbanization. The questions that dominated domestic politics in the late nineteenth century appear rather mundane — monetary policy, civil service reform, and the tariff. The failure of the federal government to seriously address the problems facing agriculture forced farmers to organize and pursue political action on their own. Although domestic issues occupied the nation for most of the period, foreign policy questions dominated the last years of the century. In a remarkably short time, the United States acquired an overseas empire in the Pacific and the Caribbean and became a major force in world affairs.

Republicans and Democrats were relatively evenly matched in the political arena. Although the Republicans controlled the White House for all but eight years between 1876 and 1900, presidential elections were close and the winner rarely received more than 50 percent of the popular vote. Congress was usually divided with a Republican majority in the Senate and a Democratic majority in the House. The reason for such an even political balance was that neither party had a truly national base of support. Democrats could count on the “solid” South (as the states of the former Confederacy were called) and the southern parts of the border states, as well as recent immigrants, Catholics, and the working class in the larger cities of the Midwest and Northeast where political machines got out the vote. Republicans, on the other hand, had strongholds in smaller cities, towns, and the rural areas of the Midwest and New England, and were also backed by the business community, the growing middle class, and African-Americans (to the extent that they could and did go to the polls). These generalizations about party loyalty had many exceptions, of course. For instance, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were swing states, meaning that they might vote either Democrat or Republican in a presidential election.

Greenbacks and silver. The nation's monetary system was chaotic after the Civil War, with gold, silver, and paper money all circulating simultaneously. Gold circulated in twenty-, ten-, and five-dollar coins known as “double eagles,” “eagles,” and “half-eagles” while silver coins were minted as dollar, half-dollar, quarter, dime, and half-dime coins. Greenbacks, the paper money printed by the Union during the Civil War, remained in circulation and could be redeemed for gold or silver. Banks, meanwhile, were printing their own notes (another form of paper money), often in excess of their assets. As individuals and institutions struggled to find security within the country's complicated financial system, two approaches to managing the system emerged — one that favored restricting the money in circulation and another that favored expanding it. Supporters of a restricted currency felt that limiting the money supply would keep the economy stable and prices low. Advocates of an expanded currency, however, believed that increasing the money supply would make it easier for debtors, particularly farmers, to pay off what they owed and create increased prices for farm products.

Those who supported an inflated currency, as well as mining interests in the West that had just found major deposits of silver, were outraged when the Coinage Act of 1873 ordered the U.S. Mint to stop issuing silver dollars; they derided the new law as “the Crime of '73.” In 1878, the Greenback Labor party, which was quite successful in that year's Congressional elections, called for the unlimited coinage of silver. In the same year, the silverbackers secured passage of the Bland-Allison Act, which required the Treasury to buy between two and four million dollars worth of silver per month. Treasury officials, however, purchased the minimum amount of silver required under the law and did not put the new coins produced into circulation. Congressional supporters of a silver standard passed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1890, under which 4.5 million ounces of silver were bought each month (effectively the entire output of the western silver mines) and Treasury notes were made redeemable in gold or silver. While the money supply did increase slightly, the currency question remained unresolved and became the central issue in the 1896 presidential election.

Civil service reform. Angered by the scandals of the Grant administration and political corruption in general, Americans demanded changes in the way government jobs were given out. Common practice was to rely on the spoils system, in which the party that won the presidency replaced office holders in the federal bureaucracy with members of its own party. Critics charged that such “rotation in office” resulted in a considerable loss of experience and expertise. The Republican party was split into two factions on the issue of civil service reform. The Half-Breeds, led by Senators Carl Schurz and James G. Blaine, along with newspaper editor Edwin L. Godkin, favored an end to the spoils system, while the Stalwarts, led by Senator Roscoe Conkling, felt that control of patronage jobs was essential. When the Republican convention deadlocked on the issue in 1880, the party compromised and nominated Half-Breed James A. Garfield for president and Stalwart Chester A. Arthur for vice president.

Although Garfield won the close election, he was assassinated four months after taking office by Charles Guiteau, a disgruntled office seeker and self-proclaimed Stalwart. The country was so outraged by the murder that the Pendelton Civil Service Act was passed by Congress and signed by new pro-spoils President Arthur in 1883. The law created an independent Civil Service Commission and determined which jobs in the federal government would be filled on a merit basis through competitive examinations rather than through political appointment. Although the percentage of positions covered by the law was small at first, subsequent legislation expanded the commission's reach and significantly improved the quality of federal employees.

Considered by his peers to be a hack politician and a mediocre president, Chester Arthur was pushed aside by the Republicans in 1884 in favor of James G. Blaine, whose career in the Senate was tarnished by trading political favors for railroad stock. The Democrats, who had captured the House in 1882, sensed a chance to gain the White House for the first time since 1856. They selected Grover Cleveland, who had risen from the mayor of Buffalo, New York, to the governor of the state in a remarkably short period of time. The campaign was a dirty one, with the Republicans claiming that Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child; he admitted that he had accepted his responsibility for the child and was paying support to its mother. A remark by a Protestant minister (who was a Blaine supporter) that the Democrats were the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” was not disavowed quickly enough by the Republicans, and this helped Cleveland to win a close election.

The tariff question. Tariffs were the one issue that seriously divided the two parties. Republicans favored high tariffs to help subsidize American industry by keeping cheaper imported goods out of the country; Democrats wanted to lower duties to reduce prices. Tariff schedules — what rates were charged on which products — were always changing to reflect new commodities on the market or the political strategies of members of Congress who used the tariffs for their own advantage. A senator from Iowa, for example, would support a low rate for iron ore since none was mined in his state and a high rate on imported grain to protect Iowa corn.

Toward the end of his term, Grover Cleveland proposed a major overhaul of the country's tariff policy. The high rates, he argued, had created a sizable federal surplus that pushed the cost of living up for everyone while benefiting only a few. Congress refused to enact tariff reform, and Cleveland's position cost him the next election. Although receiving more of the popular vote, he lost to Benjamin Harrison, the Republican senator from Ohio, in the electoral college. Emboldened by their victory in 1888, the Republicans raised rates in 1890 (the McKinley Tariff) and again in 1897 (the Dingley Tariff). In the interim, during Cleveland's second term (1892–97), a modest reduction was enacted in the Wilson-Gorman Tariff of 1894. The law included a personal income tax to make up for the revenue lost due to the lower rates, a provision the Supreme Court later declared unconstitutional.

The Revolt of the Farmers

American farmers faced a myriad of problems in the late nineteenth century. Agricultural prices steadily declined after 1870 as a result of domestic overproduction and foreign competition. The high rates charged by grain elevator operators and railroads to store and ship crops were a constant source of complaint, while high tariffs made the goods farmers had to buy, such as farm machinery, more expensive. Forced to borrow money to pay for their land or equipment, many farmers were in debt and favored keeping the amount of money in circulation high, either through printing greenbacks or the unlimited coinage of silver.

The Grange and Farmers' Alliances. Farmers began to organize soon after the Civil War. The Patrons of Husbandry, or the Grange, was established in 1867 to sponsor educational and social programs for farmers and later encouraged farmer-owned cooperatives. In the political arena, the Grange successfully secured legislation in several states to regulate railroad and warehousing rates, and many of its members supported the Greenback Labor party. As the Grange declined in the late 1870s, new farmer groups known as Farmers' Alliances came to the fore. By 1890, the two largest were the Northwestern Alliance and the Southern Alliance, which, despite their regional names, had more than three million members nationwide. Although the Alliance movement encouraged the participation of women, who were among some of its most outspoken leaders, the Southern Alliance was segregated. As a result, African-American farmers in the Deep South formed the National Colored Farmers Alliance. Representatives of this organization met with the Southern Alliance and the Farmers' Mutual Benefit Association in Ocala, Florida, in December of 1890 to develop a platform that became known as the Ocala Demands. These demands called for the abolition of national banks, the creation of federal sub-treasuries that would provide low-interest loans to farmers against the value of their crops, the unlimited coinage of silver, an end to high tariffs, strict control over transportation and communication, a graduated income tax, and the direct election of senators.

The Southern Alliance stayed within the Democratic party, and following the 1890 elections the Alliance gained control of eight state legislatures, elected four governors, and sent forty-four representatives and two senators to Washington. In the Plains, the Alliance ran third-party candidates with very similar results. Kansas and South Dakota had senators who were Populists, as the new political movement was called, and both houses of the Nebraska legislature were in their hands as well. These victories soon led to the creation of a national party.

The Populist party. The Populist, or People's, party was officially organized in St. Louis in February 1892 and held its first nominating convention in Omaha in July. Dominated by farmers, the party also reached out to labor and reform-minded groups and reflected this broader constituency in its platform. In addition to restating the Ocala Demands, the platform called for an eight-hour workday and immigration restriction, strongly condemned the use of Pinkerton detectives against strikers, and supported such political reforms as the secret ballot, initiative, and referendum. The Populists took a somewhat more radical stand on government ownership, implying that the railroads should be nationalized without delay.

In the 1892 presidential race, the Populists nominated James B. Weaver, a former general in the Union army who had previously run for president as the Greenback Labor party's candidate. Although he received more than 1 million popular votes and 22 in the electoral college (including Kansas, Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada) Weaver and the Populist party lacked support in key areas. Southerners did not back Weaver because he had fought for the North during the Civil War and because of the fear that a Populist victory would lead African-Americans to demand their full civil rights. Nor was the party's appeal to labor groups very successful, because higher agricultural prices meant higher food prices and lower tariffs meant more competition from abroad, which could result in layoffs. Although the Populists elected five senators and ten representatives, Democrat Grover Cleveland took the White House for a second time.

The crisis of the 1890s. Cleveland had barely taken office when the nation was hit by the worst economic crisis in its history up to that time. Triggered by the bankruptcy of several railroads and the failure of a British bank that caused many British investors to exchange their American stocks for gold, the Panic of 1893 led to a depression that lasted for four years. The nation's gold reserves fell dramatically between January 1892 and March 1893, 600 banks had closed their doors by the end of the year, more than three million people — about 20 percent of the workforce — were unemployed, and wheat and corn prices fell precipitously.

Cleveland failed to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster. To stop the drain of gold, the President asked for and received the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. This stopped the issuance of silver certificates that were redeemable in gold, but it did not solve the problem. The federal government was forced to secure a loan from a banking syndicate headed by J. Pierpont Morgan to buy 3.5 million ounces of gold in order to meet the Treasury emergency. Throughout the crisis, Cleveland maintained that boom-and-bust cycles were inevitable and that little could be done about them. Indeed, he strongly believed that responsibility for the social costs of depression did not fall to the government, at any level. Jacob Coxey, a Populist from Ohio, disagreed. He led a group of 400 men on a protest march to Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1894 and demanded that the federal government set up a $500 million public works project for the unemployed. Coxey's Army quickly disbanded when Coxey and other leaders were arrested for trespassing.

The election of 1896. The Democrats were certainly hurt by the Panic of 1893; both the Republicans and Populists gained seats in the 1894 congressional elections. As the country anticipated the presidential campaign of 1896, it was clear that the main campaign issue would be whether to have a silver or gold monetary standard. The Republicans nominated William McKinley of Ohio on a platform supporting the gold standard and high tariffs. Democrats were split between the silverites, who supported a silver standard, and the goldbugs, who supported currency that was based on gold. Silverite William Jennings Bryan, a former Congressman from Nebraska, guaranteed himself the Democratic nomination through his famous “Cross of Gold” speech before the convention. The selection of Bryan created a serious problem for the Populists. Party leaders realized that running their own candidate would split the silver vote and hand the election to the Republicans. At the same time, “free silver” was just one plank in the Populist program and backing the Democrats would mean a loss of independence and identity. Ultimately, the Populist party decided to nominate Bryan for president as well and made Tom Watson of Georgia its candidate for vice president.

The Republicans dramatically outspent the Democrats in promoting their campaign and trumpeted that a vote for McKinley was a vote for prosperity. Meanwhile, the Democrats discovered that Bryan had very little appeal among immigrants, factory workers, and the middle class. McKinley's victory was decisive; for the first time since 1872, a candidate for president won more than 50 percent of the vote. By committing the 1896 campaign platform to the single issue of free silver, the Populists lost momentum on their other reform proposals. When Bryan ran against McKinley for a second time in 1900, the Populists again endorsed him and shared his second defeat. By this time, the party was no longer winning state and local elections and was clearly in decline.

Circumstances more than his program made McKinley's administration a successful one. Certainly the high rates of the Dingley Tariff did little to solve the country's economic ills, but an increase in farm prices, the excitement of finding gold in the Klondike, and restored prosperity helped the Panic of 1893 fade into a bad memory. Americans were also turning their attention to a new issue — the idea of overseas expansion.

The United States as a World Power

Around the time of the Civil War, the majority of Americans showed little interest in foreign policy; national concerns were industrialization, the settlement of the West, and domestic politics. Nonetheless, steps were taken to extend American influence beyond the continental United States. Before and after the war, several small islands in the Pacific were acquired as coaling stations for American ships: Howland and Baker Islands in 1857 and the Midway Islands in 1867. The purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867, though derided at the time as “Seward's Folly,” was seen by Secretary of State William H. Seward as an important step in establishing a foothold in Asian markets. In 1878, a treaty was negotiated that gave the United States the right to establish a naval station at Pago Pago in Samoa. The true prize in the Pacific, however, was the Hawaiian Islands.

The annexation of Hawaii. American missionaries and commercial interests had long been active in Hawaii; by the 1840s, they controlled the sugar plantations and held positions in government. The United States was given the right to build a naval base at Pearl Harbor in 1887, and, in the same year, Americans on the islands forced the Hawaiian rulers to create a constitutional monarchy under American control. In 1891, Queen Liliuokalani assumed the throne and tried to reassert Hawaiian sovereignty, but this brief interlude of independence came to an end two years later when the planters, with the help of American gunboats, staged a successful coup. President Cleveland refused to annex Hawaii and preferred the restoration of a constitutional monarchy, but the leaders of the coup rejected that solution and instead proclaimed The Republic of Hawaii on July 4, 1894. The United States quickly recognized the new republic, but this did not end the matter. McKinley ran on a platform that called for the annexation of Hawaii, and the island became a U.S. territory in 1898, just as European and U.S. imperialism boiled over into the Spanish-American War.

Justifications for expansion.Since 1870, European nations such as Great Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy had been seizing territory and establishing colonies in Africa and Asia. Several factors contributed to the United States' somewhat belated participation in this Age of Imperialism. Both industrial output and agricultural production were far exceeding the ability of the nation's consumers to absorb them, and foreign markets were thereby deemed essential to continued economic growth. Business leaders believed that huge profits could be made by selling American goods in Central and South America and Asia as well as by directly investing in the development of the natural resources of those countries. The clamor to annex Hawaii, for example, came first and foremost from the American sugar cane planters on the islands.

The proponents of a strong navy also recognized the value of overseas trade. Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan argued in The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890) that a nation's greatness depended on its navy, and that countries with the greatest fleets played a decisive role in shaping history. His vision for the United States included overseas colonies and control of a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans across either Panama or Nicaragua. Mahan's ideas influenced men like Theodore Roosevelt, who served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under McKinley, and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a supporter of American expansion.

In addition to national prestige, race theory was another justification for American imperialism. In 1885 Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong published Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, in which he argued that the United States, as the home of the “superior” Anglo-Saxon race, had an obligation to spread political liberty, Christianity, and civilization. He wrote, “This powerful race will move down upon Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond.” The popularity of Strong's book (the first edition sold 158,000 copies) indicated that public opinion supported the concept of the “white man's burden” and social Darwinism, or the survival of the fittest society. Such beliefs in moral and societal superiority helped Americans to rationalize U.S. involvement in foreign affairs.

The war with Spain. Spain's misrule of Cuba alarmed many American businessmen who had more than $50 million invested on the island. When the Spanish government attempted to harshly suppress a revolt, dramatic stories describing brutal atrocities circulated in the American press. Two leading American newspaper publishers, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, used the Cuban tragedy to boost circulation through sensationalist reporting known as yellow journalism. The newspaper accounts succeeded in stirring anti-Spanish and pro-Cuban sentiment in the United States. The publication of the de Lome Letter, a letter from the Spanish Minister Depuy de Lome in which he called President McKinley a weak politician, heightened anti-Spanish feelings in the United States as well. On February 15, 1898, less than a week after the letter appeared in the press, the U.S. battleship Maine blew up in Havana Harbor with the loss of 260 men. Although the cause of the explosion could not be determined, Hearst loss no time in blaming Spain for the incident, his newspapers declaring “Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain!” McKinley did not want open hostilities, and there is ample evidence that Spain was ready to make major concessions in Cuba, but public opinion demanded action. The two countries were at war on April 21.

The first victory of the Spanish-American War came far from Cuba, in the Phillipines. On May 1, under the command of Commodore George Dewey, the U.S. Asiatic Squadron destroyed or captured the entire Spanish fleet in the Battle of Manila Bay. American forces took Manila with the help of Filipino insurrectionists and began the military occupation of the islands in August. In June, 17,000 American troops, a combination of the regular Army and volunteers (including a cavalry regiment popularly known as the “Rough Riders,” organized by Theodore Roosevelt), landed in Cuba. Strategic points on the island fell to the Americans in two major land engagements on July 1, and the American fleet made short work of the Spanish ships that tried to run the blockade of Santiago harbor a few days later. By July 26, Spain was asking for peace, and the armistice to end what was called the “splendid little war” was signed on August 12. Of the almost 5,500 men who died during the war, less than 400 were killed in battle, the majority falling victim to diseases such as yellow fever and malaria. To many, this seemed a small price to pay for an empire.

At the start of the war, the United States had disavowed all territorial claims to Cuba, but this pledge did not apply to other strategic islands or Spanish possessions. While Cuba became independent under the Treaty of Paris (December 10, 1898), which formally ended the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico and Guam were ceded to the United States. The United States also gained control of the Philippines in return for a payment to Spain of $20 million. American acquisition of the Philippines was the most controversial aspect of the war, and the dissension was reflected in the debate between the imperialists and anti-imperialists in the Senate regarding the ratification of the treaty. The Filipinos had fully expected the United States to grant them independence after Spain was defeated, and when that did not occur, a revolt against American rule began. Fought from 1899 to 1902, the Philippine Insurrection was more costly than the Spanish-American War. Over 125,000 American troops were sent to the Philippines and fought a protracted guerrilla war that resulted in more than 4,000 U.S. and nearly 20,000 Filipino combat deaths. The cost of administering an empire proved high indeed.

China and the Open Door policy. By the 1890s, Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan had carved out special trading privileges and spheres of influence for themselves in China. Not to be left out of a very lucrative market, Secretary of State John Hay issued a series of diplomatic notes between 1899 and 1900 that outlined what became known as the Open Door policy. The first note called on all countries to allow open access to trade with China. Even though formal responses were never received from any nation except Great Britain, Hay announced that everyone supported the American initiative. A new obstacle to trade in China arose in June 1900 when Chinese nationalists organized a revolt, the Boxer Rebellion, against foreign influence and laid siege to several embassies in Peking. Afraid that the revolt would be used as an excuse to break up the Chinese Empire, Hay called on all countries to respect the territorial and administrative integrity of China. On August 14, a joint American, British, German, Russian, and Japanese expeditionary force arrived in Peking and put down the rebellion. The United States would continue to make its presence felt in Asia as well as the Caribbean and Central America in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Political and Social Reforms

During the Progressive Era (1900–1920), the country grappled with the problems caused by industrialization and urbanization. Progressivism, an urban, middle-class reform movement, supported the government taking a greater role in addressing such issues as the control of big business and the welfare of the public. Many of its accomplishments were based on efforts of earlier reform movements. The federal income tax and the direct election of senators, for example, were a part of the Populist program, and Prohibition grew from a pre-Civil War anti-alcohol reform tradition. Although the Progressives formed their own political party in 1912, the movement had broad support among both Democrats and Republicans. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft (Republicans) and Woodrow Wilson (Democrat) all claimed the Progressive mantle.

The need for reform was highlighted by a group of journalists and writers known as the muckrakers, who made Americans aware of the serious failings in society and built public support for change. Exposés such as Lincoln Steffens' The Shame of the Cities (1904), an attack on municipal corruption, and Ida Tarbell's History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), which chronicled John D. Rockefeller's ruthless business practices, often first appeared in the new mass circulation magazines, such as McClure's and Cosmopolitan, and were later published as books. The muckrakers' impact could be powerful, as in the case of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), a book whose vivid descriptions of working and sanitary conditions in Chicago's meatpacking plants led directly to federal laws regulating the industry.

Making government more responsive and efficient. Two important objectives of Progressivism were giving the public the opportunity to participate more directly in the political process and limiting the power of big city bosses. Progressives hoped to accomplish these goals through a variety of political reforms. These reforms included the direct primary a preliminary election giving all members of a party the chance to take part in a nomination and that was intended to limit the influence of political machines in selecting candidates; initiative a process for putting a proposition or proposed law on a ballot (usually by getting a specified number of signatures on a petition), and referendum, the voting on an initiative, allowing the people to enact legislation that a state legislature is either unwilling or unable to do; and recall, a process giving voters the power to remove elected officials from office through petition and a vote. Governor Robert M. LaFollette of Wisconsin championed these reforms, and their implementation in his state became the model for the rest of the country (the Wisconsin Idea).

Meanwhile, making the national government more responsive to the people was expressed through the Seventeenth Amendment (1913) which provided for the direct election of senators rather than their selection by the state legislatures. State legislatures were also increasingly concerned about the welfare of their citizens. In 1902, Maryland became the first state to offer workmen's compensation, payments to workers or their families for disability or death suffered on the job. Some protection was offered to federal employees under the 1916 Workmen's Compensation Act.

Progressives were also fascinated by efficiency and scientific management. In 1900, when a hurricane and flood destroyed much of the infrastructure of Galveston, Texas, the mayor and city council were replaced with a commission made up of nonpartisan administrators who ran each of the city's municipal departments. The commission form of government became popular in small and medium-sized cities throughout the country. Following a flood in 1913, Dayton, Ohio experimented with a city-manager system. Under this plan, the structure of a city government followed that of a business corporation, with a city administrator acting as a manager reporting to a board of directors made up of a mayor and city council. The Progressive Era also saw the growth of the public ownership of water, gas, and electric service; municipally owned utilities offered consumers lower rates than private companies. Utilities that remained in private hands invariably came under the jurisdiction of regulatory commissions that reviewed rates, mergers, and other business activities. Railroads and urban transportation systems were under similar regulation. Progressive reform measures, however, extended beyond restructuring the government and addressed social problems as well.

Prohibition. The campaign against the evils of alcohol made little progress until the formation of the Anti-Saloon League in 1893. Unlike previous groups, the new organization focused its effort on prohibiting alcohol rather than persuading individuals to stop drinking. Supported by Protestant churches, it pioneered single-issue politics and backed only “dry” candidates for elected office. This strategy worked, and by 1917 almost two thirds of the states had banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol. With German Americans prominent in the brewing and distillery industries, American participation in the First World War added allegedly patriotic motives to the calls for a constitutional amendment on prohibition. In December 1917, Congress adopted the Eighteenth Amendment, which was approved by the states in January 1919 and went into effect a year later, banning the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol nationwide.

Child labor and women's rights. The National Child Labor Committee coordinated a movement to address the exploitation of children. One of the most effective weapons in its campaign were photographs taken by Lewis Hine that showed boys and girls as young as eight years of age working with dangerous equipment in coal mines and factories. By 1910, many states had enacted legislation establishing the minimum legal age when children could work (between 12 and 16) and the maximum length of a workday or week. It is not clear, however, what had more of an impact on child labor — these laws or the state compulsory school attendance requirements that were becoming more widespread at the same time.

Progressives also wanted to limit how long women could work, arguing that long hours in a factory were detrimental to a woman's well being. The Supreme Court agreed in Muller v. Oregon (1908) and upheld a state law that limited women laundry workers to working no more than ten hours a day. The case was significant because the Court accepted the Brandeis Brief a wealth of sociological, economic, and medical evidence submitted by attorney Louis Brandeis demonstrating that the health of the women was impaired by long factory hours. Sometimes, however, change came only as a result of tragedy. On March 25, 1911, almost 150 people, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrant women, died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire. In response, the New York State legislature established a 54-hour workweek for women, prohibited children under 14 from working, and imposed new building regulations and factory safety rules.

Although the cause of equal opportunity in the workplace was pushed back by the Progressive's argument that women were weaker than men, women finally did get the right to vote. A number of western states had already granted suffrage (enfranchisement, or voting privileges) — Wyoming (1890), Colorado (1893), Utah (1896), and Washington (1910) — and the Democratic Party platform in 1916 called on the remaining states to do the same. While the National American Woman Suffrage Association relied on patient organizing, militant groups adopted more direct tactics. The Congressional Union, for example, was committed to gaining the vote through the passage of a constitutional amendment rather than securing it piecemeal state by state, and the National Woman's Party used picket lines, marches, and hunger strikes to build momentum for their cause. Women's participation in World War I, through service in the military and work in defense plants and the Red Cross, heightened the momentum. The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which gave women the right to vote, passed the Senate in June 1919 and was ratified by the states in August 1920, more than 70 years after the first women's rights meeting in Seneca Falls, New York.

Progressivism: Roosevelt and Taft

On September 6, 1901, an anarchist shot President William McKinley, who died a few days later. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt returned from a camping trip to take the oath of office. Although he was the youngest person ever to hold the office, Roosevelt had considerable political experience. The vice president previously served as a member of the New York State Assembly, commissioner of the New York City police, assistant secretary of the Navy, a leader of the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War, and governor of New York. Just as Progressives believed that state and local governments had an expanded role to play in controlling big business and public welfare, so did Roosevelt believe that the federal government and the presidency itself had a greater job to do.

Roosevelt and big business. Roosevelt had a well-deserved reputation as a “trustbuster.” During his administration (1901–09), 44 antitrust actions were filed against the nation's largest corporations, including the Northern Securities Company (a railway holding company). But the essence of the president's Square Deal — Roosevelt's approach to social problems, big business, and labor unions — was that he distinguished between “good” and “bad” trusts and strongly preferred to regulate corporations for the public welfare rather than destroy them. In the case of the railroads, for example, the practice of rebating was eliminated through the Elkins Act (1903), and the Hepburn Act (1906) allowed the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to set maximum railroad rates. The Hepburn Act also expanded the ICC's jurisdiction to include pipelines, ferries, sleeping cars, and bridges and made the ICC's orders on carriers binding, pending a court ruling.

Regulation meant protecting the interests of consumers as well as controlling the power of big business. The muckrakers had raised serious questions about such problems as the utility of the patent medicines sold to Americans and sounded the alarm that meat infected with disease or covered in rat droppings was processed and sold to the public. Congress reacted to these revelations by passing the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) which prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of food or drugs in interstate commerce that had been adulterated or fraudulently labeled. The Meat Inspection Act, which was enacted in the same year, sought to enforce sanitary conditions in the packing industry and authorized the Department of Agriculture to inspect meat sold through interstate commerce.

Conservation of natural resources. Outdoorsman, hunter, and naturalist in his own right, Roosevelt was the first president to actively promote the conservation of the country's natural resources. Under his administration, millions of acres were set aside as national forest lands; coal and oil reserves as well as hydroelectric power sites were placed in the public domain; and the national park system was enlarged. For Roosevelt, conservation meant wise use, and this was the theme of the White House Conference on Conservation (1908) that brought together members of the Cabinet and Congress as well as the governors of most of the states. The president's utilitarian approach was championed by the head of the U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, and was reflected in such legislation as the National Reclamation Act of 1902, which directed that proceeds from the sale of public lands be used to finance irrigation projects in the West.

Taft as a progressive. After the 1904 election, Roosevelt stated that he would not run for president again. Four years later, William Howard Taft, his handpicked successor, easily defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan in his third and final run for the White House. Although Taft had never held elective office, he did have years of public service behind him. He had been a prosecutor and judge, U.S. solicitor general under President Harrison, the first civilian governor of the Philippines, and Roosevelt's Secretary of War. Although more conservative than his predecessor, Taft filed twice the number of antitrust suits as Roosevelt, and the Supreme Court upheld the breakup of Standard Oil under the Sherman Antitrust Act (1911) during his administration. Through the Mann-Elkins Act (1910), the authority of the ICC was again expanded to cover regulation of telephone, telegraph, and cable companies. The act also enabled the commission to suspend rates set by railroads pending investigations or court actions. Taft actively supported both the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments (which provided for the federal income tax and direct election of senators, respectively) and established new agencies, such as the Bureau of Mines, which set standards of mine safety, and the Federal Children's Bureau.

Despite his strong reform record, the president lost support within the Republican Party and among Progressives. Taft ran into trouble with a group of Progressive Republicans in Congress known as the Insurgents, led by Senator Robert La Follette. Although the president wanted lower duties on imports, he was unable to stop the conservative Republicans from pushing through the Payne-Aldrich Tariff (1909) which kept rates on some products high over the objections of the Insurgents. Taft sided with Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon in his struggle to hold on to his power against congressional reformers. When the Speaker's authority was weakened through changes in the House rules, the president also lost influence. In the meantime, a dispute over conservation policy between the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service ultimately caused Taft to fire Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt's close friend and the man who epitomized the federal government's commitment to the environment. Early into Taft's term a major split in Republican ranks between conservatives and progressives became apparent. Whatever other goals they had, the Progressive Republicans were determined to gain control of the party and deny Taft's nomination for a second term. Roosevelt began to seriously consider running again when he returned from a safari in Africa in 1910, and LaFollette was clearly a candidate in 1911.

The election of 1912. Roosevelt indicated early in 1912 that he would accept the Republican nomination if it was offered to him. Even though the former president won several primaries and carried a number of state conventions, Republican conservatives controlled the nominating convention and made sure Taft was chosen to run for a second term. Roosevelt and his supporters bolted and formed the Progressive Party, whose platform called for presidential primaries, direct election of senators, the vote for women, greater regulation of the trusts, and a ban on child labor. The Democrats selected the past president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, as their nominee. Although put into the State House by the Democratic bosses, Governor Wilson had proved himself to be a reformer, pushing through a direct primary law, workmen's compensation, and public utility regulation.

The election of 1912 was a contest between Roosevelt and Wilson and their respective progressive philosophies. Roosevelt campaigned for his New Nationalism, which maintained that large corporations were an integral part of modern industrial society. The responsibility of the federal government was to regulate, not to destroy, business combinations while protecting the interests of the underprivileged. Wilson's New Freedom called for restoring competition through elimination of the trusts and lowering tariffs. Although recognizing that federal power was necessary to accomplish these goals, he was just as concerned with big government as big business; any expansion of authority from Washington he considered to be only a temporary expedient. With the Republican vote split between Roosevelt and Taft, Wilson won with the largest electoral majority of any presidential candidate up to that time.

Progressivism: Wilson

The election of Wilson was significant in several respects. First, it brought the Democrats back to power for the first time since the Civil War. The party controlled not only the White House but both houses of Congress as well, which had happened only briefly (1893–95) under Cleveland. The election also represented the political resurgence of the South. Despite spending most of his working life in the North, Wilson was born and raised in the South. In addition to making William Jennings Bryan, who had long enjoyed strong southern support, his secretary of state, Wilson appointed a number of other southerners to the Cabinet and Colonel Edward House of Texas as his chief political advisor. Because of the seniority system, the chairs of many key House and Senate committees were southern Democrats.

Tariff and banking reform. Staying true to his campaign promises, Wilson tackled the tariff issue first. The Underwood-Simmons Tariff (1913) was the first law to substantially lower rates in 50 years, and the free list of goods, on which no import duties were charged, was expanded to include iron, steel, raw wool, and sugar. To make up for the revenue shortfall that the reduction in rates caused, the law included a provision for implementing the federal income tax provided for in the just-ratified Sixteenth Amendment. It levied a tax of one percent on all incomes over $4,000 (the majority of Americans made considerably less than that and therefore paid no income tax), with the tax rate going up to 7 percent for the highest earners. Wilson's most important domestic program, however, was the reorganization of the nation's banking system.

A congressional investigation found that the country's credit and money policies were largely controlled by a handful of eastern banks. The administration's response to this discovery was the creation of the Federal Reserve System. Under the Federal Reserve Act (1913), Federal Reserve banks were set up in 12 regions across the United States. These were, in effect, “banks for banks,” and they became the depositories for all national banks and those state banks that wished to join. The Federal Reserve banks took over the outstanding loans of their members in return for Federal Reserve notes, or paper money. The Federal Reserve Board, appointed by the president, oversaw the system and, by setting the interest rates charged on loans to its member banks, could seriously impact the economy. Lower interest rates tended to stimulate business by making more money available for expansion, while higher rates helped control economic growth and cap inflation.

Antitrust legislation. The cornerstone of Wilson's antitrust policy was the Federal Trade Commission (1914) which was intended to control unfair competition in interstate commerce. It was empowered to investigate individuals and corporations suspected of unfair practices, and it could issue cease-and-desist orders to stop a company from hindering competition. Already existing antitrust laws were strengthened with the passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914). It outlawed specific business practices such as price discrimination, “tying” (an agreement that required a buyer not purchase products from a competitor of the seller), and the acquisition of stock in a competing company. Of particular importance given the way antitrust legislation had been interpreted in the past, was the Clayton Act's specific statement that farm organizations and labor unions were not “unlawful combinations in restraint of trade.” The use of injunctions against strikes was also prohibited, unless it could be shown that irreparable damage to property was likely. However, the degree of protection these provisions actually offered unions depended on court interpretations.

Wilson showed little interest in the social concerns associated with progressivism during his first term. With the Republican Party on the mend as the 1916 election approached, he began to include more reforms in his domestic agenda. For farmers, a program of low-interest loans through Federal Reserve banks was put in place. Child labor was addressed in the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act, which prohibited interstate commerce in products made by children under the age of 16. Although the law was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1918, the Court did uphold legislation that set an eight-hour day and time-and-a-half pay for overtime for railroad workers handling cars in interstate traffic. In women's rights, Wilson did not openly support a constitutional amendment to give women the right to vote, but he backed action by the individual states as called for in the Democratic Party platform.

Immigrants and African-Americans. Two groups did not benefit from the reforming zeal of the Progressive Era: immigrants and African-Americans. Immigration to the United States reached its high tide before World War I, with immigration numbers topping the one million mark six times between 1900 and 1914. During this same period, demands for immigration restriction found growing public support. By 1903, the original list of people who could not enter the country (compiled in 1882) was expanded to include anarchists, prostitutes, paupers, and all those likely to become a public charge (in need of some type of welfare). When the San Francisco School Board ordered Chinese, Japanese, and Korean students to attend segregated schools in 1906, President Roosevelt intervened and the decision was reversed. In return, Japan agreed to voluntarily limit the number of its laborers emigrating to the United States through what became known as the Gentlemen's Agreement (1907). Americans who favored significantly reducing immigration pinned their hopes on a literacy test for those who wished to permanently settle in the United States. Presidents Cleveland (1897), Taft (1913), and Wilson (1915 and 1917) vetoed bills containing requirements for such a test. Wilson's second veto was overriden by Congress, however, and a literacy test became part of immigration law. What direct effect the test had on immigration is difficult to assess because immigration had already declined sharply because of World War I. The legislation did mark an end to the more or less open immigration policy and paved the way for the quota system that would be implemented in the early 1920s.

In 1900, the overwhelming majority of African-Americans lived in the rural South, where segregation was established as a legal institution, and the denial of civil rights to blacks, particularly the right to vote, was an accomplished fact. Conditions in the South and economic opportunities in the North, particularly as the country began to mobilize for war, led to a significant shift in black population. The Great Migration refers to the internal movement of African-Americans from the farms of the South to the factories of the industrial North. Organizations like the Negro Fellowship League, founded by Ida Wells-Barnet in Chicago, and the National Urban League helped the migrants adjust to life in the cities. The North was not free from prejudice, however. Competition for jobs in defense plants and for housing were contributing factors to the violent race riots that broke out in East St. Louis in 1917 and Chicago in 1919.

Although President Roosevelt broke with precedent and invited Booker T. Washington for lunch at the White House (1901), the federal government did little to help African-Americans. The driving forces for change were men like Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, whose Niagara Movement (1905) pressed for political and economic equality for blacks. In 1910, his group joined with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), established a year earlier by white social-justice progressives and African-Americans to work for equality within the system. The NAACP was most successful in mounting legal challenges aimed at making sure the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were enforced. In 1915, for example, its attorneys persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down the grandfather clause in Guinn v. United States that had been used in Maryland and Oklahoma to deny blacks the right to vote.

Foreign Policy in the Progressive Era

In the wake of the Spanish-American War, the United States joined the ranks of the imperial powers with possessions that stretched halfway around the globe, from Puerto Rico in the Caribbean to the Philippines in the Pacific. In the years leading up to its entry into World War I, America did its best to maintain its influence in Asia through diplomacy while following an aggressive foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere. The United States showed little interest in European affairs until the outbreak of war in August 1914 and even then remained officially neutral for almost three years. The commitment of American troops in 1917 was a significant factor in the Allied victory and earned President Wilson the right to help shape the peace settlement. The failure of the Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, however, marked a shift toward a more isolationist foreign policy.

As a two-ocean conflict, the Spanish-American War underscored the value of a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The French had tried but failed to construct a canal across the Isthmus of Panama in the 1880s, so the United States decided to take over the project. Under the Hay-Herran Treaty (1903), Columbia agreed to a 99-year lease of a six-mile-wide strip of land in Panama (a province of Columbia at the time) in return for a $10 million cash payment and an annual fee of $250,000. When the Columbian Senate refused to ratify the treaty, the Panamanians mounted a successful revolt that had the tacit approval of the Roosevelt Administration. Sending warships to prevent Columbia from taking action, the United States quickly recognized Panama's independence. A new agreement — the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty — gave the United States full control and sovereignty over the Canal Zone (an area ten miles wide across the isthmus) in return for the same financial arrangements made with Columbia. Construction on the Panama Canal began in 1904, and the first ship passed through the locks in 1914. While the canal construction was a major feat of engineering, medical advances that occurred during the ten-year period, such as the eradication of yellow fever and better control over malaria and other tropical diseases were important accomplishments as well.

American intervention in the Caribbean and Central America. Throughout the Progressive Era and well into the 1920s, the United States followed a policy of intervention in the Caribbean and Central America. Under the Platt Amendment (1901), which was incorporated into the Cuban constitution and a Cuban-American treaty, the United States could intervene to preserve the independence or political and social stability of Cuba. Furthermore, Cuba agreed to grant land for an American naval base on the island (Guantanamo Bay), not to sign a treaty with another country that impaired Cuba's sovereignty, and not to incur a debt that could not be repaid out of current revenues. The U.S. government used this amendment as the justification for sending American troops into Cuba in 1906, 1912, and 1917.

Similarly, the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1904) maintained that “chronic wrongdoing” by any nation in the Western Hemisphere might force the United States to exercise its “international police power”; that is, it would intervene. Under this principle, the finances of the Dominican Republic came under American control through a treaty, and after a revolution threatened these arrangements in 1916, U.S. troops occupied the country for the next eight years. Essentially the same policy was applied to Haiti, where American civilian personnel and military forces remained on the island from 1915 to 1934. When a revolt against the government jeopardized American interests in Nicaragua in 1912, U.S. Marines arrived and stayed until 1925. They were back a year later to put down another round of civil unrest. As a possible site for a second interocean canal, Nicaragua was particularly important, and the United States wanted to make sure no foreign power gained control of the route.

U.S. policy in Asia. At the turn of the century, Japan was the major power in Asia. Fearful of Japanese dominance, Roosevelt played peacemaker in the conflict that broke out between Japan and Russia in 1904 in the hope of limiting Japanese gains. The Treaty of Portsmouth (1905), which ended the Russo-Japanese War and earned the president the Nobel Peace Prize, recognized Japan's influence in Manchuria (a province of China) but did not include a cash indemnity and required Russia to give up only half of Sakhalin Island. At the same time, in the Taft-Katsura Agreement (1905), the United States and Japan acknowledged the United States' control of the Philippines and Japan's control of Korea. Despite the tensions that arose because of immigration and the Gentlemen's Agreement, relations between the two countries remained good. They agreed to respect the territorial integrity of each other's possessions in Asia, and Japan reconfirmed its support for the Open Door Policy through the Root-Takahira Agreement (1908).

Taft's foreign policy relied on dollar diplomacy — spreading American influence through the economic penetration of overseas markets by U.S. corporations. In an attempt to maintain the independence of China, the administration unsuccessfully tried to establish an international banking syndicate that would buy back the railroads in Manchuria that were in the hands of the Japanese. The combination of a Japanese-Russian alliance and a lack of support from the Wilson administration led U.S. investors to reject the project. On the whole, dollar diplomacy was more effective in Central and South America than it was in Asia.

Relations with Mexico. Opposing the regime of General Victoriano Huerta, who had come to power in Mexico following the May 1911 revolt, the Wilson administration supported the revolutionary movement headed by Venustiano Carranza. American troops attacked Veracruz in April 1914, which ultimately led to Huerta leaving office and Carranza and his supporters occupying Mexico City. These developments were soon marred by infighting between Carranza and one of his generals, Pancho Villa. When Villa's forces raided a town in New Mexico in 1916, Wilson ordered the U.S. Army to mount a punitive expedition into Mexico to capture him. This prolonged intrusion brought the United States and Mexico to the brink of war until the troops were withdrawn in January 1917.